Screaming Silence

After the storm, when the wind calms and the dust clears. The fires turn to smoke and the helpers have all left.

It’s just you sifting through the remains. Remembering the crashing. Remembering the thunder. Getting soaked in the rain. You’re dry now, except maybe your cheeks.

That’s how my year is starting. That’s how my brain is shifting.

It’s all clear now. Everything I tried to block out. From talking to the doctor on the phone to people cutting contact with me. Everything in between and everything after.

I remember every word and every silence.

I feel everything I tried to bury. It’s calm now. The chaos is subsiding.

And it’s silent.

On the outside.

But my body is screaming and my kids are crying and the fear of losing his voice has set in and denial is over.

I’ve tried many ways of distracting myself that first year.

Alcohol to cloud my mind. I found new favorites.

Food to fill the emptiness. Milkshakes, galore.

Dating sites to distract my loneliness. Those were something different. To swipe through on a picture? Sweet. To message back and forth with a stranger? Fun. To talk on the phone, or meet in person, and hear their voice? Now I’m done.

Their voices bothered me. I would tell my friends, “He’s a nice guy, but something about his voice bothers me.” Who says that?

And then I realized it was simply the wrong voice. Once you put a voice to a name the reality sets in.

That’s not the voice I want to hear.

That’s not the man voice I want filling my home.

That’s not the voice I want talking to my kids and it’s definitely not the last voice I want to hear before I fall asleep at night.

So goodbye to those sites. They were a fun distraction, but not realistic. And, well, I have shit to do.

I put the alcohol away and the gluttonous food out of reach and I need to just feel it all.

Work through it all.

It honestly feels like I’m starting at the beginning, again. I’m learning how to live this life, yet, again.

Because everyone gathers around a fire and watches it burn in horror, in disbelief—and then they go home. And there’s nothing wrong with those people–they still care. It’s just not their fire. It’s not their mess.

It’s not their world shattered at their feet where they need to focus on breathing and remind themselves to drink some damn water.

So the crowd is gone and the smoke is cleared and the vices are realized.

And there’s homework to do and reading to catch up on and children who need held at night more than a stranger needs a right swipe.

And there’s lunches that need packed more than a drink that needs to be made.

There’s dinner that needs to be cooked rather than pizza that needs to be ordered.

And it’s heavy. It’s a lot.

There are still forms that need sent out. There is so much organizing that still needs to be done. There are so many messes that need to be cleaned up.

And there are only so many hours in a day.

And we are lucky to have two hours in each of those days that our minds are cleared, our focus is fixed, and we can knock out at least a couple things on our ever growing list.

We hope for two hours in the day where no one else asks us for anything, where no one else tells us where we dropped the ball, where no one else knocks on our door.

We have a small window before the silence starts screaming again and our mind is distracted and our dinner plans seem daunting and our doubts set in.

Giving myself grace and extending it to my kids is how we’ve been surviving.

I let them ruin their shoes and buy lunch at school and call people when they want to call people and not call anyone for weeks when they don’t want to talk to anyone.

I let at least one of them wake me up every.single.night and tell me they miss their dad.

And I walk them back to their room or lift the covers and let them crawl in between my piles of clothes that I have yet to put away.

And I let them find their outlets. New music or drawing or new hobbies or whatever it may be—just let them do it.

But we are back to homework first, like we did when daddy was here. We always had homework done before he got home, so there wasn’t a dinner/homework/shower/bed struggle as soon as he walked in the door. We are back to getting it done early for our time between dinner and bed to be free.

We are back to not watching a screen at dinner. I’m back to sitting with them while we eat.

And now I have my son telling me, “I wish daddy was standing right there. I wish you were still right there and he was right there.” And it’s so sweet and so innocent and so fucked up that they have to think such a way.

We are back to being diligent about therapy and having discussions.

And we are back to fueling healthy bodies and minds. No matter how much of a struggle it is to do, we have to do it.

Because here we are, crowd cleared and smoke-filled air lifted, and it’s just us.

Just us and our memories that sometimes makes us laugh, but often haunt us.

And we need to identify that and trust each other to confide that.

It’s time for the vices to be gone. The ill-obtained distractions to be gone.

It may not be as fun for those on the outside, but it’s our health on the line for us on the inside.

I don’t know if the fire will ever completely be out, but we finally have the gear to withstand it.