Eleven

The leaves change and so do I. Grief is so heavy at times, and other times it is feather light. It’s the feather light that scares me the most. I can carry heavy. Releasing heavy is a relief that is felt immediately. When the grief is light, you never know when you’ll feel it touch you. It turns into a game of grief eggshells in your mind and there is nowhere you feel comfortable. Grief is uncomfortable like the itchy dress you bought in a haze to wear to the funeral. You pull and tug and pretend it’s not making your skin crawl while you cradle everyone else’s emotions like prized possessions. When grief is comfortable, it feels like a thunderstorm filled with thunder and lightning. It is the blanket that envelops you and the warmth is hazy and sleepy. It is within those comfortable moments that I try to remember you. By now, it is hard to conjure a mental photo of your face without seeing a physical photo of you. It’s hard to even remember the sound of your voice, your laughter and what your presence felt like to be in. But I try. I lay there and search every corner of my soul looking for a shred of you somewhere. I’ll find a tiny memory as small as a shred of paper and I clutch it so tight. Because holding this memory means that you existed. You were here and then you weren’t. It never seems to be a monumental memory, like our wedding day or the day you boarded a bus to head to a plane that sent you to Afghanistan. It’s always a memory so small and insignificant – like standing in line at Little Caesar’s on Fort Benning waiting for our pepperoni pizza holding the garlic butter. It’s sitting in your car listening to your music and watching your fingers tap, tap, tap the steering wheel. It’s the buzz of the apartment dryer filled with your uniforms that I need to fold and hang up. Those shreds of memories, I put them in my pocket and vow to never lose them. And yet, they still fall out of their hiding place and are swept back into another unsearched corner just waiting to be found, read and remembered.

There are 12 months in a year, but only 1 that you’ve claimed as yours.

Eleven.