Writers Jam

May you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you–haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe–I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always–take any form–drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

When I was 6 months neck-deep into debilitating grief, I tried everything; breaking down, walling up, socialization, isolation, empathy, cruelty. I karaoke’d with Britney Spears in the kitchen 3 days after the funeral. I hyperventilated over filtered sunlight in a crowded park 3 months after. Nothing made sense. No analogy or well-executed routine could've filled the deep void of uselessness that I was back then.

I searched for media that could put together the pieces of my now-disassembled Lego dollhouse of a life. I spat on idols and rituals that let me down when I believed the most. I plunged further into information and rationale for answers that never arrived when it was desperately needed. I gave myself away to strangers who only knew this burdened version of me, to build a sense of self that I had begun to lose. I became a baby, washed up on unknown shores, teaching myself to walk, talk, and survive in a world without an instruction manual. 

I gave myself traits as goals to acquire, so that I'd have something to live for. I don't know if that's the norm or if I sucked so bad at existing that I had to gamify it for an incentive.

I clung on to this idea that the ghosts that haunt me might be temporary and all of this loss, a long-term nightmare that I'm experiencing in the dark womb-like coma of not being Someone™. I gave myself these 5 years to become a Person™. Someone who might have answers, a routine, an identity, values and goals that were forged in an unguided crucible. 

I have barely a year left before I have to turn myself in for a Grade on how well I have fared so far. Now, I may have to come to terms with the fact that these ghostly hauntings might be permanent, in case I've failed to contain the spectres of my sadness inside my mind before the deadline. If I do fail, I’d at least I’d be stuck with a loving presence, as far as phantoms go.

It's probably a bad coping mechanism, prophesying a Second Coming. I'm going to get my hopes dashed horribly one fine summer afternoon when I realize I've run out of stipulated time and that he hasn't showed up, unchanged, in his patient gown robe. But this fantasy of meeting him once more, has kept me going for now. 

I am nowhere close to being Healed, but I am on the way to being Whole again. I make uncomfortable jokes about it. I only break down to sad art every two weeks. I’m no longer searching for broken glass fragments of myself strewn on the beach. I may not know enough on how to pick myself back up flawlessly but I do know myself enough to know when I might falter. I'm not going to pretend that I might get back the time I lost without him; that I am on my way to inventing time travel just to live out the life I had lost track of somewhere along the way. Things will never go back to being untainted by mourning.  

I just want to get to a point where if I encounter him again, for an hour, I’d be able to tell him that I did it. (We did it). I want to tell him how I've changed in his absence, and yet how I remain the child that he knew. I want his ghost to know how his memory kept me company on the days I was Nothing.