Missing Pieces of Myself

Memoir: My life is asking me to accept the things I’ve lost and discover who I am without them.

There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.

Oscar Wilde

Pexels

The ducks didn’t come this year.

They came last year. And my best friend died.

And then the ducks came... again

She didn’t die this year because she’s already gone, so I couldn’t lose her a second time. But grief has a strange way of continuing to take things from you.

Grief begets more grief.

Since she died, while absorbed in my own sorrow, I lost my relationship. Along with it went part of the job I love and the man I thought would always be one of my people — beside me through life. But looking back now, I don’t even recognise him.

Has he changed? Perhaps I simply started seeing things I had chosen not to notice before.

Either way, I still care. Still feel the loss of what I thought we had.

I miss twelve years of shared memories. Believing I was part of a team and that there was someone beside me who cared in the way I did.

Whether those things were real or whether they only existed in the version of the relationship I carried in my heart, I honestly don’t know anymore.

Last year, on the 9th of July, I went to bed with my best friend still in my life. My relationship intact and the job I loved.

This year, on the 9th of July, I went to bed with none of them.

Sometimes it feels as though life has duped me. I thought those things were permanent. I thought they were the foundations beneath my feet. But it seems they were more fragile than I realised.

And lately, I find myself missing someone else too.

ME.

Or rather, I miss the many versions of myself I’ve been over the years.

We like to think we’re one person, but we’re not. Life keeps introducing us to new versions of ourselves. Experience adds things, takes some away and changes us in ways we barely notice until we look back.

The woman I was fifteen years ago isn’t the woman I am today.

Sometimes I look at her and wonder what she’d think of me now.

She never had a moment to herself. She was always rushing somewhere, juggling work, relationships, friendships, life. She didn’t have time to stop and ask whether she was on the right path because she was too busy walking it.

Now I have time.

Too much time.

And I spend a lot of it thinking.

Wondering when it all changed. Why the relationship ended so harshly. I always wanted US to be better. Believing it could be the best. I thought that’s what you did in a partnership — kept trying, because forever was supposed to be built along the way.

But we never got there and forever turned out to have an ending. So I spend a lot of time inside my own head, loss escorting me like a ghost.

And if my best friend were here she’d have had something to say about it all. Being one of the very few people who simply accepted me exactly as I was. Not because she thought I was perfect, but because she didn’t need me to be anyone else.

I remember one night when we were in our late 20s. We’d been in the pub and ended up chatting to a couple of men. We went back to their house to watch a film, drink a few beers and carry on laughing. That’s all it was.

At one point my friend noticed that one of the guys couldn’t stop watching me while I talked.

She looked at him and said, “Yeah… she’s pretty perfect, isn’t she?”

It still makes me smile.

Not because she really thought I was perfect. She knew better than anyone that I wasn’t. What she meant was that I was completely myself.

And that was enough for her.

I don’t think many people get to experience that kind of friendship.

I miss who she was. And I miss who I was when she was here.

I don’t particularly want this current version of my life. Living on an island in reality and metaphorically. This feeling of uncertainty and constantly looking backwards, all defined by loss. Feeling undone.

I don’t want to be learning who I am because everything familiar has disappeared.

I don’t want to feel like I’m drowning. Each day searching for things to keep me afloat. Trying to make new friends and realising I was never good at that. People always chose me. Not the other way around.

But it seems that my life is asking me to accept the things I’ve lost and discover who I am without them.

The ducks didn’t come this year but more grief did.

I know what I need to do, find that lamp in the darkness to guide me. So please excuse me if I seem more distant than I did before. I’m a little lost, hoping my strength and a lot of luck will propel me forward and…

I suppose I don’t have the final line yet. I’m still becoming the person who will write it.

When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time

John Irving - Owen Meany

Find and subscribe to more of my work HERE.

Or … maybe

---