Monday, May 30, 2005

I Wish I Had My Trumpet Here

I put on my sunny face and go out into the world every day. It’s really easy to do here because no one knows me, therefore no one suspects that I’m faking it. And the people that do know me don’t know me well enough to not buy it when I explain away my obvious discomfort with excuses of being “so busy” and “very tired”. I’m not tired. No more than usual, anyway. And I’m not so busy that I don’t have time to let myself get locked up in that eternal mystery that is otherwise known as my brain.

It’s been pretty easy to fake it with my friends that I am only able to communicate with by phone because A) they’re all super busy and therefore don’t really have time to worry about me and B) I’m in “real” college now so I can keep the conversations short because I always have homework to do.

I don’t really know why I feel the way I do…constantly on the verge of tears. I’m sure part of it is because everything here is so new and therefore foreign. But most of it, I think, has to do with the fact that I miss my Jack more than I ever thought possible. There is this huge gaping chasm inside of me where he used to reside. Now that spot is all naked and empty. I keep trying to fill it up with other things but I continually fail. And people keep letting me down.

I remember when I went through one of the most painful periods of my life – just about two months ago now – and I thought there would be nothing else that could cut me as deeply – at least not for a good long while. Well, I was wrong.

Being separated from Jack is like having an arm or a leg missing, only worse because I know that I am the one that chose this situation – I am the one that caused it. And the one person that I want to talk to about this, that I need to talk to about this, is not someone that I can share these things with because he is not quite nine-years-old and he will be better off not fully knowing the agony that I have placed myself in.

I need him here. I need to hear his breathing when he’s sleeping. I need to have him yell at me when he doesn’t get his way. I need him to make me laugh. I need him to share in all of these new experiences with me.

But more than all of that I need him not to know that a part of me dies each day that we’re apart and the fear I have that I may not be able to find my way back to the “happy” from this dark, dark place. I guess that what I never noticed before was that while I was completely, or at least mostly, alone for almost five years before meeting Jayme & Shyler and the Browncoats, was that I didn’t need people because I always had Jack with me and he was truly enough to make my life complete.

But now I have no one. Because the pseudo relationships that I thought I had been building are really only place-holders…people I have used to try and fill the void that being separated from Jack has left behind.

Jack has been my whole world for so long that now my life seems to have lost its meaning. Sure, I’m in school and working towards a better future for Jack, and intellectually I know that the separation is only temporary.

But what I do not know is if these sacrifices are worth it. I do not know that anything I ever do or accomplish will ever have any meaning at all if he is not here to share it with me.

I don’t know what I’m doing here and I don’t know where the real me went.

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