unfortunate fates

today - 16 years ago - i entered my first marriage. i was 23 years old and had not the slightest suspicion that the man i was marrying wasn't the one. i loved D. i was crazy about him. but, only later in life did i come to learn the true meaning of these words. love and crazy.

today - one year ago - i said a final good-bye to my soul-mate, J. i loved him so much, i would have died for him. i was crazy about him. it may be a cliché, but, addiction is a term that most adequately describes the way i craved his presence. my heart and reason wrestled each other constantly, for in my mind, i knew that he was trouble and that i shouldn't love a man this unstable. in my mind, there shouldn't have been forgiveness for all the missteps he had taken throughout the course of our relationship. but, in my heart, forgiveness and love for this boy seemed infinite.

**

as i was driving back from dropping the kids off at school earlier today, i found myself - as so often - overwhelmed with tears. i hate this even more so in the mornings, when i am surrounded by so many faces. it's embarrassing not to be able to control one's composure. especially when, in general, you would consider yourself a fairly stoic person.

**

my tears usually lead me to prevention strategies. since i hate crying so much, i would like to figure out how to do away with this sadness. as i sat in the car, staring at the snowflakes which had just started to fall ... in fact .. now that i think of it ... the kind of snow that was falling was exactly the same short flurry that surrounded me when i went to buy J's urn and later, when i picked up his ashes, together with his sister. it was only a brief, very light snowfall, which seemed to have appeared solely in response to overwhelming grief, and back then, made us think of J. ... life can be mystical sometimes.
or, maybe it was just the weather.

Photo: www.flickr.com/photos/hernanhernandez/

anyway, as i sat there, a man walked by, struggling to push a cart overflowing with cans up the hill we were on. after my first thought of sympathy (how much it must suck to have to collect cans to make ends meet, at this early hour, and in this cold weather), it occurred to me that this could have been one of J's more depressing fates, assuming he would have not made it out into complete recovery. and then i had the idea that i could maybe take the time to write down all the potential lives i could imagine for J. only the bad ones, for the good ones would probably just make me sad and full of regret. i assume, J wouldn't be very happy about this exercise, but i'm thinking it may help me with feeling less sad about losing him. this, of course, is a rather cold and calculated statement but i am desperate. i'm also aware of the fact that this is something you probably should not do. thinking negatively about a person who has passed. you should remember the love and the good things, they say. but, what if it is more therapeutic to imagine scenarios that would have driven us apart? granted, there was hardly anything he could have done to make me not love him, but, maybe some of these unfortunate imaginary lives are going to take away pain by creating anger. .. now, that i am saying this out loud, it kinda sounds like a bad idea. replacing sadness with anger is really just another stage of grief and thus, is still grief.

but, i think, i'm gonna do it anyway. just to see what happens.