The Chelsey Diaries

I can feel it coming back. I can feel it like a horned mammal rampaging in a porcelain retailer.
It’s not the same as every other day. It’s more. It’s worse somehow.
I can feel it bubbling up from the pit of my stomach like bile after a bender.
I can feel it warming, getting hotter in my veins, burning my skin from the inside.
My throat starts to close and I feel like if I don’t scream i’ll suffocate.
I feel reckless. I feel the pressure sitting on my chest like a thousand pound pile of bricks.

Did I actually think it ever left? Was I naive enough to think that it was gone? That it was a new season, that it was changing?
It won’t be gone. It will lay dormant until it decides that today is the day. Then it will sear it’s way through my body, coursing like blood, burning like lava. 

I’ll try to out run it like I always do, but I know it’s pointless.
 I‘ll press down on the gas peddle and not look in the rear view,  because I know it will be there. It will chase me like the darkness does while driving into a sunset. 

I’ll fight every urge I have to take all that I’ve worked for and throw it in the bin with the rotten fruit and animal bones.
I’ll fight not to say FUCK IT and leave. Or to spend the money, or rack up the card. 

 

I see images flash in my head of a seem being ripped open down the center of my body. My own two hands holding onto each side ripping me apart staining my skin red, pieces of me hitting the floor as the thread tears. 

Am I two people trying to be separated? Am I rational and irrational? Am I strong and weak? Am I fearless and fearful? Or am I trying to let free whatever beast lies beneath the surface of this soft, olive skin, scratching from the inside, hungry for a breath of air and a taste of flesh.

 

Grief is a monster. 

 

I don’t think I could put words to this feeling until I knew it like I know a best friend. I couldn’t understand the agony, the physical pain that it caused. I assumed that it would be all darkness, all tears, all sleep, all quiet. But it’s not. It can be as calm as a spring breeze coming through an open window, brushing my face with gentle coolness. A reminder of something past, a reminder of love. Both chilling and warm. 

But it can also be loud and frightening. It can be a voice screaming, one not coming from you, but you know it intimately. It disregards you, it disregards the people around you. It cares about just one thing. Its self. And it grows and it feeds off of the pain until it becomes the red behind your eyes and all you can feel is fire. Its the kind of feeling you have to stop, that you’ll do anything to stop. Its like the itch you can’t scratch, the thirst you can’t quench. Nothing gives you satisfaction, you have to ride it out. And even though you know that, you still do everything you can to somehow, someway, end the rage. 

 

I can deal with sadness, because it makes sense to me. I understand being sad. My daughter is dead. Sadness makes sense.
I live for the moments of calm reminders. Where the grief pricks at my skin like drops of cold rain; a melancholy reminder of all that use to be. It reminds me that she lived. 

But the rage. The anger. The feeling of breathlessness, of NEEDING to escape. I can’t handle that feeling because I don’t understand it. Escaping wont help. So why do I get the intolerable urge to?  

Sometimes I truly wonder if maybe i’m not being myself. If maybe I’ve been so good at convincing myself, along with everyone else, that I am a certain way and have closed my eyes to the person I actually am. Am I bottling up something so deep that from time to time it tries to tear me apart so it can get out?

Grief is a monster. 

It is a monster of pain
It is a monster of self doubt
It is a monster that blinds you to love and to living. To reality, to hope, to faith. 

 

But along with every monster comes the sword. Maybe not to kill it; I don’t think it will ever be beaten. But to tame it, to wound it. To make sure that it isn’t controlling you. So that it knows when it rears its snarling, drooling, nasty face again it has one hell of a fight ahead of it. Because thats the idea, right? Fight the monsters within? Fight to survive? Fight to live? 

 

I never know, from moment to moment, what form my sword will take. I think, throughout my life, it will be different things. I’ll do things, need someone, go somewhere when I’m feeling the walls closing in and it will temporarily lessen the raging fire. It will change as I change, adapt as I adapt and grow as I grow. So when the monster inevitably rises, so will my retaliation. 

 

Sharpening the blade…

Chelsey xo