It is slow, incremental, this reclaiming of my life.
It still feels odd to not have anyone checking in on me. To easily go a day without speaking out loud to another person. I know that this is just what the liminal spaces feel like. It won't be forever.
Slowly, I am starting to find my fire again. I'm writing again, working on a creative brief for a job application feels fulfilling and interesting, instead of depleting and exhausting.
Things are getting done, sort of. They are getting done slowly, gently. And if they don't get done well then that's okay because this is a hard time in my life you know?
I think I am forgetting him, forgetting us, or both. There is this knowledge that he is a different person now. No longer the person who came with me to Tuscany, nor the person who proposed on Christmas day. Even less so the person who slammed doors and punched walls because of his medication and because I could never give him what he needed. He is a stranger now. Perhaps even more of a stranger than he was before we met.
There's something peculiar about that. The way that you can feel like you know someone inside out because you share every single day with them and then, just like that, they are a person who is in love with someone else, who you used to know and who still has their name on the mortgage, but who doesn't live here anymore.
Messages become shorter - chipper and helpful on his part, clipped and guarded on mine. We are no longer each other's people. I suppose we never really, truly were. Just under four years of a life, swept away, disappeared as if it never happened. But it did happen, at least I think it did. I'm not sure what any of it means now, but all I know is that I'm starting to figure out what I mean, and that has to be a good thing... It's a start.