It's a touch embarrassing that I have played pool casually/competitively for fifteen years or so, but I can still only fit a maximum of one billiard ball in my mouth.
One!
Hello there.
Good to see you again.
Grieving has become this weird pass time, kind of like a hobby that you want to spend more time at.
"Yeah, I bought the dongles, beads and hemp last summer, but so far I've only made two friendship bracelets.
Maybe
this summer I'll make some more..."
It's a damning thing; choosing between obsessive, destructive misery or slowly forgetting...everything.
I try my best to remember her laugh each day, which was always jarring.
I try to picture her face (too long), and whenever I do she's wearing the expression she used to make when I cracked a joke that she didn't want to give me the satisfaction of laughing at, even though she found it funny. She'd put her tongue in her cheek at those.
I remember her eyes because they were green and that's a statistically less likely colour.
I try to remember her voice, but it only comes out in the tone she would use when she was talking like a stupid man, which is kinda fine, I suppose.
Otherwise, things have been fading already, much like the passport photo of her that I carry in my wallet.
I took it out the other day to see that she looks like an albino in it, and only those who know her would be able to look at it and say, "Oh yeah, it kinda looks like her."
When I noticed this, I threw it in the garbage, but then I took it out again and put it back in my wallet.
I have Peter White's passport photo in my wallet too, so I'm ready for him to die at a moment's notice.
I look at all of the photos of her staring out at me in her family home and get mad that most of them are airbrushed.
I think about the stupid gap in her upper row of teeth sometimes, but I tend to forget which side it was on - the left? It's easy enough to figure out, but it's more dramatic to leave me uncertain about it.
I've begun to read her blog, finally. I mean, I was reading it long before now, when she was in the habit of living, but even then I didn't keep up on it as well as she did mine.
I tended to be just a touch more self-centered than her. This distance grew as we aged.
I look at posts about her dilations and hospital trips and iron injections and keep asking myself, "Where was I?"
Thankfully, I've thought of some stupid tattoos to get in her honour, which she'd be all about.
As I said a few months back (I think), she
loved my stupid tattoos. She especially liked telling the women I was interested in about them before they had a chance to learn about them themselves.
She was there for my first. I can only remember how embarrassing she was acting in front of the biker guys.
She didn't care.
I sometimes tell myself that I am her conduit now, and if I concentrate really hard on her being in the room with me, I can fill in the blanks for those things she may have said, but I can't.
I haven't completely given up on the concept either, though.
Some of the posts are
hard to read (click 'older post' once at the bottom), but those get balanced out by any that I'm mentioned in.
I guess I just lament how few of those there are during the most important time of her life, as it would turn out.
