If Onlys

I've been thinking a lot lately about the if onlys.  The if onlys show up right about the time I'm losing my shit.  They creep in, hidden in the shadows of my bedroom floor.  They crawl right into my bed, uninvited, and nestle in close.  One whispers, "If only you'd went to the store yourself."  Another strokes my hair and murmurs, "If only you'd went with her."  A third practically sings, "If only you'd known she wasn't ready..."  They tsk me.  Their insistent cries keep me up, and when I finally succumb to sleep, it is troubled, and filled with bad dreams.

Last night, I dreamed that another loved one had been run down in the road.  That damn road.  Decapitated.  Legs sheared off.  For some mad reason, my mother and I were standing side by side at my kitchen sink, trying to wash his heart, his liver, his kidney, and then pack them back, puzzle-like into his torso that we'd laid out, triage-style, on the dining room table.  There's a dream.

So this grief thing, with its stages that enter and exit the stage at random.  You have to ask, what the hell?  The bargaining stage is surely the definition of insanity.  Am I crazy to keep going over this in my head, knowing (intellectually, at least), that there can be no other outcome than the one that rests at Bedford Cemetery?  What is the blasted purpose of this torture?

Biding time.  Wandering can be a pleasant distraction, wandering - through the countryside of Bargaining- right back over the border to Denial- that safer, saner place where the world once made sense.  Things were linear.  You could check them off, and be done with them.  Reasons hung in plain sight like apples on a tree limb, and when you needed one, you just looked above you, and picked the best looking one.  You could walk away, and not have to look over your shoulder.  You could hear danger approaching because it screamed and threw things, and occasionally banged its head against the nearest wall.  These if onlys from the land of Bargaining are sly in their approach, and wait until you are already at your wit's end to even show their sorted faces.

Sometimes, I think I entertain those dreadful If Onlys purely to get some relief from reality...an alternate reality, if you will.  If my brain sends me signals that say something is possible (I could possibly have a do-over if I ask long enough, hard enough, and suffer enough), is it not a real possibility to me, if ever so briefly?
Perhaps, it is.  My reality is what my brain provides to me, after all.  That lesson I learned at Cory's side.

It is shabby comfort, at best, and at worst extremely harmful.  What is so harmful about your thoughts being based outside of reality?  That I can answer easily and with so much heartache- it's all the experiences and growth you miss out on.

But, oh the glamour.  That single sparkle of the glorious outcome that another decision on my end might have provided.
 It is all too hard to resist.