Today is 6 months since Carly’s death in Australia, and 9 months since Stef’s death here. Half way around the sun and a new-born baby. 

Nine months is how long it takes to bring a human to life. I wish nine months was long enough to make me feel alive again.

There is nothing, on or off this planet that I wouldn’t give to have them back.

My sisters, my lovers, my wives, mi amigos, you are all that I need. 

And then I woke up to the realisation that it’s actually far too late for that, and I feel like that was news to me. She’s already dead but my heart still doesn’t know. I don’t know if I have actually been at all capable of feeling real feelings or genuinely emotionally responding to anything at all since Stef died. I’m just going through the motions.

I keep telling people that I’m not here, I’m only a hologram; they think that it’s a joke but I am not so sure.

I carry myself like an ambulance with someone dead inside, still thinking I might get there in time.

Today I went to the street where Stef lived when I first met her and went looking for the house we first had sex in. The street and all the houses had changed so much it was hard to work out which one it was. Her curtains were missing from where her bedroom used to be. She was missing.

Then I went to the abandoned skate rink around the corner that she (and later, Carly) would often break into. All the windows were boarded up and I didn’t even have a crow bar, but Stef would have. She always did, back then. I felt like if I could just get inside I would find them both there, find some secret message they left for me, telling me how to find them now. But I couldn’t get in, so I just sat against the wall smoking cigarettes while my heart tried to escape my ribcage.

I talked to Stef while I was walking, out loud and into the air, tears in my eyes and voice shaking to no one. I don’t know if she can see me or hear me or if she exists in any form any more. If you had asked me half a year ago I would have told you that she definitely doesn’t, that her body has become ashes and she no longer exists in any form other than a memory, but now I’m not so sure. I want so badly to believe that she is still somewhere, watching me; that all of the things I am doing to try to make her proud count for something. I want the fact that I’m staying alive to mean something, and if she doesn’t know I’m doing it then I can’t convince myself that it does. Everything I have ever done has been about Stef, for her, the life story I have been writing is a love poem for her. I thought it wasn’t ready yet. I was working so hard to become the person I thought she wanted me to be that I wasn’t there when she needed me just as I was. I wish I knew. I could make this better now, I know I could, but making anything better just doesn’t count for much any more if it is too late to give it to her. I want so badly to believe that she is somewhere, in some form, that she can see and hear me now and know how deeply I love her and could never find the words to explain with my shaking voice.

If I thought Stef and Carly were somewhere and that I could be with them there, I would have left this place long ago. If Stef is anywhere that is exactly where I want to be. This is really hard because people have taken this time of tragedy to talk a lot to me about God, about heaven, about all these things that I really want to believe right now. I know they would both laugh at me for all of this. It is a trap in a way I can’t explain. I can’t give up what I believe in because I am trying to make them proud, I am trying to prove to them that it is possible for us to live through this; but it is only by giving up what I believe in and subscribing to an opposing set of beliefs that I can actually believe that they can see or feel any of this. This is a trap and I am struck in it. I never dreamed of heaven much until they put her in the ground but it’s all that I’m thinking about now.

I can’t seem to get past this bargaining stage. I can’t stop the feeling that if I just do the right thing or say the right thing or learn the lesson I am supposed to learn from all this that she will come back to me. That if I just go to the right place or listen to the wind coming through the right window at the right angle, I will hear her voice and she will tell me where to go from here. I am looking for her everywhere and I know that none of it makes sense but it’s the closest thing to sense I can find anymore.

It makes sense for me to go this weekend, it would fit in with the pattern. Carly went 3 months after stef did, the next morning. Carly went 3 months ago today. I am the last one left, now feels like my time. I know it doesn’t make sense, I know, in whatever conception of the world I had before it ended, that I cannot leave here and join them, but I am still waiting at this imaginary ferry stop for them and I don’t want to miss that boat. It’s like jumping into the ocean just in case an invisible boat is there. I know these words will worry you but I need to be honest about what’s going on and I’m trying. I’m still not telling you everything. I’m still trying to keep the darkest parts inside so I don’t make the people around me uncomfortable.

