This is the Afterlife

I just miss you

[shellojello]

I still miss you everyday and some days it’s sweet but it’s usually just sad, selfishly i want to be with you and as I get into other relationships it comes with this form of guilt, not toward you, not in a way that’s like “I shouldn’t be with someone I should always be with you or honor you in that way”. I don’t believe that at all but there is guilt for my current partner because I have so much of myself in a different time, different place, and it starts to feel like it’s trapped because I don’t really want you to know how much I love someone else.

I’ll just tell myself we can always expand the heart, I remind myself it’s not comparable, that all loves are different feeling anyways (or so I think??? Do different people love the same with different partners??)

The guilt comes from not having the same emotional capacity for love as I once did. Like I know I can’t love the same.. Even if my partner doesn’t feel a lack of love or affection I ..do. It doesn’t feel so bad, and I’m happy in my relationship, and thankful for what was and what is... but I can’t deny that it’s there, no matter how much reason or acknowledgement tried to correct it. We know there’s no correcting anything, this is what happened. It’s just another thing to accept and in that there is some peace.

[imissyoulilgucciv]

Gus.. it’s happened, the dreaded it’s friiiiiday mentality has officially become my weekly routine, the good news is, I get to carry an inside joke with you through the neighbors. It’s weird that they do not know what it really means to me. When Friday comes the neighbors come out to their porches and as I get out my car they will shout hello and one of us will say it’s friiiiiiiiday first.

I miss you 😞

[imissyoulilgucciv]

Another Monday,

Another day waking up missing you, confused by the life I have that will always keep going, getting deeper, evolving, and yet.: somehow there will always be a part of me waiting for things to be different- waiting to wake up from a never ending dream that I now call my life: put like that it almost sounds romantic, but I assure you the it’s not the dream disguised as reality, it is reality disguised as a dream because the reality is so fucking hard to accept, even if life seems to go on, my career goes on, my pathetic love life (and the guilt with being in love with someone else) it’s hard to wake up to someone else and have gone through the night believing you’d just disappeared somewhere, in the dream I was convinced you’d run away: you didn’t tell anyone anything but there was hope I would see you again when you were ready. I wake up and my other life appears and I remember the sadness and the denial that keeps me from having any deeper connection; it’s just gone, the one I had, and most of the time I don’t think I can accept it, even though the acceptance is waking up everyday and over and over again so I need to acknowledge the fact that this is my life; and you are not physically part of it.

[imissyoulilgucciv]

I keep having these fragmented dreams and you always appear in conversation or actuality. The situations, places, and people change but the knowledge that you’re dead does not. This knowing is keeping other parts of you from connecting with me in a way that I desperately desire.

2020-2021 ? I will continue to watch myself age, my image of you never will, the space between us and that version of myself will only continue to get further and further away and no matter what I try to hold on to, there won’t ever be anything as satisfying as when I could hold on to you. New albums come out that I know you’d be listening to and I can’t describe the feeling of time passing while everything seems so frozen, so permanent. There’s this confusion around the belief that everyday you recreate yourself and yet somehow I know there’s still apart of me that’s never going to leave 2017.

Aging is weird enough on its own but this kind of pain is the most lonely I’ll ever feel and I’ll admit I don’t really believe in love, it’s just one more thing I’ve grown to accept while I believe that too is a false reality I’ve inevitably grown into.

Everything I feel, feels so confusing. I often feel like I don’t have the capacity to feel anything yet I feel so much and I can’t function the way I think I’m expected to. Added on to the confusion is that every time I feel any intense emotion (usually sad or upset) I instantly think of you, as if 6 months of daily crying between robotically functioning in society conditioned me to link you to any intense feeling I have because for so long it’s alll I could think about and feel. I can’t tell if I’m ever upset about anything or if it’s just the feelings I have coming out in whatever form they can on whoever they can.

[imissyoulilgucciv]

I had this dream, like most it went from one place to the next, the next place was filled with upset about something and my sister was there making it worse, continuously going on about something and she lifted her phone and said “see it’s gus”. It wasn’t random the next place was also an old room that Gus would visit me in, our earlier time together and I had been missing him so much but in my dream I knew he was gone and I thought my sister was mocking me further, I closed the phone and Gus went away, the sound of his voice, the identity photo...waking up wasn’t any better and then I was convinced I was and have been letting my emotions block me, and they blocked Gus too and knowing I closed that phone is waking up feeling like I missed the chance to get a message or to get to spend a little time with him and you can imagine what that feels like every time.

