For Every Missing Shade

Entry 48

It's been a week since her funeral. People offered me distractions, but all I wanted was to be alone, so they weren't much help. There was only one person I wanted to talk to, but she was the whole reason they wouldn't leave me alone in the first place.

The one thing that kept me sane was painting. Midway through last week, I felt angry and ended up punching a hole in my closet door. I apologized to my parents and splattered maroon on my canvas to account for it.

The whole portrait looked bleak. I looked at it, wondering if other parts of it were going to be happy. I thought about how weird it would seem to see a blue or yellow right next to my mix of maroon, grey, and black. Happiness didn't fit into this portrait, at least not right now.

My emotions didn't progress like I expected. I expected to be sad for a week, depressed for one week more, angry for another, and then one day, the emotion would be happy, and that would be the end of it. That didn't happen. Some days I would feel okay only for it to get ripped out and replaced by something else. Emotions blended. There were parts of confusion in anger and parts of anger in depression. The stages of grief felt more like a spectrum of grief than anything else.

I didn't know what to do without her. I wish I could just get over her, but it wasn't a breakup. She died. I couldn't get any more closure than I already have. I couldn't call her and ask to be friends or invite her out to coffee to hear her voice again.

I was miserable.

I couldn't help myself. It wasn't my choice to fall in love with her as much as it wasn't her choice to get cancer.

She moved and my world moved with her. She spoke, and the stars stopped to listen. She walked through my life like a fish through water. The wind blew with her, and the seasons changed with her.

My world lived for her, and my world died with her.