Triggers All The Day

Last week, here in Michigan, there was snow on the ground; today it is a balmy 78 degrees.  People are practically dancing in the streets, but I am walking around, slack-jawed, with my eyes to the ground, watching my feet take one step in front of the other.  All day today at work, I nodded in the right places and smiled enough not to be noticed, but I watched my feet.  Instead of black shoes and dress pants floating around my ankles, I saw those shiny purple purple sandals slapping down on hot pavement and I could hear my heartbeat in my ears.

When this weather comes for the first time each year, it snatches me back instantly.  I am perpetually wearing khaki shorts and a plain red t-shirt from Target and I am chasing Cory.  I know that she is wearing a white Where the Wilds Things Are t-shirt, black cargo shorts, and her new Hello Kitty sneaks.  I expect to find her crying, hurt, and looking around for me.

I never run fast enough.  I didn't run fast enough.  She wasn't crying or looking around for me. I got her shoes and her belt back; everything else was a loss.

All the stuff I've done this past year... getting my budget together, caring about Jake again, attempting to run a household, even minimally,...they melt away under the sunshine of the first hot day.  That was the dream- that reknitting, relearning, refining myself.  Like it's going to fix something here?What could ever be more real than the loop of her arm twisted the wrong way or that horrifying shade of blue on her lips under a four o'clock in the afternoon sun?  "Is she BREATHING?"

What could ever burn hotter than the sun the day she died?  I think it reached 101 degrees that day.  Falling on my knees when told the news, "I'm sorry, ma'am...she is gone.", I knew where I was.  I knew exactly where I was.  It hasn't changed.  I'm still there, right there.

 It'll be four years in less than three months and all the pathetic little rituals in the world...avoiding her place in the road, kissing her monument when I visit the cemetery, having Jake taste the mashed potatoes with Cory's Special Fork...don't make it any less real.  Today I looked down at my feet and I'm in hell all the same.