Living Without

 
I was her anchor, her voice of reason and calm.  She pulled me forward from a hellish childhood and showed me defiance and independence; things did not have to be the way it was according to other voices, I had to learn to trust and listen to my own.  Not always making the best choices, she wasn't considered a "good" girl by her family or their circle of friends and she believed them, leading to a crooked road walled by stone that she finally couldn't escape.  Her mother would began sentences, "Even though you're adopted..." and attributed her failings to genetics inherited from her real mother, a young girl who had given her daughter to the nuns at Father Baker's.  Her biological father was listed as a toymaker.  I was fifteen, she was fourteen when we met, at Scouts.

Her family thought Scouts was a way of taming her; I saw it as an acceptable way to escape my home if only for hours.  She smoked and liked boys, as did most of the other girls in the troop; she snuck out of her house to go to dances at the local Catholic high schools.  Put makeup on only to have it scrubbed off by her parents, and would reapply it once outside.  Her father would hit her with his steamfitter's fists, in a bid to appease his wife; a woman who could look through you with dark, lifeless eyes above the thin line of a smile.  They liked me, as I would get her home on time, c'mon, c'mon, we gotta go, you'll get grounded or beaten or worse, put out on the street.

Growing through ups and downs, marriages, and moving to different states would separate us from time to time, but it always was as it had been.  She became ill with an autoimmune disease, and that, combined with a three pack a day habit took her away one cold November day.  Her doctors had given her too many pain meds, sleep meds, anxiety meds and the aneurism that killed her in the middle of the night was said to be a result, but no one knows for sure.  I have my own theory, that deep sorrow created by rejection and a convoluted twisting of her trust in relationships bore her down to a numbing stupor of legal drugs, leading to the one day she was gone.

It feels like an empty jar, a hole in the wall of consciousness that doesn't heal but overlaps into this continued life.  I miss her dearly.

We have clocks that divide the days, calendars that separate the months into years; but no measure will erase memory until our own days change and disappear into endless realms, where clocks stand still.  Is there an afterlife?  Absolutely.  How is it managed?  That is a charlatan's trick, to claim prophesy of is and isn't, to dangle promises like apples.  Hope.  It’s the second best remedy for sorrow.

This morning I heard a crow yelling it’s barking head off, possibly heralding the change of the slowly rising temperature.  Winter weather is not over yet, for there are 21 days until spring with plenty of room for more snow and freezing rains, but the extended light of the sun lifts our heads and hearts, for the cycle is returning to the start of running sap and breaking ice.  Warmer days and cold nights awaken the maple trees with human dreams of pancakes.  Sleep, first; the night is full of the forgiveness of time, of hours lost, and gives peaceful time to remember before falling.  Remember when.  As I look forward, you are there.