HelloGoodbye

Goodbye Mitten, you are indeed a pleasant peninsula.

Goodbye little town with the funny name. ("Wait, you're from where?")

Goodbye lake.

Goodbye woods, goodbye trails I've memorized over the past 22 years and can now hike intuitively when I need to escape.

Goodbye brick house where I grew up, goodbye blue bedroom where I dreamed.

Goodbye extra large black cat and extra small orange cat (temporarily). We'll see you very soon, we promise.

Hello mountains.

Hello dry air.

Hello little apartment, hello my new permanent roommate.

Hello marriage. I think I'm going to like you a lot.

What Sarah Said

what sarah said // death cab for cutie

It stung like a violent wind that our memories depend on a faulty camera in our minds

But I knew that you were a truth I would rather lose than to have never lain beside at all

But I’m thinking of what Sarah said 

that “Love is watching someone die”

According to Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, there are five stages of grief:

• Denial
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression
• Acceptance

I think, seven years after my dad's death, that I’ve reached the acceptance stage. And that terrifies me. What if I forget his voice, even though I have the last voicemails he ever left recorded safely on my hard drive? What if I forget how he smelled, even though I’ve selfishly hoarded his clothing and refused to wash it so that it still smells like iron and salt and lake water? What if I forget his face, or his hair, or his hands, even though I wear each of them as my own, every day? Every pockmark, every curl, every blunt tipped finger a perfect copy of his just made softer, smaller, more feminine.

In a few years when Naveen and I are ready to start a family, how will I ever be able to explain to my children what they have lost? How can I make them understand  this brilliant person they will never get to meet? Stories and pictures aren’t enough.

I accept it, I do, because I don’t have a choice in the matter. But seven years on my heart is still broken.