My Life Would Suck Without You.

Autumn heard that song and thought of me. Oh, Autumn, and our near-decade of telepathy.

Over the past year, I've had a faithful handful of you become better friends than most real life people. Over the past four months, I've taken comfort in your comments, all about how I don't have to dodge reality on this blog just because it scares people off. About how it is my journal. It was more of one back when only 5 of you were reading it, before I plastered my name and Reboyfriend's all over it because it seemed cheeky to treat the title like a tweet.

I read your input that a journal doesn't talk back, and that anyone who tells me to get over it can eff off (my grandma said the same thing to me in a card, and just like you she spelled out the real word, and it was satisfying and awesome). All of that is the truth.

I've been super scared since the beginning that, in blogging about this, I look like an attention whore or something. But blogging is my therapy, my thing and has been for five years. It was a small soapbox in the broom closet of the Internet that only that five of you really knew or cared about. It felt private. It felt safe - it WAS safe - to say our names, to show our faces.

But still, I worried that all this could be taken wrong. Nobody really knows just how suicidal I was, and have been, and hearing voices of strangers root me on helps. It has made all the difference. I would not be OK if I didn't have the feedback. Literally, I was cognizant of the risk that it looked fame-whorish, and posted it all anyway.

I'm constantly cringing at myself. I blurt shit out. I say "fiance" when I should just say boyfriend because people didn't know how serious we were. People have seriously told me they didn't necessarily believe that Rbf actually asked. While that felt like lemon juice on top of blunt-force trauma, I gotta say, why would anyone believe it? OK. We moved in together, got a quarter million dollar home loan together, signed construction contracts, and picked the wedding day. Had the preliminary proposal. But not all of that got out to everyone. He was waiting to make sure I wasn't going to say no. So while it hurts, should I be all that surprised? I'm constantly cringing at myself because it's my nature to do things like blurt shit out and become the queen of TMI. I don't know the difference anymore, between whether something is special and sacred, or if it's sweet to tell on the blog. It's my decision, but I don't really know how to even make those decisions anymore.

That awful day of waiting for news - the worst day of my life - sitting alone in silence at my computer next to my silent phone, with nothing else to do with my hands/eyes/mind while I waited in silence...I turned to my blog. MY BLOG. I asked people to pray.

Was I liveblogging my nightmare? WTF? Is nothing sacred anymore?

I don't feel like I know what that even is. It made perfect sense at the time. Honestly, perfect sense. It might be because I didn't really think they were gone yet, I thought they were hurt and lost in the mountains. Now in retrospect, it just seems ludicrous. In a state of total self-chastizing, I edited it with just news updates from that day, because I felt like such a freak. It wasn't real yet when I wrote it. I still thought they were coming home.

I had to read about the first sign of wreckage from the Boise news. I have a B.A. in news editorial Mass Comm, and that's the thing you are always trying to avoid. You can't say that stuff until family has been notified.

Family. They did their job, technically. Nobody ever trained me as a journalist to wait till "girlfriends" had been notified.

Days earlier, RBF was telling me exactly what HE would be doing with all my stuff if I died. "Duh Kir [with a touch of hurt in his voice], it would be MY stuff if you died." He was the executor of my life. He knew it. My mom knew it, my friends knew it. Everyone knew it. Literally two days after this conversation, he died, and I just sat there frozen and alone at my computer like an ancillary part of his secret life while his things just kind of disappeared quietly. He didn't tell his family much about me, and certainly not about our relationship. He didn't even keep Jake in the know. It confuses and infuriates me. And that's when I started with all the Blurting Of Shit.

My mom says when I talked to his family about the whole getting married thing, his mom's face looked ... not shocked, or horrified, or confused, or patronizingly polite, or disbelieving...but somewhere in between them all. And who can blame her? I simply wanted her to feel better about his lifestyle, I wanted her to know he was on the road she wanted him to be on in life. I am convinced my comments only made it worse. Part of me thinks that doomed fishing trip was when Rbf planned on telling his dad and brother the news. Or at least priming them to receive it soon.

I have had to give up my home and my best friend all at once. His friends don't feel like my friends anymore. I ditched my own friends to strengthen ties with his, and sometimes it feels like it was a waste. In the end, my friends have been here for me, while "his" friends have sort of disappeared. Why did I invest so much time getting to know the people in his world when we could have spent it together, enjoying our last few months together? The real answer to that is that I met a handful of other people through him, that have more than compensated for the lost time with Rbf and my own friends. Those new friends - and you know who you are - will be mine for life. I've told them they are akin to family. I thank Jed for them. But I resent the time lost on others who didn't deserve it. Like I said, all those things feel like losses now that he's gone.

I'm sick of the sound of my own voice sounding OK when I actually want to check into a mental institution. Yet I'm sick of the sound of my voice crying when I'm truly exhibiting how I feel. I'm sick of the sound of my thoughts. I'm sick of the sound of silence. I feel like I am in a constant CONSTANT fight with something, not sure what.

I mentally live through our wedding day. I mentally live through our first day home with a new baby. I cry when I hear people talk about fixing up their yards. Reboyfriend promised to plant me trees in the yard of our new house so I'd feel like it was home. I cry when I hear my uncle and his son talk about their Eagle scout stuff. I will never get to sit and hear Rbf and our son dish out pinewood memories they built together.

It's been nearly five months since Rbf's passing, and I am still only beginning to process the true magnitude of what I have lost. Not just in real-time...not just the presence of my best friend at Christmas or my New Year's kiss...but the loss of every day of my future and what it should have been.

I keep it all in, quite often now. It feels like the statute of limitations in the compassion sphere of blogworld (and the real world) may expire soon, and I don't want to be whining when that happens. I don't want to appear to exploit my situation to garner support and a "media blitz" of comfort. But being afraid that it's not OK to fall apart anymore, is taking a toll on me.

And I love him so much. And I miss him tremendously. And he's my best friend; isn't that how it should be?

Thank you for reading, for understanding, and for not telling me to STFU / accusing me of attention-whoring. Or at least for keeping it to yourself. Just thanks. Love to you, because my life really would suck without you.




And now for the daily Picture Of Us That You Didn't Ask To See.