all saint's day is the day of the dead

i didn't realize it was getting so bad. i honestly really didn't. i thought i could handle everything - the full courseload, working part-time, both kinds of therapy and the emotional repercussions, the sexual assault, the flashbacks.

i got up and wrote every morning with my coffee, then i went to school and talked to people, then i put my headphones on and waited for the bus. day after day. sometimes met and i watched movies, sometimes i talked to my friends on the phone.

i didn't realize how much i was dying. i don't mean to be melodramatic, but that's a lot for anyone to handle, and i was doing it basically alone, shunning help, shunning support.

oh, i'm fine. i get down from time to time, but i always bounce back up. you know me. i'll just drink the tea and take my pill and get some rest. it'll be better in the morning.

it's hard for me. to be honest, i tend to need the most support from my partner - always have. there's this part of me that yearned for the "couple against the world" thing. right now met has quite enough on his plate, and even though he is the most supportive man in the universe, there's been this part in me refusing to ask him for help. refusing to let him know that i needed him, how i needed him.

well, he says that it's the asking that counts, not the getting, but right now i literally think it would kill me to ask for something i thought i truly, truly needed and not get it.

i'm finding myself instinctively putting up walls. he wants me to confide in him, to feel comfortable doing so - but i can't. not knowing that he wants distance. i mean, i'm going to try and figure out how, because this is the most important relationship of my life and this tendency of mine is what's killing it - but it's so hard. opening up, keeping open, when it already hurts so much, even though being open might not fix things.

i just...wanted a birthday, where i didn't have to ask people to make a fuss over me. it's so funny that i'm here, 3 days later, still crying into my coffee, wondering how it all went wrong.

my sister told me a beautiful story this weekend - how she was hiking in jackson park a few weeks ago and sat by the river for a while - something told her to be still. a flash of light caught her eye and she looked up, to find a white wooden heart hung from a tree. she knew that it was mom, and in that instant became comfortable with letting mom in, as someone who has died, rather than the aching memory of someone who had once lived.

i think back to my 17-year-old self, that sassy, loud-laughing, chain-smoking teenager who wrote poetry about sex on scraps of paper and listened to the doors late at night because jim morrison was the only person who truly got her. she wanted to be a writer, she wanted to be in love with every fibre of her whole being. she was full of this tender, green confidence - in the universe, in her place in it.

this was before. there is such a gulf between before and after. a gulf that took place in an instant (september 8, sunset, mother swollen and unconscious. moaning in pain. death rattle breathing. getting slower. and slower. each of us in the room waiting, praying for each breath, until five minutes passed and her strained face had turned waxen) but before that, too, when cancer just split us open. like rotten fruit. sweet and gathering flies.

i wonder who i would have been if she had lived - if i would have been the girl in the black power suit, or if i would still be this version. there's something there. i was this sensitive before, yes. i remember having anxiety attacks before she died, but would things have been different? could i have corralled the depression?

rhetorical questions are fun to try and answer before 10 am.

i wish i could go back to that 17-year old. tell her to hold tightly to the leaves of her new confidence, to not be so brazen with it, that it will take awareness and attention to keep. i wish i could tell her that she will find what she wants - someone that she loves with every fibre of her being, who loves her back, she will be a published writer - but that it won't solve her problems. that she must hold onto her confidence and turn inwards, and keep looking inwards until everything settles.

until the pain goes away. because if she doesn't, it will become cancerous, and eat her alive.