Today, Taylor has been gone for 21 years.
It doesn’t seem that long ago sometimes, at other times, it feels like I was in another lifetime then. I certainly wasn’t this woman. I belonged to a different existence then.
In that life, I was a mother. I was a wife. I thought I knew anything, something, really, I knew nothing.
Of course, as some of you may remember, we know what took my girl now. An enzyme, or lack thereof, if we’re being technical. I think back now and wonder if I would have turned to the pills, the 151, had I known. Would it all have gone straight to hell in a handbasket if I didn’t constantly wonder if it was my fault? If I didn’t live every day weighing my choices and their consequences and wondering exactly which one took my daughter?
Ultimately, I think it would have wound up just about the same. Although it wouldn’t have been the same blame game, I would have found a second runner up, I’m sure of it. The pain was so tangible. Even today, I can taste it in my throat, I can feel the weight of it on my chest when I inhale.
There is never a time that it doesn’t make my breathing uneven. Even today, 21 years later.
I haven’t remained in that broken shell, though. I moved a few steps to the right and slightly forward, because the woman I was then wouldn’t be granted another chance with her. As much as I joke about strongarming St. Pete, I’m fairly certain God would not be amused if I try to backdoor that shit.
I’m not saying it’s completely off the table. I’m saying we’re going to try the front door first (I hope they don’t have security, ain’t no telling what I may have in my Kate Spade).
This Terrible Membership To This Shitty Club
I have a friend who lost a daughter a little over a year ago. Not like my girl, his daughter was lost to violence. Perpetrated on her by a man. He is in a bad place right now, and I know it well. I worry, and I sometimes cry for his family. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, but at least I have the comfort of knowing my girl went in her sleep, next to her Daddy, and unafraid.
To know his girl didn’t have any of that just tears me up. I have prayed a thousand times for someone to have done right by her, but that time has long since passed.
My friend said someone told him, “You didn’t die”. And I understood exactly what he wanted to respond and said it for him. “Only the best part of me did”.
I Don’t Belong Here
I’ve learned the hard way that you can try to go back all you want, but you’ll never get there. That’s another life. And that life is gone. You’re not going to drink it back, or steal it back, or rage it back. It’s not here anymore, in this realm. It’s in some parallel where you lived happily ever after like all the happy families you see everywhere around you every time you pretend to be normal and go outside.
I feel like an imposter every time. Like I don’t belong there, amongst the happy families and the husbands and wives and the living. I am just pretending to fit in, but if someone looked hard enough, they could see that I’m no mother, no wife, no human. I’m dead inside.
Most days, my stunt double can pass for a human. As long as nobody looks too closely, or for too long.
Nothing to see here, folks, keep it moving. It’s just a regular broad doing regular shit on a regular day. It’s not the woman who went to her knees and tried to dig her baby out of the ground. It’s not the woman who can’t remember a solid 6 year stretch after because if she wasn’t completely fucked up she wanted to die. Not at all.
You must have me mistaken.
I’ve learned that, although I hide much of it well, there is slippage sometimes. Just enough of the dead inside me is visible to the outside world to make people uncomfortable. They can’t quite put their finger on it, but they can smell the decaying flesh and they know I’m hiding something.
I’ve learned that everything I thought I knew about life was so small. So irrelevant. It barely could be considered intelligence, I knew nothing of the effort it takes to drag your body through the motions, the energy it takes to constantly lie and say you’re okay when really, you’ll never be okay. You’ll never be anything close to okay. You’re just breathing in, and then breathing out, and sometimes you eat or sleep. Over and over, until you finally get the call that it’s time to pay the man at the gondola your two-pence and take the fucking ride.
I’ve learned the grief is more than an emotion. It’s a way of life. It’s a whole existence, and it doesn’t care for change. You move in, but you don’t move out. You move in, but you never move on.
I am here, in the land of the living. It’s where my house is, my dog, my little office with my Cadillac laptop, but me? I don’t belong here. My things belong here, my dog. But I am simply biding my time, and gathering my redemption points to cash in with the doorman when I’m called home.
I’ve got an appointment to keep. I made a promise to a baby girl, one with a tube down her throat laying in the saddest plastic bassinet with a nurse who had visibly been crying telling me she would take good care of her, that she wouldn’t leave her alone.
So, you see, I really don’t belong here. But I’ll continue to pretend, simply so everyone else is comfortable. The happy families and happy husbands and wives and all of you out there in your happy lives won’t smell the stench of death on me. You’ll never even know I don’t fit in. Just don’t look too closely, or for too long. You don’t need to see where the seams meet.
You’ve no need to see where I’m sewn together, just know I’m stitched up enough to hold.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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