back to before

Twenty-two days is not enough time.

It’s my birthday.

I’m writing this from bed, which is where I imagined I’d spend most of the day. The plan involves a Broadway show this evening, Ragtime, which is one of my favorite Broadway shows. I decided to treat myself when the dread started setting in and I realized I needed the day to have a shape. Something to move toward. Otherwise I knew what would happen. I’d lie here and try not to succumb.

Dan died on April 1st. My birthday is April 23rd. Twenty-two days is not enough time.

I’ve never minded aging. I liked getting older. I liked the accumulation of it, the sense of a life being built. So this feeling, this quiet horror at the arrival of a day I used to look forward to, is genuinely foreign to me. It doesn’t fit who I am.

I know, cerebrally, that today does not have to look like the image in my mind. I know this. I have a ticket. I have a plan. My psychologist and I have talked about it. I can tell you, in complete sentences, that the day will pass, that I am not alone, that my dog Nate is here, that the grief is not going to be solved by a birthday and so the birthday is not going to be ruined by the grief.

None of that “knowing” reaches the part of me that woke up this morning to the empty side of the bed.

This is another thing nobody tells you. The gap between what you understand and what you feel. Your mind can hold a truth that your central nervous system refuses to receive. You can know you’re going to survive the day and still be terrified of the first hour of it. The cerebral and the physiological are not on speaking terms yet. I wonder how long until they are.

I chose Ragtime because I love the show. It was only later, sitting with the choice, that I contemplated what I’d picked. A story about love taken too soon. About people trying to find their footing in a world that keeps moving whether they’re ready or not. I’m not sure whether I chose it or it chose me.

There’s a song in it called “Back to Before.” It has been playing in my head for days. The opening lines are:

There was a time our happiness seemed never-ending

I was so sure that where we were heading was right

That certainty is what I keep catching on. Dan and I had a shared momentum. The surety itself was part of what made life feel safe, and part of what makes the absence of it feel like standing on a floor that isn’t there.

Later in the song:

There are people out there unafraid of revealing

That they might have a feeling

Or they might have been wrong

There are people out there, unafraid to feel sorrow

Unafraid of tomorrow

Unafraid to be weak

Unafraid to be strong

This is the part that undoes me. Because I have spent a lot of my life being afraid of exactly these things. Afraid of sitting with a feeling long enough to find out what it actually is. Afraid of being alone with myself. I’ve kept busy. I’ve built good distractions. And now the person I was willing to be fully known by is gone, and I’m being asked to do the thing I’ve avoided my whole life, which is to stop running from my own thoughts.

I don’t know if I’m ready. I think I have to just begin.

So today I’ll get out of bed. I’ll walk Nate. I’ll play Wordle. I’ll go to the theater. I’ll sit in the dark with several hundred strangers and let a song I’ve known for years do something to me that it couldn’t do before.

It’s time to get up.