I am trying to figure out how I can write about being sad…again…without sounding like that is all I am.  It seems like the grief that I carry over Jeff’s death is always with me, always so close to the surface that just mentioning him can bring tears to my eyes again yet he is not the focus of my thoughts. 

It has been a year and a half and it is a fresh wound and I cannot just let it be, I must turn it over and poke at it, abuse myself for having this pain because who am I to mourn so.  I am not a family member, not a close friend.  I was just a friend, one of so many people whose life he touched, who he made a difference to. 

I watch a lot of true crime or crime dramas and I never noticed before how many people are done away with by fire.  I watch and I wonder.  I cannot help myself.  I wonder if what is what he looked like.  I wonder about my friend and it is no longer his smiling face I see, it is no longer his laugh I hear.  What I think about, what I imagine is what the amount of meat left on his charred bones was. 

I was talking to a client here at work and at the end of the conversation, I edged into asking her about Jeff.  I asked her if she still had a copy of the commercial he did with them for their business.  She said she thought she had it in a file on her computer and she sent it to me. 

I just needed to see him alive again.  I needed to see him moving and interacting with people so that when I think of him, I can stop thinking of him as a charcoal briquette and remember him.  Remember him laughing as he told me how many takes it took and he still couldn’t make a break on the pool table. 

T called a few weeks ago to tell me he had applied for a job back here and that he would be here for an interview.  I told him that was great but I wouldn’t be seeing him.  The next time we spoke he said he was looking for a piece of his glasswork to bring me.  I asked him if this was by way of a bribe so that I would see him. 

He just didn’t understand that I really wouldn’t see him.  I would talk to him on the phone, I would text him, but I wouldn’t open the door.  He knows that I have done this to other people, most people, he just didn’t think he would ever been included in those I withdrew from. 

I am broken, I told him.  I am broken and I don’t know how to fix me yet and I just need time, time to figure it out and this is the only way I know how.  He pouted and I just wanted to scream at him,

“It is not about YOU!  It is about me, what I am thinking, what I am feeling and what I am going through – you have no part in it – none at all – you can’t fix me, seeing you will do nothing for me.  I don’t need to be cheered up, I am not a child with a scraped knee, I am broken, God damn it, broken, shattered and the pieces slide around and refuse to fit nice and neatly back together and I am not going lie to you to make it easier for you.  I am not going to apologize to you because you don’t understand!”

That all being said, I am watching Last Comic Standing and very much enjoying my loathe/hate relationship with that show.  See, I do have joy in my life, I do have things I laugh at and that make me feel something other than morbid and sad…I am just not going to pretend the other doesn’t not exist, that is so much more wearing on me than the grief.