firsts

Even after three years, I am shocked by how many "firsts" there are.

It's gotten easier to talk about Derek. Sometimes he feels like a far-off memory. I often wonder what my life would be like if he were still here. It's a simple fascination: I've learned so much since coming to Seattle two years ago. Everything really has changed.

And yet it's the little things that tend to catch me off-guard and send me swirly into tiny sadness and the ever-frustrating tear wells that I hate to let fall. It's been too long, I tell myself, but I know that even still, it's been hardly any time at all.

I don't even know how we got into it, but my friend & I were at a restaurant, sitting across from each other. A normal scene. Towards the end of the meal, we started playing thumb-of-war. Part way through, I paused, realizing that the last time I had done that had been with Derek, but we both played with our right hands because we were lying side-by-side in his hospital bed, and his hand couldn't fold the whole way closed, and sometimes I let him win, but on really good days, he'd win on his own. Feeling the strong hand of my friend across the table felt both comforting and wrong. Comforting just to feel someone's hand in mine; wrong that it had last been Derek's twiddling thumb.

A week later, at a different restaurant, I ordered jalapeno poppers, thinking hmm, I haven't had those in a while. It wasn't until I tasted them in my mouth, all of the flavors absorbing, that the memory hit: New Years with Derek. Years and years of New Years with pizza and poppers or Friday nights with rented movies and poppers.

 The tiniest occurrences can stir up the little memories that mean the most. The tiny, happy memories mean more than a hundred nights in the hospital or months of putting him to bed or the years the disease took away.

I've found myself ending a lot of thoughts with "by now". I thought I'd miss him less by now. I thought he'd feel more distant by now. I thought I wouldn't be so sad by now. Three years feels like a long time without him, but I know that in the long run, it is short. I have my next three years seemingly planned out in my mind, but I don't see it as a long journey, just the next steps for my life. And I realize that three years from now means six years without Derek, and the number will keep growing, and no matter how many years continue to pass, I may never reach the sentiments I thought I would "by now" because it takes more than time to fill the emptiness.

In a week-and-a-half, I will turn twenty-three. The thought has bothered me for a few months now. Derek would be twenty-five now, but he never saw past twenty-two. The thought that I will overwhelms me with a guilt and sadness that I cannot control. I sink into it like a potato into a stew.

A good friend told me, regarding this notion, that he knew someone who's therapist told her that there is the world that you live in and the world that everyone else lives in. He tried to give an example of how this applies with Derek, noting that Derek does not live in the world everyone else lives in now, of course he is dearly remembered in my world, but I have to exist in the world everyone else is in. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, but the stew simile reminded me of it--I'm just a potato trying to blend in, but I've still got roots, and they're thick & tough and hold deep to who I am as a lone potato. But I bring that to the stew and it contributes in its own way.

So three years sounds like it should be "enough" time to stop being so very sad about missing Derek, but it's a big year, my twenty-third. I guess every year from here on out will be another that he didn't have; this is just big because it's the first.