April 2011

Welcome To My Head.

by Lori Dwyer on April 30, 2011 · 29 comments

I wish I could articulate, properly, what’s it’s like to be inside my head right now.

Most days…. I do OK. Just OK. I enjoy little things. I think a lot. I listen to music.

I mourn.

Other days…

It’s like my mind is trying to put on a hat, and my head is just too big for it.

I was so used to life, as it was….

Tony and I, we were one of those couples- I’m sure there’s plenty of you- for whom divorce just wasn’t a real option. We were in it together, through everything. We adored being married.

I loved my plain, simple, gold band wedding ring. And it hurts me not to wear it.. but the presence of it, it sears my finger, and I find myself playing with it, reminding myself without meaning too.

Do you remember, when you were little, and you lost a tooth… pushing your tongue into the soft hole that was left, hurting but feeling strangley good, because it’s a sensation you’ve never felt before?

Welcome to my head. When I think about my husband. It makes me deliriously happy, to remember the Before, the perfect little family we had…. but it’s just damn sad, it takes my breath away.

Imagine the cornerstone of your life, the thing you depend upon and plan around.. suddenly it’s gone, with no warning.

And every time you picture the rest of your life, you have to remind yourself.

That what was- a normal, surbanan, boring existence… growing old with my husband, watching the hair sprout out his ears as his hairline recedes… cuddling up with him, through forty more winters…

All that, it’s gone. And some days, days like today, all I can see in the future in a wasteland- raising my children, alone. Being the Women Who Drove Her Husband To Suicide.

Knowing that once-and not that long ago- I had everything I wanted. A man who loved me, and who I adored. A pigeon pair of perfect children.

I’d love to spend just one minute, back in my old life. In my head, the way it used to be.

As the women with the perfect life, the perfect husband. The woman who didn’t know what it felt like to lose someone, who had no real concept of death.

Some days- days like today- it feels like she was a much nicer person. Nicer, sweeter, far less jaded.

Not as strong. But I’d trade the strength, for the ignorance-is-bliss. In a heartbeat.

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Next Time.

by Lori Dwyer on April 28, 2011 · 36 comments

I think, the next time I fall in love, I simply won’t be so busy.

I’ll appreciate things more, take time to kiss and smile and laugh more. I’ll do what I did before- iron and cook and clean, but I’ll enjoy every second of it.

Because now I know what a big hole it leaves, having no one to take care of. Having no one to take care of you.

I think I just appreciate life more in general, now.

The longer I’m here, in Paradise, the more I wonder why I was so afraid of coming back here… this place is so beautiful.

So simple…

Simple pleasures, I’m finding, are the best things for a broken soul.

It’s the very simple things I miss.

Because I think, in a relationship, it’s the very simple things you take for granted, when you assume, as most people do, that you have all the time in the world.

Next time, there won’t be anything I take for granted. I’ll never be too busy writing, or folding washing, or doing a million other tiny, boring things, to cuddle or kiss or chat or have a coffee with someone- anyone- that I love ever again.

And the last thing I’d do again is let the sun go down on an argument…. what a silly thing to do, when I’ve avoided it all my life, and look at what it led to.

So many things I’ll do differently, next time…. if there is a next time.

Because now I know… just when you think you have all the time in the world…

You might not.

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Small Talk

by Lori Dwyer on April 26, 2011 · 35 comments

I guess this post serves as a written apology to my family and my friends. The people who’s calls I sometimes don’t return. The people who, when they do contact me, find themselves talking to someone who is either chronically disconnected, or irritable and short tempered.

It’s just…difficult, being a functioning member of society right now. It’s difficult, trying to be a social person. I feel like I’m in a different place to most people. Most people are where I used to be- the frothy top of the cappuccino of life, I guess. While right now, I’m sitting in the bit at the bottom, cold and sticky with too much sugar.

And it hurts, because I used to be so social. I used to love small talk. I used to love chatting, waffling, babbling, talking about nothing in particular. Getting to know people.

I watch other people, people I know and love, life their lives, and I wish mine still had that much depth, where little things mattered and it wasn’t day to day survival.

I’m sure I’ll get there, eventually. For now, I’ll live in the numb bubble of grief and guilt, and watch other people sparkle by with their normal lives, and hope they understand.

Small talk, for me, it just doesn’t happen. I have an inkling that may sound arrogant, and deliberately ignorant, and i guess that’s OK, because it’s just how I feel at the moment. Small talk, discussions of holidays and the weather and how old are my children?, I just find them irritating and excessively difficult to follow. They always seem to thread back to my husband being dead, that I’ve run away to Paradise, and then occasionally I flood these unsuspecting souls with too much information, too many sad details and I want to stop talking and I can’t.

Or my irritation, my anger and edginess,it shows through, and taints the conversation to the point where it is uncomfortable.

So, gradually, I find myself withdrawing from everyone I love, and those who love me. I still feel for them, all of them, even more deeply than before… but conversations with me are difficult, for all involved. It’s either too much, a bright light of ugly emotion that makes me people squint at me as if i am the sun, or it’s my bristly anger and sadness as I try to restrain everything I’m feeling.

Even with my children, my babies, a lot of the time I am on auto pilot.I answer questions, I change nappies, I smile and I play, but I do it all on auto pilot, no passion in my voice, with a smile that doesn’t quite reach my eyes. And in between the times when my attention belongs to them, I stare off into space, and I see a man in a blue shirt, with an orange rope cutting into the flesh of his neck, hes eyes half closed and bulged and rolled back, and I try to process how the hell this happened to me, try to remember that this is not a dream, this is real, this is my life.

So.. an apology, to those who I can’t small talk with, as much as I wish I could.

Please believe me when I say I love you, and I hope, one day soon… I’ll be back.

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