[imissyoulilgucciv]

I always feel like I’m missing you so much lately and then I remember lately has been this way since august 7th 

[imissyoulilgucciv]

fraud

I’m sure I’ve written of it before, but here we are 3/5/2019- counting since 8/7/2017. No matter how much I do, no matter what I do, no matter where I go or who I am, I will always know it’s because of that day. That is how time works I guess as what we have is seemingly linear, its the feeling of the way things change, they way they can’t be the same, but that day so clearly molds the rest of my life, for the rest of my life. When I am anyone and the day starts and I put on my clothes and don’t really do anything with my hair and get ready to be whatever Michelle the world needs her to be, I’ll know it inst everything, I’ll know I lost so much that day and I’ll know no one else will see it or understand it, I’ll know I think of you in every thought and I filter through it because the thoughts are something else, they’re not a conversation, they’re not something that needs to be stated. You are a huge part of me that no one can see, and if I describe you, it wont add up to the you I knew, and the you I have come to know. I think of us as a new person and I think of the way you are with me, I think of the ways you are with me and what you left with me, I think of what I left behind and what I wasn’t able to do, I think of how we lost our battle, I think of what you’d think about this or that, I think of honoring you, talking with you, missing you, feeling disconnected because I haven’t dreamed with you, time is our biggest separation now and it only gets bigger. So when I put on that Michelle- Shell that everyone see’s I feel like a fraud, I feel like it’s all a discourse of something else that could have, maybe should have happened. I feel this intense confusion and sadness I couldn’t do anything with except get dressed and do things with my time I can live with, otherwise I wouldn’t be living at all, so I go and go and go, and it’s okay. Its not all bad, it’s okay, my gratitude keeps me going and fills me with a different kind of purpose or satisfaction about the life we share. How do you know when you’ve let go of too much? Is that even possible as we don’t get to keep anything, even ourselves, ideas of the “quantum you”, its always shifting, and always becoming, but why does it feel so fake? I assume its because there is a part of me that is always hiding, and there is nothing I can do. I tried to find another group therapy, for that reason, but there is nothing here,  I might try to make one, I made a flyer, but I didn’t print or post it. It’s a lot and I’m not sure its a good idea, like a relapse wouldn't be. 

[imissyoulilgucciv]

I just realized the last post had a lot of re posts, a lot being anything more than 2 and that is sort of unsettling to me but keep in mind those are not negative feelings to me. It’s just that I know, no matter how many people see it, or like it, they will never understand the true context, they wont feel what it means to me, its okay, thats just something I always felt strange about when I think about all types of art, the way it gets transformed through others like a game of telephone that doesn’t need any words. 

[shellojello]

to think I’ve had an image in my mind for almost 7 years, and only now have I sat down for an hour to let it materialize. 

[imissyoulilgucciv]

yea this was from our first intense trip, one where I lost myself in your pupils and silk black sheets, the same ones I still use on my bed today. Not the same sheets, but the same kind and same color. I sank into them so far and traveled through different realms wrapped in a small cocoon made for exploring the universe I’m so limited to and yet you were still right there with in an arms reach, and I dumped some water into a glass where you looked at me in amazement “how are you doing that”, we decided to go outside for some air, to feel the breeze, to see the trees, and to get lost in the night sky. Exiting your room was like leaving a pod we were bound to for years until the pod reached a planet we could survive on, out to explore unaware of the darkness that would welcome us. The stairs were easy, we had to move silently to avoid waking up the other beings in the house, and the very sensitive pokie alarm. IT was there at the bottom of the stairs that I found a pool of ghouls wondering back and forth, I imagined small grunts coming from them as they went in only two directions. It was a bit scary, but only because I was so lost in that moment and that place that I didn’t have any sense of my own direction, I didn’t know which one of those wonders was you, I knew one was, but they were all your size and moving around with no faces. That little room was a different eternity. Its always there, but that was the day I was able to enter it and I still don’t know what it is or what it means or if it is anything at all, but I do know it was very real, and it was its own place. I couldn’t help but to let out a nervous laugh to break the silience and the space I didn’t know how to navigate in, and it worked, I came back to the bottom of the stairs and you spoke as a response to my sound and there you were, there the door was, and we made it to the breeze and trees. We looked into them and you said something about how easy it would be to get lost, how people get lost just wondering and can’t find their way back. 

