Losing A Whole Year

This morning I wake up earlier than I have to, as usual. I feel around the bed for my cat, but she has abandoned me during the night. I climb the stairs, out of my basement bedroom, and find an empty house. Everyone is asleep.

I shower and make coffee and sit down at the computer desk in order to write in my journal. I can't remember what the date is, so I glide the cursor over the time on the lower right hand corner of the computer screen. Friday, December 09, 2005. I get a knot in my stomach. Fuck, it's the 9th. One year.

I write about a page of bullshit in the journal and then go into the living room and stretch out on the couch. The house is silent and from where I lay, I can see the front door. I think to myself, This is exactly the position I was in when the police pounded on the door. Sister was at the computer; she answered the door. Mother was upstairs; she rushed down. Gasps. Mouths agape. Mother says to me, "You have to come with me!" I panic and offer to watch kid sisters instead. "Is it serious?" she asks them. "Ma'am, we wouldn't be here." Door slams. I collapse into tears as soon as it does.

I stop daydreaming and begin to get ready for school. I don't have any absences left; I must go. I shovel a path in front of the house, clean the snow off of my car, start her up, and drive off. I'm driving for about fifteen minutes before I break down. Tears stream down my face. Damn it.

I get on campus and pull into the parking lot. I sit in the car and look around, still crying. I write a note to Professor G., explaining that I can't come to class because it's one year. I cry all the way across campus, hoping I don't run into anyone I know. I approach the door to his office, the one with the photos of Bob Dylan and George Harrison on it, and slip the note underneath.

I intend to make the trip to see Fellow Seeker, but know I shouldn't go MIA without letting Mother know. I drive home. No one is surprised to see me; no one asks why I'm not at school. I am just in time to drive Kid Sisters #1 and #2 to school. So I do. Sister comes with me. After we drop them off, I ask her if she wants to go have lunch.

We sit in a diner and she makes me laugh. She reads the menu in disgust: "Why the fuck do they do this? A crisp salad? Makes me want to puke reading that." "The soup is hearty? Ugh. I don't want it anymore." I laugh because she's not trying to be funny; she is actually serious. I convince her that her salad will most definitely be wilted, not crisp, and that this is only marketing. We spend an hour talking about our boyfriends, our frustrations with Mother, our future plans, and our childhoods. I feel a lot better.

We pick the girls up from school and I drop them all off at home. I travel for about an hour and a half to see F.S. He finds me browsing an outdoor holiday market, looking at over-priced items and trying not to get my socks wet. We spend about an hour together, just walking around and talking. Then we go and see The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

I am into the movie for the first half, enjoying it very much. After that, the Christian allegory starts getting to me. It's really depressing the hell out of me, and I can't enjoy it anymore. It's weird. It's an all-around strange night for spirituality, because Fellow Seeker is in rare form with his antagonism towards God. He starts to frighten me, and that's hard to do! He tells me that he doesn't really believe in God anymore, because it seems like we have given God all of His attributes. I agree in the sense that God seems awfully human, and I feel that we ascribe characteristics to Him ourselves. I will even admit that I don't know for sure whether or not God exists. But I am not yet at the point where I can say that I don't think He does. We are with two other people at the movie theater, and after hearing F.S. rant a bit, one of them says to him, laughing, "Man, you are going straight to hell." F.S. takes pride in this, asserting that yes, he and I are. I tell them, "I like the way he says we."

The entire day was not bad; there were some parts of it that were okay. My eyes, however, kept playing tricks on me. My mind traveled backwards and I imagined Father walking through the door, coming home from work. While on the bus, I passed a house that used to belong to relatives of ours, and I could see Father and I playing catch outside. I saw him playing with Kid Sisters. I saw him brushing past me and opening the refrigerator. He doesn't do those things anymore.

Today was hard because he is not better yet. It was hard because all year long, I still held onto the hope that one morning I would wake up, and find that none of it had happened. But it has been one year - one year - and I haven't woken up yet. There will never be a time in which this has not happened. I also wonder why everyone else has been able to come to terms with it, but I still have not. Mother and Sister wish I would just get over it so that I could visit him more. Everybody thinks that, they just don't say it. I'm selfish, I should just suck it up and go. Nobody thinks that perhaps this is greater than me. People think that because I still get good grades and don't do anything too crazy, that I'm fine.

I'm not fine.