This is terrible, et cetera.

Seven weeks ago, we entered some of the darkest moments of our lives. I’m still among them; I’m lost; I can’t find my way out; there is only one thing that could guide me, and at this moment it doesn’t exist beyond the haze of our hopes and dreams. 

Since we found out, there has only been one day I didn’t cry as if the world – my own little pathetic wretched world – were ending, and it was the one before this one. Which clearly didn’t end well. 

It’s getting worse. At first, until recently, the grief cut like a knife, deeply but clearly and simply. The blood was fresh and red, and it was easy to know how to suffer. 

It’s not like that anymore. The wound should be mending but it’s not; it’s muddied, infected, seemingly unhealable. I cry and I don’t know why, logically; I can’t connect the dots; there’s no linearity like there was before. I cry because this has touched my entire being. I cry like I never have before, because I am no longer what I was before, and I don’t think I ever will be again. 

The nights are ruthless. With a little help, a little distraction, a little luck, I can get through the day, or most of it, but when I put my head on the pillow and close myself against the light, I can’t escape the darkness – both literal and figurative – that envelops me. 

Gilles is my rock and my true love. He can’t sleep if I’m in pain, and yet he still has to get up and go to work and face the world every day that I have the choice not to. I try not to disturb him but he is there next to me, my silent screams vibrating through him. “Just cry,” he encourages me in the lost hours between bedtime and dawn, feeling my body tense and crippled around the ache cemented inside me. “Let it out. Don’t keep it inside.” So I do, and he holds me, patient, kind, strong as always. 

Hours later, we sleep, exhausted, beaten, weary, but still guarding inside us the hope that these moments will pass. They have to. We can’t go on like this. 

my rock. on a rock.