Your resolution passed in the other ward near your bridge, babe. Now it will go to city council and the mayor. You are going to save lives, even though you couldn’t save your own. Neither could I. I think a part of me feels that if I advocate hard enough for suicide prevention, I’ll get another part of you back, whatever that may mean. Nothing will bring you back, though.
I’m feeling more capable than the last time I wrote to you. I’m learning more and more how to carry your loss and still function. It’s a good thing and a bad thing, because in my mind it shouldn’t be possible to carry it. Yours is too big a loss; yours is not a life I can go on without. I cannot live our life, alone. But here we are.
I started EDMR, last week, for the trauma aspects of losing you. I’m not sure if I am ready for the work, though. Still building a routine and trying to navigate this path of aftermath that Hugo and I are on. I’m also sleeping better. Less, but better (more a function of the amount of work I am trying to accomplish than not being able to shut my eyes). I don’t remember my dreams, really, but the snippets I do remember have not been triggering.
I am so thankful some of your relatives are in the DC area. I saw the Todaros, last weekend. They make you feel closer.
Your family is in Hawaii, right now. I remember when you asked me about going on that trip with them. When we were making plans that you would be alive for, right now. You haven’t been alive for almost 5 months, and I feel that in how much I miss you, but not in my frame of mind. You just left. I think it will feel like you just left for a very long time. After the resolution passed, last night, I walked Hugo and came back home. Talked to you, as I usually do, and my eyes scanned over the pictures of us on the walls. I got caught on your face in the one from the first wedding we went to together. Then I stood there, trying to lose myself in the idea that I could still reach out and touch your face, feel your beard, run my fingers through your hair. I can still imagine what all of those things feel like, so vividly. I hope that never, ever goes away.
Sometimes I say “babe” and “Peter” to the empty room, just because I haven’t had a reason to in so long. It feels so foreign that “babe” left my vocabulary so quickly, but you were the only one I called that, and with you gone, of course it goes with you. Sometimes, I’ll accidentally call Hugo Peter, though…im curious what that’s about, psychologically.
I love you. I miss you.