Time Stop

I turn 31 on Sunday.  This has sparked thought about time and its passage and even though I hadn't realized it until tonight, I guess I've been thinking about it a lot lately.  Friends, family, authors - they all say time will make things easier, heal the wounds.  At first I thought they might be misspeaking - isn't it just that the shock will fade and the pain will become my norm?  Now, I'm beginning to worry that they might be right for I have had moments of laughter and my 365 Gratitude project has helped me focus on something wonderfully distracting and positive each day.  For three months and five days I have endured waves of forgetting only to remember, stifled pain and one step at a time.  I ask for relief, but tonight I think maybe I could fend it off forever.

I work in a high school.  I went to high school.  The usual stint is four years which is longer than the length of time we were married.  I lost him three years and three months to the day after I married him which is shorter than the blip of time I was a high school student.  How is that for cruelty?

So since I'm over 30, high school was about half my life ago.  Think about what you remember from high school.  Are those memories clear?  Are they only brought to mind by a rare scent or song?  Are they fresh and present in your daily thoughts or are they faded and worn, sparked by a few old pictures?  Mine are the latter.  I see pictures of myself from high school and occasionally I don't recognize that person.  I don't remember sitting at that restaurant or owning that sweatshirt.  Some of the long lost friends in these photos are merely familiar faces without easily recalled names.  Now there are the stories, the special nights, the events you relive in your mind over and over.  That vision, those friends, those experiences are still with me, but the day-to-day of being in high school is gone.  I am losing what it felt like.  When I was there, I thought it was intense and forever.  But now?  I'm sure if I went back there the building would feel small and the smell would be unrecognizable.

Certainly, it is absurd to compare my marriage to my high school career in many ways, but in length of time?  I can't stop myself.  What if I can't remember my every day with Matt in 15 years?  I cannot bear it.  I've been so focused on worry for Daphne who won't remember her own experiences with her dad that I haven't stopped to worry about my own memories turning into old glory day stories.  He is not just some old boyfriend, boiled down to the five stories your friends hear whenever his name is conjured.  But like an old boyfriend, my memories created with him are finite.  The pictures are already no longer current.  So how do I make sure I save each experience and not just the photos?  And not just the special stories.  How can you file away the millions of seemingly unmemorable pieces of a life?

I want to remember how he made a goofy and dramatic face when he had the sniffles.  He used one of those protein shake bottles with the metal ball inside about six hundred times a day and the sound drove me nuts.  His handwriting - he always hated it.  His tooth that overlapped just a little in the front and only from certain angles.  All of his made up lyrics to real pop songs.  That time when we had a big argument before he stormed off to work, only to come back after having driven all the way there so he could hug me and then hash it out even though he would be late.  The way he put on Daphne's diaper cream far too thin and not nearly enough.  The way the skin between his forefinger and his thumb was always dry and how his eyes crinkled when he open-mouth smiled at our baby's every word.  How it felt to just sit on the couch near him even if we weren't talking or touching and how Daphne and I both went straight for the laundry room entrance to greet him when we heard the garage door lift.  I want to remember these things, but not just in this list.  Writing the list may have ruined them already - now they are trophy stories, the highlights of a life that can never actually add up to everything that he was, is, for me.

Faced with the idea that I might one day forget that he really loved to warm his feet (frigid) up with mine (warm) in bed or the way he always presented his grocery store purchases to me like they were prizes from a treasure hunt, I'd rather stop time now and keep every knife of pain.  I've said recently that I feel stuck.  I've also said that the farther away we get from October, the farther away he feels.  Panicked, stuck, drifting, healing... None is better than the others and I find that thinking about it causes me to feel like I can barely breathe.