[imissyoulilgucciv]

The child I was reading with turned to the next page and there it was, a few tomb stones,

“here lies Gus”

 “here lies Jello” 

right next to each other, on the very edge of the page, sure to be the first ones I’d see. 

Things like this happen all the time, smells, feelings, phrases people say that seem sort of out of place. 

or maybe everything is out of place, because the place I want it to be, is impossible, and so many things besides memories are little locked windows. Anyways it gets my attention and I love these moments as much as they tear me apart, and I find myself in the middle of an empty desert with nothing but grains of sand rolling one on top of the other, over and over again. These take me out of my own place too. 

Did I write here that one day a child asked me if Suicide was a ninja term, and seriously thought it was. This really took me far into the desert and I was so confused that I couldn’t even feel the sun. 

[imissyoulilgucciv]

the nothing stuffing

So I don't bother misleading myself with a hope that constantly demands that I seek out a stuffing for what will be an endless void.

I know there is no replacement, I know there is no love that will be the same, and I know

no matter how many new people I bring into my life, no matter how many genuine romances are subjected to feeling phony, no matter how happy, no matter how busy, how "full" there will always be a space for you, there will be the space we had together, which I believe will shrink with time, the impact will not, but the memories do not stand out so much, and being with you will be as unfamiliar as an earlier time in my life. This was horribly depressing for some time, and I have done what I can do to remember, to record, I doubt I will return to them as they are available, don't get me wrong, these recordings are already flawed in that they were mostly written down long after they happened, opposed to some of the entries here, most of them, are a collection of bringing forward my past and thinking about the present. There will always be the space of us together, and there will always be the space that holds what we could have been what we did not get to be, this space isn't an image of us living together happily, it's not an image of us playing out our live in any form, its not the good and the bad, the wanted, the unwanted, the imaginable horrors with in our relationship unfolding, and the most blissful awakenings we'd have together over and over,

it is a space where I think you're still here, it is a space that became nothing on the day you died. A space that sends urges through my body.

No matter how many new faces, new places, I will never cease to have the urge to message you, to tell you things, to share things with you, this I can accept, it becomes more upsetting when I can feel the reasons behind my urge, when I feel the love I have for you, when I feel the respect and admiration that sends my entire being into a longing for a response from you, longing for your feedback, your words, your wisdom, your love, for you. I can't ever have that, but the space will be there, and that little space is both a creator and destroyer.

I miss you. It will be a long winter break, I do hope to enjoy some alone time, but I fear for what it will be, and I fear for returning to work after, it will be harder. I want to find mushrooms so I can have a more intimate moment with myself and this house, so I can release some things I don't know how to access or so I can listen to the sink drop, the tape slowing peeling off the wall, to feel a passing car, to feel alone, to feel you, to feel something/ anything.

I just keep going.  

[imissyoulilgucciv]

In reality I was also hoping to meet a guy my age who also lost a lover to suicide and we could hang out and be sad together, that didn’t happen. 

[imissyoulilgucciv]

National Survivor Day, 

I told myself I’d go because I’m really looking for people who have been through this however that is for them, it is still comforting to be around people who need to talk about it too. However with my luck I got very sick yesterday, started the day before, I slept from 6-11 then woke up feeling hot and more sick, I went back to sleep around 1-9 and the only reason I woke up was because I heard knocking on my door, 3 times, then another 3, so I thought it must have been important, I was sure it was a roomate trying to ask me something or see if I was awake, so I said hello, when no one replied I was positive no one would be at the door, and ofcorse they were not. 

So I got up and went to the thing, the lunch non lunch provided survivor meeting for this day, surprisingly the closest one to me is a 2 hour bus ride, so I spoiled myself with a lyft, and got a ride back home, I had a feeling I’d be able to get a ride from someone, I wasn’t going to ask. 

it is so good to be around others, and I miss that connection in my home town, even if people know just a hint of gus I feel better but  I still feel uncomfortable knowing other people really don’t know and what they think they know whatever that may be makes me anxious. 

