I accused him of putting me down like a coffee mug on his way to wherever he went after. Maybe I was right? Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe I had been put down or misplaced one or two too many times before and he was just the one that would understand the metaphor. No matter. We were silent for years until I came across his recorded voice today, clear as a bell, reading to everyone.

In the giant mess after the storm of the last six months, I am the misty girl he mistook me for then. Ugly, messy, raw as a scar but healing. Each of these days has started with the quiet reassurance that ‘I am doing just fine’. I am trying to be small and quiet and tiny with grief. I am doing yoga every day. I am making lentil soup. I am going on dates. I am going to work. I am waiting anxiously for an answer. I am avoiding phone calls. I am trying not to be annoyed by the clicking of shoes on wood floors. I am trying to wake up early. I am making french toast. I am getting manicures. I am drinking coffee on my roof. I am trying to sleep late. I am watching movies. I am reading books. I am waiting.

I am trying to be fine but I am also trying to cope. The only people I seem to be okay telling are the people I owe excuses. I don’t know how to call up my close but far away friends and say “I lost my grandfather and I’ve been a surrogate mother for months so my own mother could be his mother while my father lives elsewhere and my sister lives elsewhere and my whole life is elsewhere now too.” No easy way to explain that the funeral was hard and it is all getting to me in a cumulative way. Like I said, I’m trying to be fine.

The big fear here is, of course, the next step. For months, I couldn’t go. I couldn’t commit to forty hours a week, limited vacation days and a set schedule. I had to be there- not because they made me, but because someone needed to be. The kickstand is gone, the tether unwound and I am drifting in every sense. I am my own chest heaving. I am my own sidewalk swept. I am myself staring at nothing and feeling everything but me.