Changing Tides

The Power of Words

My husbands words stayed heavy in my mind. Day in and day out they played like a running loop, over and over and over.

He had told me to move on to "not be afraid to move on from this" but how could I move forwards when the weight of our memories held me down. I was pinned to the past even as the world kept turning before me. I was hoping, dreaming and wondering of a future that would never come into fruition and while I clung to that nonexistent future, the life I had begun to build, crumbled around me.

I had no fight left in me, no energy left to preserve what was slipping between my fingers. I tried to clasp onto Kai but the more I held steadfast the rockier the journey became until my fingertips were sore and bleeding and I could no longer hold on. He had thrown me to the side, discarded me like a piece of rubbish.

I had no desire to fight the inevitable any longer. Instead I sat back and dreamed of an alternative universe.

One where my husband was alive and my son - because Kaiser was mine- still loved me and did not show his back every time I came around.

Weeks had passed since receiving my husbands letter and the days had become harder. The only person who truly understood my struggle was Jana but even she was slipping away from the world of the living. She was lost and resentful and so was I. I was resentful that the gods that I had dedicated my life to had struck me unmercifully.

Taking my husband and now taking my son from me.

I was mad

Meilan's words had cut me open, ripped open a wound that I had tried to sew together. The threads of my life ripping at the seems, there was no staunching the blood flow.

I was belligerent, the toxic emotions that I had harboured inside of me pouring out. I was mad, so goddamn mad I felt like resorting back to my juvenile days and wrecking this room. Like shredding apart everything so the world around me could resemble my battered emotions.

But my energy was spent.

I was wrecked. The necklace that hung on my chest forced emotions out of me that I had refused to acknowledge. Anger at the gods, at me and worst of all at him. I was angry at Meilan for leaving me when he had promised an eternity together.

My world was painted red by his beautifully spun words. Veins sliced open.

I wanted to spend days in this bed. In our bed, curled up with my husbands final message to me clutched to my heart as if it were him but the world moved on and so did I. One step forward at a time I kept going. My body moving until one day my sanity would finally rejoin the world and I would be somewhat whole again. Until then I just went through the motions of living. Smiling when needing to, laughing when I was supposed to laugh, eating, drinking, meditating.

I did it all

Compartmentalising my life into tiny fragments so I could control it and in turn, control my grief.

I was somewhat successful for five weeks, five weeks until some evil energy had possessed my son and ripped what little of my soul that was left from my body.

As I sat in the hall watching Winter play with Eliza's second youngest - I was on day care duty while she recovered from her most recent pregnancy- Kaiser stormed in. His pale blonde hair was shaved short on his head, grey eyes glacier and jaw clenched as he glared at me.