Hysterical normalcy

 It feels like I am living something that isn't real. 

It is a weird sensation to have a mom that is gone? Blinked out of existence in an instance and yet there is all of this irrefutable proof that she did live, that she had an impact. There is this longing to call and talk to her and yet there is a constant reminder that I can't. That her voice lives on in recordings and home videos. It is almost sickening to think about it. All week people have been tiptoeing around me at work. Afraid to get caught talking about it, afraid of putting too much on me while piling on the work... just afraid of grief-stricken me, but I am living what I like to call Hysterical normalcy. Manic normality where I am so aggressively focused on the status quo I forget that I am depressed and not exactly okay. I get caught up in the minutia of the day-to-day and then all of a sudden things get quiet and I feel it all at once. The hurt, the pain, and the exhaustion. I am still not sleeping well and yet I am expected to function like things are fine. The world is not fine. My world is not fine. It is a dark fucking place and full of monsters, but most of all time seems to slip away. We are coming up on two weeks that my mom has been gone and each day slips in like a dagger to the ribcage, all at once shocking and leaving me breathless. 

Thinking about it, I get why people are afraid to talk to me... I am the rule. The examples are all people that escape pain and heartbreak, the rules are those that enforce the specialty of the exception and right now I am no exception. My mother got sick, fought like hell, and still lost. Her fight is important because she didn't just give up when she was told there was little to no hope. She was determined to fight to the last breath and she did. She is exemplary in that she pushed against awful odds and still gave us as much time as she could. The anger and the pain in the wake of her loss are still there hanging on and I must admit it would have been worse if she had given up, but she didn't. She went out in peace and that is all I could ask for. So here I am, in the quiet moments feeling it all... hurting, feeling the void, and missing her voice. I miss her giving me grief, all of it. When I was younger many people told me to appreciate that my mother cared, even if she was giving me grief or angry with me... and you know what, they were right. I would take my mother giving me shit every day if that meant she was still here. 

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