Stages of grief.

I asked my psychologist how i can move on from my ex, if maybe i wasn’t grieving the way i should – that i felt a little too okay.

That ‘okay’ that replicates a calm before a storm, that uneasy stillness that fills the energy with a motion pause.

“This is what i was afraid of,” I told her, “that i am distancing myself from the reality of what has happened. I am not moving through the pain in the correct way. What if it all hits me in a collision of thunderbolts, rain, and a hurricane?”

“And so what if it does?” she replied.

In one week i had moved through the waves of emotions of depression, yet now the emotions felt like tiny ripples in the water.

Things that triggered my denial state were hearing our songs on Spotify, or even hearing songs at the grocery store (who knew that Baby by Justin Beiber could make me ugly cry in the middle of an aisle), finding photographs of him, or even hearing a joke that I turn to him to say – but he is no longer there.

As the weather grows colder and isolation continues longer, the parts I miss start to be his physical presence and warm kisses.

The way his laugh could heat me up and yet, now there is a coldness to remembering the sound.

I felt guilt.

Guilt that I was left, yet I can still walk. I was asking boys on date A.C. (after Corona), I was eating dinner, I laughed with my friends, and I could touch myself to the thought of someone else other than him (here’s looking at you Jesse from Gilmore Girls).

This was 3 years of my life, one that HE had let go of. So, where was the familiar darkness that became a thick dark cloud over my head?

The crying into my pillow until it is drenched wet from the rain, listening to Bon Ivers’ “for emma, forever ago” until i fall asleep from how puffy my eyes are, the simple two plain pieces of toast that would get me through the day, the endless chatter about him to anyone that would listen as I rehash every moment, analyse every word of the way he broke up with me over FaceTime, opened the chapter of our relationship and re-read it word by word with a red marker – circling all the moments that i did wrong, he did wrong, and figure out the solution or the answer to how two people in love found themselves here.

I felt the anger. Fuck him. Fuck him for doing this to us. I had done nothing but loved him after everything he put me through.

But then, it was at that moment at 3am, listening to punk-rock songs that brought me back to being a 16 year old scene kid. I felt liberated, I was dancing, screaming, smiling the words that made me feel that someone understood my pain – until that one. song. hit. too. close.

The tears didn’t stop for days.

When they talk about the stages of grief, who knew that denial masked itself as acceptance so fucking well.