Some Sad Shit.

Sometimes, without any

real telling why, I become aware of a sadness. It is pervasive and real, and I sometimes fear that if I let myself stop to consider it that this sadness will overtake me. I know that people who have lost people as I have lost my sister know about this sadness. Maybe those who haven't lost anyone know it too. It's not to say that I am not okay. It's just to say that there is a piece of me now that feels like it doesn't belong to the rest of me anymore. Like I've lent it out. It's the piece where the sadness is and can stay and grow or subside as it will, given time and experience and age. And I keep it there because if I don't allow this place for it, I know that I can't do all the things I need to do: the grocery shopping and the metro riding and the dancing and the growing up that continues to put years between the person I am and the person I was the day that Laura died. We don't really have so much time to live, in all, and I am not going to spend my time circling around events that cannot be undone or a person who is not here. I fear I've teased this piece too completely from the tangle--that I don't allow it enough moments. It's difficult to negotiate the desire to be fun or funny or easy to be around with that to express who you are, when so much of who you are is determined by a terrible loss. I guess that I am trying to say: I miss my sister.