Lightning bolt, lightning bolt, won’t you strike me down?

http://youtu.be/6PAJj0OG0BY

6 months since the only person in this world who ever made sense to me left it.

I don’t know what to do with myself, I feel like I want some sort of ritual. I want to do something for it, but I want to do something that MEANS something and nothing in the world means shit anymore.

It’s not easy.

I don’t feel like there is anyone else in the world I can talk to about this.  I can’t make sense of this on my own and I need her to help me. She’s always made the world make sense to me. She was the only thing in the world that ever made sense. Oh Stef, help?

This will probably mostly involve me talking about death and grief and reflecting on the chain of tragedies that has comprised this year. And being angry at the world.

TW: grief, death, suicide

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I don’t want to start a new year. I don’t want to be in any year which they are not. I don’t want this to become ‘last year’. It feels so fucking obscene for time to keep going and dates changing when it is so clear to me that the world has ended. In my reality, this doesn’t exist anymore.

I wish new years would just fuck right off. I’m sick of being asked what I’m doing. I’m sick of the pressure to ‘do something’ so steeped in drinking culture and in rape culture. What am I even supposed to do? I’m supposed to spend new years eve with Stef, having an anti-new years party. That’s what I’m supposed to be doing.

TW: grief, death, suicide

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Tumblr is really triggering for me right now. And this post might be triggering for you because [TW: grief, anger, guilt]

There is so much anger and I just don’t know how to cope with interpersonal anger right now. And I’m not just talking about tumblr, I’m talking about my whole life and everything I come into contact with. It’s so hard to watch people fight with each other and treat each other badly because if this year has taught me nothing else (and it has taught me plenty) it’s that we all are fragile and fleeting.

It’s especially hard for me to see people fight with their friends because I am just in this space where I am constantly hyper-fucking-aware that every conversation I have with someone might be the last. Every time my phone rings I expect it to be the news that another person in my life has died. Every time. Every time I see you and talk to you I feel absolutely no sense of certainty that that will ever happen again. I keep thinking about all the funerals and all the people who called me up unsure about whether they were welcome at them because they were fighting with the person or had a complicated relationship or even felt like they hated the person until suddenly they were gone and they realised how much we all need each other. I keep looking at my friends and the hurt they cause each other and the conflicts and the anger and the hurtful things they think and say about each other and I just feel like I am preparing myself for those phone calls about those funerals.

I’m just finding anger so fucking hard to be around right now, and that makes me feel like a pretty bad person because I know that anger is often important and necessary and sometimes the only way that we can fucking get through some of the shit we have to get through. But all I want to say is a lot of the time is ‘they are alive and they might only be alive for a few seconds or hours or days or years longer and they need you and you need them and you need to fucking go and be with them while you still can! Let them know you love them and don’t wait another minute because you might not have one.’

I don’t want to silence peoples anger. I just really really really wish I had another fucking minute.

[this isn’t what I meant to say or the point I meant to make but now I have tears and snot all over myself and should probably stop]

why can I not catch the smell of your hair in my nostrils and keep it there, keep your breath in jars, tied around my neck
your fingernails and teeth sewn into jewelry
hanging off of every available part of me
until I am a walking wind-chime of you?

and my world comes tumblin’ down

I don’t know. Funeral speeches are the hardest thing in the world to write because you feel like you need to say The Perfect Thing, because it’s like the last thing you’ll ever say to this person, even though it’s really not at all and I said my last words to her two weeks ago, I just didn’t know how important they were then.. Anyway, here is what I got so far:

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I have so many stories. I don’t know where to go with this. I don’t know what to do with this. I have come to no closure for myself so how am I supposed to provide anything to anyone that could possibly help?