All you can do

You know, sometimes, all you can do is cry.  And I'm not talking about the body-wracking sobs that could go on for half an hour or more at a stretch of early grief, although it's true of those as well.  I seem to be past that (though of course I never say never anymore.)  I'm talking about the silent tears that slide out of the corners of your eyes as you remember, once the lights are out and the house is quiet and there is no protection from your mind, or your memories.  I have yet to be able to determine which hurts more:  the regrets of things unsaid or undone (or unsaid or undone enough), or the memories of the moments that were really, really good.  It's the really, really good moments that make me cry most often.

I should be asleep, but I can't sleep, because that was me until I got up a few minutes ago, in the hopes that if I emptied my head, I could fall asleep eventually.

I remember some things so clearly that I can almost feel him in my arms, feel his lips on my cheek, hear his laughter.  I go back to those moments like a safehouse, where for a minute I can just be there again, where it was all so good, and he was HERE, beautiful and strong and loving me, and I had no reason to cry in my bed once the lights went out.  But I am not safe for long; it always backfires.  Because what it comes down to, what it has always come down to since he died, is this:

I wanted more.  I wanted more of him.  I wanted more of who he was, and who I was with him, and the marvel of the two of us finding each other and it being so very good.  I wanted so much more of him.

And the truth is, I still do.  And that is why I suffer.

Because I still do not understand how a person can just disappear like he did.  I understand that it happens, but I cannot comprehend this violent interruption of his and my conversation.  I cannot stop wanting to talk to him and hold him and love him.  And I know I'm absolutely powerless to change it.  I cannot will the conversation to resume beyond the symbolic.  All my wanting, and all my aching need, is entirely, stupidly futile against this reality.  And I want to hurt this reality.  I want to beat it with my fists and scratch it and make it bleed, because when I'm really and truly frustrated, that's the only impulse left.  I cannot understand it, I cannot change it, and so I want to lash out physically.

And I can't even do that.  I can't punch reality in its stupid nose, or kick it in its gut, (although it can do it to me, evidently).  I can't do anything but be here and accept that he's dead.  So I cry.  I cry quietly in the dark so no one ever hears or knows.  I cry because the immutable truths of the survivor never change.  My life has changed around them, my soul and my self as well, and thank goodness, but after all the struggling, all the healing, all the time, at bedrock...I wanted more of him.  I want more.  And I can't have him.  And that, all by itself, is enough to make a grown woman weep.