Remnants of the Long Ago

I'm pretty pissed off at my current state of emotion and mind. That makes no sense. I know, but right now I'm pretty sure that's normal, me and everything inside of me making no sense. I just finished spending 45 minutes wrapping up and packing up the last of Richard’s stuff to send to Clio, his daughter.

Stupid anime movies I never got, understood, or liked (but I watched with Rich nonetheless) that she'll love. His Dad's pocketwatch I figured she'd like to have. Two comfy blankets we used to put on the single bed we slept together on in Kansas. I'd smoosh up against the wall on my side and he'd sleep on his side with one arm hanging off and the other tucked beneath his head, his skinny butt barely hanging onto the flannel sheets we always slept on. The super NES and the Xbox 360, with all the games that consumed so much of both our time. The games I used to love to watch him play. I could watch him play video games for hours. He was so very good. Lastly, all the pictures of the random anime characters that, again, I didn't get but she'll adore.

I didn’t think it’d – hurt – like it does. I’m miserable and upset and disgusted with everything and kind of feel like throwing up. It’s one of those times where you don’t want anyone to talk to you or touch you and you don’t want to eat or sleep or think or do anything. Go away. You all just want it to go away.

I know this happens, but I don’t like it. I don't have to like it. I guess what makes it a new notch of (sad, repulsing, disgusting, horrible) is that this is the first time I've touched his things, thought about him and had it feel so blandly empty and so far from my life.

Richard is in the past, in my memories and the memories of the people who knew and loved him, but he's gone. I will never ever in my life see him or hear of him again. He won't ever play video games anymore, won't ever wait anxiously counting off the days for the new video game he has to have come out, he'll never lay on his side to go to sleep again. He doesn't exist.

But it's worse than that. There's no aching piercing overwhelming sadness. There's no screaming anguish. Every time I've had an emotional response to his memories or his things or our anniversary, it's been intense or unmoving. I've either wept with anguish and mourning, screamed and ranted at his selfish folly, or behind a viel of logic fondly remembered our happy times or empathized with the sad way both he and our relationhsip ended, the sad circumstances that brought us up to that point, and brought him to his end. There was never this hollow clanging of nothing. Never this awful pit-of-the-stomach feeling that this life doesn't hold Rich. At all.

I'm sure some of this is touching his stuff and thinking of Clio, his daughter. She's 12 years old, the most well behaved, sweetest child I've ever known, cute large nose that is just like his was. Her mom talked to me a few days ago and told me she's trying out for cheerleading in a few days..."Probably home practicing her smile." That intensly sweet, precocious, playful girl lost her dad.

For the rest of her life she's going to be marred with the memories of him, of how he couldn't cope, of how he abandoned her to go to Seattle then double-abandoned her by committing suicide. She never really knew him and now she won't get to. Thinking about her and her leigions of stuffed animals, anxiously awaiting her cheerleading tryouts, I'm filled with sadness mixed with a touch of despair. My only part in her life now is sending her relics from her dead father's past.

And this, my friends, fucking sucks.