a mountain from a molehill

for the past few weeks i've been feeling like everything is finally catching up with me. when i first arrived back in italy it seemed as though all of the pain of pete's death was far away from this place. milan and school seemed like a shining golden opportunity to bury myself in a productive place in which i could forget the painful circumstances of my life and focus on taking positive strides toward the future.

as you may have guessed from the first sentence of my post, this is no longer the case. of course school is exciting and i am taking major steps toward realizing my goals, and i'm getting excellent grades and performing as well as i could have hoped. my state of mind outside of school, however, is the real problem.

i'm just sad. i'm sad all the time. the real shit of it is that i'm constantly torn between knowing that the sadness IS in fact the reason for my disproportionate overreactions to just about everything these days and that there is a world full of people around me who still look at me and see only the things that i do and not what sadness is brewing behind my actions (and overreactions as it were).

[i realize that i should probably re-phrase the preceding unapologetic run-on, but i just don't feel like it.]

so these days, every little upsetting thing, already magnified by my distance from everything familiar and my husband (who soothes me better than anyone else) becomes ten thousand times bigger than it should or needs to be. everything pains me. my insecurities are enormous. i commit social suicide in my head on a daily basis. group dynamics, which are normally already difficult for me have become virtually impossible to navigate. even my ability to judge character, which is normally something on which i pride myself, has gone completely out the window. so basically, i'm a big fat mess.

i'm sure that i'll feel better tomorrow (or at least i hope i will), but today---

fuck today.

domenica

it's been kind of a tough weekend. i've been thinking about pete a lot and crying a lot (because i've been thinking about pete). it's easy to be so far away and to convince myself that i'm ok. clearly, i'm not ok. i'm functioning, doing well in school, making friends, blah blah blah. but my feelings have been a little wacko lately. i'm sure that he's the reason.

i only have a few days left here, and i'm feeling the crush to accomplish and to see everyone and to get ready to be alone again.

i'm feeling pete's absence a bit less frequently now. it's hardest in the shower of all places. i think maybe i'm the most alone there that i am anywhere and i find myself crying more there than i would think. it's also been difficult to see beautiful things, or when watching movies, it's the triumphant moments that make me the saddest. it's painful to be alive seeing and feeling amazing things when he's not.

i hope that i'm able to be true to myself and get everything out of life that i possibly can. i hope that i can love freely and allow myself to be loved. i hope that i can live the dream, just like he would be.

fractured

i've been thinking a whole lot lately about different frames of mind/states of consciousness lately, as i mentioned in my previous entry. when i was in milan, time was passing really slowly for me. i've had a couple of different conversations with friends about this phenomenon, and i have concluded time speeds and slows relative to how much i am in tune with the world around me, or as meagen said, "living in the moment." when i'm really stimulated, a day feels like a week, and a week feels like a month. when i'm in a routine and uninterested, or looking forward to something in the future the days slip by.

when thinking about ways to explain this, i always think about the theory of relativity. the closer a person's forward movement is, relative to the speed of light, the more slowly time passes. i always think about this in terms of resonant frequencies. if my molecules are vibrating at or close to the same speed as the molecules around me, time moves more slowly. maybe this is just bogus esoteric, quasi-scientific bullshit, but it makes sense to me. i have also been reading philip pullman's, his dark materials series, which has certainly contributed to my thoughts of the soul's interactions with the universe. i'm sure that i will blog about my thoughts on that also, but right now this entry seems muddled and jumpy enough already.

pete's death has brought up all kinds of different feelings for me, particularly over the past week or so. when thinking about myself and my "issues," it continuously occurs to me that many of them are based on my history of breaking myself up into little pieces. i think it's a side effect of being a child of divorced parents. when i found myself navigating my way between mother and father and the very different people they are, i think i spent most of my time trying to make everyone happy. i was one thing to my father and stepmother and another to my mother. i lived very different lives at each of their houses and each of them brought out different parts of me, both good and bad.

