unsealed

It wasn't only him I was grieving.

A friend leaves. The door closes. The apartment is quiet in a way it wasn’t ten minutes ago, and something rises up in me that I don’t have a name for. It isn’t sadness exactly. It’s closer to drowning. A tidal wave of everything I spent the evening not feeling is arriving all at once.

I’ve been doing some version of this my whole life.

I didn’t understand that until recently. I thought the loneliness I felt after Dan died was grief. It is, but it’s also older than him. It was there when I was a child of divorce, in the long quiet hours where I learned that being alone meant something had gone wrong. It was there when I realized I was gay and understood, in the way children understand things before they have words, that my family’s love had a condition I couldn’t meet. It was there in a marriage I stayed in too long because the alternative, being by myself, felt more dangerous than the abuse I was absorbing. And it was there in my twenties when my best friend succumbed to cancer.

Each traumatic event was its own earthquake. None of them ever fully settled before the next one hit. The ground never stabilized. There was never a quiet enough stretch to go back and deal with what came before, so nothing got dealt with. It got stored.

What I’m learning is that grief doesn’t stay with the event it belongs to. When Dan died, something broke open, and it wasn’t only him I was grieving. It was the child of divorce. The teenager who figured out his family’s love was conditional. The young man who lost his best friend too early. The person who stayed somewhere dangerous because leaving felt worse. They’re all in the room now. They all showed up the moment the pressure seal cracked.

Unsealed is the word I keep coming back to.

I think I’ve spent most of my life avoiding this. Not consciously, but constantly. Friends. Relationships I knew weren’t right. Spending I couldn’t afford. Food I wasn’t hungry for. Anything that would fill the silence long enough to get to the next thing that would fill the silence. None of it touched the feeling underneath. It just kept it quiet for a few hours at a time.

I have a nervous system that learned, very early, that being alone with itself wasn’t safe, and I’ve been running from that one feeling ever since.

I don’t know what it would be like to be at peace in the silence. I’ve never felt it. I can describe what I think it might look like, but I can’t actually imagine it. I would love to end this article on a note of hope, where I tell you I’m learning to sit with myself and it’s getting easier. That would be a lie.

That’s not even what I’m allowing myself to hope for right now. I would settle for just being able to name it.

Dan is gone, and a lot of other people are gone with him in ways I didn’t expect. The child. The teenager. The young man. All of them are here, asking for something I never knew how to give them.

The apartment is quiet again.