It is so strange to be in such a big city and not be close to any support group, and one I found was for people under 1 year and 6 months, which I fit in but I am really turned off that this is the structure for their thing, because there is no end to this, but I also understand how different these years are, but I also feel I have met people in year 9 who sound the same as people I’ve met in year 1. it was still pretty far from me, so I might end up trying to see if people in this area would respond to a bulliten notice for an SOSL group, not lead by a professional. I think I will proceed with this but it is hard for me to commit to things like this especially with the different turns of mood. 

This really was about the way I will things so hard they come true, it was a doubt of any sort of afterlife, and having the afterlife be formed purely from my intense will for something, and while I think I am in connect with a universe that will respond, or knock at my door, I also know people have seen the same hallucinations at the same time, I Did once but that time it was drug induced, still it opened my mind to this window of how two people could hallucinate the same thing, and when that happens it feels less like a hallucination because there has to be some truth behind whatever was being seen. 

[imissyoulilgucciv]

I am really missing you, your mom, my “other mom” visited this weekend, and I couldn’t believe it when I remembered its only been 3 months since I’ve been here, and I just think about that year in your house, it’s indescribable, the feeling I have towards my stay and that time of my life, the way it will be with me forever but also there is a haziness and the whole thing is extremely surreal, it feels misplaced, I suppose it makes sense if I consider I never wanted any of this. 

I confidently believe if your mom had not felt about me the way she does, I would not be alive. If I was alive I’d be in very bad shape, abusing substances and going down the most self destructive route because deep down, there is the guilt, the feeling of being one to blame, the self blame, the lack of acceptance, the unwillingness to move on because you couldn’t... that I didn’t do enough, I couldn’t do enough, that I failed miserably and why should I go on this way? Why should I do it now when clearly I couldn’t do it then? 

but your mom, reminds me you loved me more than anything, and I can only believe her because she is extending that love on to me, and had she not, I no way could have been as strong as I am and have been, I will always have a whole, and interactions will always be missing you, without you, yet there will always be a space for you and so that space will always be unfulfilled. 

For the record I ended up writting a lot down somewhere else, but it really doesn’t get better with time, easier I guess but it isn’t right and it isn’t ever going to be the way it was, and that is the future in general. 

The music we’d listen to, I cycle through it and I’m back on bonobo, there is that song stays the same or something and I feel it so much, the lyrics obviously speak to me but I can also think of all the time we spent listening to bonobo, the first time around, we had been binging on drugs and having a lot of sex and we had come out of that into an intentional sobriety, We got concert tickets to see a show, and right on schedule you broke up with me and I sold my ticket because you didn’t want me to go at all, The way things were also hurts to look back on there is so much to our past that is not ideal for most people, and wouldn’t make sense to most people, because thats just not how “stable” people have relationships, but I always knew there are things we can’t fully understand and that none of the pain either one of else felt was ever intentional. 4 years later we are back and you are much much better than the first time, I often forget how that time was until I start picking out specific memories.. its so hard to find the best ones when the dark ones really swallow them, sometimes it is like that with our recent time too but I can really feel the inside jokes or the things we’d do and I have those moments, I have simple moments like the making of the bed, the creeping up the stairs, I have the week before where I was afraid for my own life, and I was so confused with what was wrong, with what the problem was, 

what thats just it 

there was no conflict, the problem was internal it was the dark but there was no switch, there was no sun, there was no light to come, it was impossible to see through. 

So 4 years later he is better at showing he cares, he is making more attempts to do the “stable “ couple sweet things, I did notice them, I knew that wasn’t where we were before. 

4 years later and he gets tickets again, before we go on our trip, I can’t remember if that was when.. yes it was so he gets the tickets thinking we’d still be in our homes and I’d be graduating, instead we went across the country and I took the semester from school off, 

so we didn’t see them in 2012 and we didn’t see them in 2016. 

I really got on here to say I had a bad dream last night, it wasn’t so bad but it felt awful. 

