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I got into bed at midnight. I was so pleased with myself. Midnight! Now it’s 3am, I’m still not asleep and I feel more exhausted from this pattern of insanity than I do from any lack of sleep. Well obviously I’m TIRED from my lack of sleep but I’m EXHAUSTED from being sleepless. Look, it makes sense at this hour.

Plus there’s a ghost moving about, I don’t know who, feels male though. Not threatening. But made sure to let me know he was with me in the bathroom right now, when I went to pee.

I really think he was trying to make me feel less lonely. Truly! And isn’t that just the sweetest. I could cry. Whether he’s a ghost I know or just some otherworldly spectre that knew I needed him…

I do love living alone. It makes me happy in ways that are hard to comprehend. Maybe it’s even unhealthy, how much I love it. And I’m not alone. I have my boys here OF COURSE, my heartbeats. And now there is ginger, the single greatest thing in the universe.

but there’s no other here. Someone to know my secrets and take refuge in my dark corners, someone I can dip into, a cool place where the heat from my body can dissipate.

So yeah, I love living alone, but maybe some pieces of me don’t think it’s so great. My dreams lately are almost embarrassing in their cotton candy innocence: I’m getting asked on a date. I’m getting kissed. I’m getting an intimate hand squeeze from a deeply loved deeply familiar soul. The kindness in these dreams, the ache I feel upon waking… well it has been hard keeping all that heaviness at bay. Loneliness? Sure sure but something else. We have all struggled in our own ways since this began a year ago, it’s taken a toll, and I am no different. there is a sorrow threatening to consume me, if I let it.

The relief and release I would feel if I surrendered? It’s very seductive. But it’s not time yet. A few more miles to go. Then I’ll sleep.

Tomorrow (well, today now I guess, since it’s 2:40am), it’s been four years. It seems crazy. Four years? Really? I am annoyed that I know this day, that I keep track, that I mark it. How stupid. It doesn’t have to mean anything. It can be just another day.

But it isn’t.

The feeling is different every year (every day) but it also never changes. grief is so weird, don’t you think? when opposite things are equally true.

I miss her, often in unexpected ways, but I am use to her being gone. Not just because it’s been four years (which is a whole other kind of pain, this almost perverse ability we humans have to just “get over” anything and move on).

Having lived away from my family for much of my adulthood, her being dead is functionally no different to my every day life than when she was alive.

But each year that goes by is another memory that gets lost. Another story that gets forgotten. Details fade, shapes blur; the shadows have begun to take over.

It is a black hole, this space where she once existed. This paradox. vast and heavy, in a tiny little pinprick. How is it possible, that it can keep growing, swallowing everything. And yet with every breath, every blink, the pinprick gets smaller and smaller.

She is disappearing but her absence is expanding.

2021 is beginning to take some interesting turns and it’s kinda freaking me out. I don’t know that I am ready for it. But maybe? I have been making a focused effort, a conscious choice, to be open to new experiences and new paths, things I might have previously avoided or rejected.

It is hard though. All the struggles of the pandemic, on top of being a single parent, and feeling lonely much of the time, and living through a lifetime of bad choices… it’s just exhausting. And holy shit, I am so old now. So old and so tired and it’s easy as pie to just slip back into those familiar habits and same routines. They are comfortable and warm and I’m good at them. Really really good.

But I want to do better. If I can just forgive myself a tiny bit. allow the possibility that I might deserve good things. trust that I’m doing my best (even if sometimes my best is shitty).

It’s easy, though, to have these hopeful thoughts, late at night, in bed, when I should be sleeping, when the world is quiet. Much different when the sun comes and the shadows move away, when morning exposes all the lines and there is nowhere to hide.

I made a Bernie doll or as I like to call it Brrnie.

I’m just gonna go to bed.