Unsa(i)d

[Ed note:  I actually wrote this some time back, but I didn't click Publish at the time for... reasons.]

"Bound with all the weight of all the words he tried to say,

Chained to all the places that he never wished to stay"

["Cast No Shadow", Oasis]

It's been over 200 days since Krista died and I've yet to feel like I've mourned her passing.  So I'm here.  To try this.  Because maybe writing shit down and admitting certain things to myself and the world at large will make me see it in an undeniable way that puts enough cracks in the dam.

She died in March and while I have teared up a little once or twice since, I've consistently felt like I've been living in denial for over six months now.  It's easy to see how I got here:  with the pandemic I'd not laid eyes on her for over 3 years, and outside my visits to Ottawa we had little personal contact.  So that sense of "missing" is not there.  It just seems like a much longer break than usual, and that "some day soon" I'll see her again.  

But I won't.

Ever.

I knew if I'd ever had to set foot in their house in Ottawa that it would hit me; she wouldn't be there to meet me at the door, or at the airport before that, with a big hug and that fantastic big smile.  I even imagined it: stepping through the doorway and having it strike me and sobbing uncontrollably.  But Geoff sold the house and moved to Mount Carmel, so that will never happen.  I'll never set foot in that house in Ottawa again.  I can certainly understand why he needed to get out of there.  I imagine her absence was unbearable for him.

Those were wonderful, welcoming, warm hugs.  Hers was an incredible smile.  God, what a smile.  No one smiled quite like her.

Then I thought it would finally hit me when I visited Mount Carmel for the first time.  I knew seeing Geoff when he returned would just feel like "another visit from Geoff" and he frequently came without her, so I knew that wouldn't do it, but I thought the house might.  Him in a house without her.  Geoff and the dogs but no Krista.  But it didn't.  It's "Geoff's new house".  It was never "their house" in my mind, so she's not "missing".  It didn't feel like she was "supposed to be there but wasn't", even when I was helping unpack things I knew had been hers.

So I keep waiting for it to hit me, but it doesn't.  I don't feel like she's gone for good.  I feel like I'm waiting for her to return.

But she's not coming back.

I can imagine seeing her again.  In my mind I can hear the precise tone of her voice when she greets me.  It wasn't always that tone, but in more recent years.  It was a tone that said that I was welcome there.  That she was genuinely happy to see me.

And I've thought "well, maybe we just weren't that close" but that's not true exactly.  If it were true, I wouldn't feel like there's this dark shadow following me around.  She wouldn't keep crossing my mind.  I wouldn't feel like I was "waiting for it to hit me", waiting for it to crash over me like a wave.

She meant something to me, very much so.  I'm not entirely sure how to describe our relationship.  More than acquaintanceship, perhaps less than a '"close friend" and yet anything prefaced with "just" or "only" feels unfair and incorrect.  I think, perhaps, we had a peculiar friendship and that it was burgeoning.  It was burgeoning.  Perhaps it's hard to mourn because the loss doesn't feel so much a past as a very interesting future.

And I realize different people grieve in different ways, and I'm usually one to insist on that, and that no one has a right to judge anyone else for how they process theirs.  It's different for all of us.  But I feel like after all these years and all these goodbyes I know how it works for me, and this time it's... not working.  It's stalled.  It's lurking.  It's a shadow that's following me and haunting me.   A splinter of the mind.  I'm held hostage by my own heart.

True crime podcasts.  That was our last conversation, I think.  Over morning tea.  We were having some one on one time over morning tea while the others slept.  I'd come to really enjoy that time.  I looked forward to it, though I never told her that.

Our friendship...  ok, I guess I've settled on a word...  Our friendship started out slowly.  Despite each of us being an important fixture in Geoff's life, I didn't feel like we clicked right away.  I'm not putting that on her; I'm sure there are aspects of that which sit entirely with me.  But it took some time before I came to understand (or at least, guess) that...  I think she had a tendency to put up a certain barrier of intellectual snobbery designed to keep people at bay and protect herself, borne not of overconfidence but of a fear of rejection.  Like many others - myself included - she may have projected more confidence than she had, and that kept people at bay that way.  But beneath that prickly exterior beat a tremendous heart, and once we could sit and talk and laugh together... 

I will never forget that laugh.  The smile, the chuckle, and the laugh.  Her laugh was loud, and raucous, and wonderful.

But I'd only just barely climbed inside and started to look around.  Like I was lucky to have made it that far, to be permitted in that inner sanctum after all this time, to have arrived, hard fought, and then... everything was cut short.

I will miss that laugh the most.

And I think I lived in denial right up until it was final.  I asked Geoff to pass her a message from me, a strange compliment.  I knew I should have told her myself but I didn't have the strength.  And I knew that was cowardice and a decision I would likely later regret but I stuck with it anyway, lost in the denial that this somehow wasn't the end, and that there would be time to fix things later.

It was simply one of many conversations I wanted to have with her that I now never will.  I wanted to some day explain to her that she reminded me of Patty and why and the myriad of feelings that meant for me.  I wanted to ask her thoughts on a million things.  I wanted to have a hundred more conversations.

But I won't.  

Because I can't.

These are just... things left unsaid.  

"Everyone leaves unfinished business.
That's what dying is."
[Amos Burton, The Expanse]