It started off inappropriate where I was sleeping with both my male roomates (like we’d take turns) that was just weird and there were more specifics about why we did that and where we were but I can’t grasp those, what I can grasp is that you showed up, or I went to some house and you were in it or I talked to someone who told me you were... anyways I find you or you find me and I am just so happy to see you but also very confused, you talk and you don’t sound like yourself, your speech is coming out irregular, it is then explained that you didn’t want to see because, even though you survived you survived with a lot of brain damage while there was no oxygen to keep everything functioning. Ofcorse I was happy to see you and that wasn’t upsetting in terms of the love I felt, but I was upset to think of you hiding away while I just wanted to be close to you, I was upset thinking of what that would feel like and how you were coping with the situation what kind of feelings were you feeling and how similar are they to the ways you felt before, I don’t know what happened after that 

I just know I woke up feeling upset and I thought about if you had survived, and that didn’t make me feel better, it just made me feel anxious and reminded me that we really messed up, that one simple move could have saved your life that day, and it wasn’t made. 

[imissyoulilgucciv]

I thought I had lost the habit of believing I can tell or ask you about things. I thought it was a habit, I’ve been naive. I thought that feeling that comes up out of my stomach with the intention of reaching you was something I’d lose after loosing the routine I had texting, telling you things daily, when the replies stopped I thought it was in time that I would no longer be able to feel those forceful motivations, for better and worse much like the dreams I still crave. 

My point is, it’s not a habit at all, its a genuine feeling towards loving someone, the one that says to anything your excited about you want to share with your partner, your best friend so they may be excited too. You want to tell them everything there is to tell. I would never really want that feeling to go away but those bursts of sudden excitement followed by the crushing reality where I can not share things with you the way we used to, there will never be a number to reach you at that place before you died, and if there is, I still don’t have it.  

[imissyoulilgucciv]

I still feel overwhelmed 

most of 

all of the time, 

I still feel like you’re missing, like maybe it didn’t really happen, maybe I can still talk to you or see you, even though its already been so long, and as time gets longer, our time together seems shorter. 

I am in my own world made up by the worlds of others. I am able to be present in the presence of others, working with children is consuming and for someone like me it’s a good place to be. It makes my constant emotional regulation feel not only appropriate but natural. 

I wonder if I will always be trying to find a balance between creative expression and being present, and while they can be the same, while a process of expression is a current felt moment, it can also be a reflection of a moment before and that isn’t the same as being hyper aware of the current moment, of feeling there and available. 

it’s so different, I knew I wanted, want a life that comes with changes and challenges, that make me feel like I am really living, but there is and will always be apart of me that does not want to live with this kind of change, I wanted the changes to be with you, and when I fall in love again, I’ll just be reminded of all the things, feelings that came to an end. 

[imissyoulilgucciv]

We made it to the one year and the month is almost over. 

I’m missing you a lot this month, after getting settled the feelings are coming back strong, I avoided talking about it, but now I feel boxed in, I want to talk about it, but I don’t want anyone to feel bad for me and I don’t want to sound whiny, Its just something I need to acknowledge and need others close to me, if they will be close to me to know so I can get the right kind of support. I am feeling particularly lonely and hopeless, and find my mind returning to this state of longing, wishing none of this ever happened. I like where I am at the moment, but its not where I wanted to be, its not where I really chose to be, its all based on that one event. Everything will always be, after that event, thats just how time works, you do something, something follows. I guess it doesn’t have to be so direct, but this feels so significant that everything relates to it, everything points to it. 

I also start feeling sad, I feel this unhealthy “no one will love me the way he did” which I understand is a common thing people believe and then stay in bad relationships, or relationships that are not the best because they’re afraid of being alone, though this is more specific toward feeling loved and loving, it is similar. I understand someone might love me again but for some reason I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it will be for the right reasons, I don’t believe I will ever feel how I felt with you again, that part of me, that part of my life is over, and all I have is what I can think I remember, and my memory, like everyones, lies sometimes. 

I am lonely and want affection and toward the end of my stay perhaps I was seeking these out in other uh not so normal ways, and now its weird, I have no desires to do this, and I do have the desire to build a relationship, but I do not have the energy, and I have the discomfort of being in love with someone else.

thinking back to those first few months...  I shut it out quick, I start feeling my chest sinking in, I feel short of breath, I feel the beginning of never again.