i've been reminded of all this recently while trying to sort out details surrounding peter's things, and traveling to san diego and such. it seems that this kind of fracturing has become habitual. this seems to be the most subtly damaging effect that my parent's divorce has had on me. i've noticed it in other areas of my life also. the habit really seems to be the problem. it doesn't seem too complicated a process to identify these sorts of patterns, but solutions are elusive. i would like to think that therapy is the answer, but i don't really believe that. i don't think there is an answer. the best we can do is to find ways to cope with the difficult realities of our lives.

i will consider myself a success if i can manage this.

tuesday

it seems like the storm has died down a little bit now. people are still calling, but less frequently. it seems like i have less to do. i have to leave the house today. i have to take off the clothes that i've been wearing for the past two days and take a shower.

bill and i are going to see our therapist this morning. i hope it will help.

tomorrow we go to san diego for the service. i can't bring myself to say the other word. funeral.

it's funny actually, because it's been hard for me to use euphemisms in my own head. i've only been using them with other people who i tell, my brother passed away on friday. yes it was of natural causes. yes it was fast and he wasn't in any pain.

the voice that's been marching in circles in my head can only say, my brother is dead, my brother is dead, my brother is dead. for some reason i'm not saying it nicely to myself.

what's the point?

my brother is dead.

monday

today is monday: the day after sunday, which is the day after saturday, my brother's birthday, which is the day after friday, the day he died. i've been home now for about 36 hours, and last night i was actually able to sleep through the night.

now i'm awake, but everyone else is still sleeping.

i've gotten so many phone calls and emails over the past few days. it's been really amazing how many people have reached out to me. to be honest i still can't really believe that all of this is actually happening.

some of peter's friends from work came over to the house last night. it's great spending time with my friends of course, but it was really really good to talk to people who knew him well and who could laugh with me about all of the ridiculous quirks that made my brother such a unique and amazing person.

he was so charming when he wanted to be. he could make old ladies and diner waitresses giggle with the most ridiculous lines. i was never quite sure why they worked, but he pretty much always got a smile. he was very serious about his clothing; everything needed to coordinate just so. a friend of his from work told me that pete used to rib him about the clothes he was wearing, that is so my brother, so something that he would do. i suppose we weren't so different in that regard.

the kids at the center where he worked in chicago used to make him these string bracelets. he always wore them to work to show them how much it meant to him to receive them. he was the kind of guy who would wear a necklace made out of pasta every day so that some little kid who made it could know that she was special. he was kind, and caring and a little bit ridiculous. but now the funniest thing is that the ridiculous things that he did, the ways in which he was just himself, are the things that i will miss most and the things that take my breath away.

11.29.08

I’m flying right now. I’m flying right now and I feel normal. I feel like a living breathing human being. I’ve had quite a few pangs of guilt over the past few hours that I’ve felt like a normal human being for feeling that way. In the end, I’ve decided that it’s what Pete would have wanted.

It helps temper the guilt a little to know that the pain is waiting for me as soon as I’m no longer flying through the air from one place to another. I’ll be home. I will be looking at people and places that he used to look at, but this time I’ll know that he’s not here to look at them anymore.

It seems slightly more merciless to me that I’m flying across time zones on his birthday and that for me this day is unnaturally long. The sun has been setting through the airplane window now for the past hour or so. It will be setting still when I arrive home.

I’ve been sitting in a brightly colored airplane under rainbow lighting with a really cool little kid for the past five hours. I wish I could stay here forever, taking small glasses of water from women in saris, eating chicken Indian style and watching movies so that I’ll never have to deal with the fact that I can’t tell my brother about it. He would be so entertained.

It’s both beautiful and cruel that the saddest day of my life is also neverending, definitely more day than god intended. The longest sunset I’ve ever witnessed on the longest darkest day I’ve ever lived.

Happy birthday kiddo, wherever you are.

in the dark

today is the worst day that has ever happened. i wish that i could say i can't wait for it to be over, but tomorrow will be bad too.