no words

i've been in a little bit of a daze, thinking about someone i love.  someone whose heart is broken.  not just broken like in two.  but broken into a thousand tiny pieces.  the kind where you don't know how to hold yourself together, you can't sleep, you have no appetite, and you just really don't know how you're getting from moment to moment.  it's that kind of broken when tears are sitting in front of your eyeballs and it is some miracle that they aren't racing down your face when they aren't.

it's that kind of broken when your thoughts come and go in no order.  when you feel scattered and lost and scared and nothing seems real.  when you pray that you are in a nightmare, and that when you wake up it will all be over.  when you see and hear other people laughing and carrying on around you, but you don't know how they are doing it.  and whatever they are laughing about or smiling about just can't possibly be that important.  because your world is different.  because your world has changed. and it just doesn't seem right that the rest of the world is going on as if nothing has happened.  even the sun shining seems ... wrong.

the kind of broken you feel when someone you love is suddenly and unexpectedly no longer on this earth.

it is scary to think about ... our mortality.

it is scary to think about ... our lack of certainty.

there is no promise that any one of us will be here tomorrow.  i know this.  you know this.  we all know this.  yet we live as if there is some promise of the future.

when someone leaves our life, we recognize this truth and we sometimes talk about the fact that we have no guarantees and that we need to live in the now.  waste no time.  seize the day.

i am lost in between both of these feelings.  the hurt, the paralysis of knowing someone i love is hurting in this way ...  and the gentle reminder that life is fragile.

i always try to find the message ... the gift in any struggle.  sometimes i can't feel one without the other.  sometimes i can't feel either one at all.

this isn't the first time i've written about the loss of another person's life.  but just as each person's life is unique, so is each one's effect on the world when they go.

i know what it's like to sit in silence and awe, at a traffic light, and look around and not understand how the world is turning and how no one knows that someone i love is gone.  watching people go through drive-thrus and order burgers and somehow even that doesn't seem right.  like how can things just go on the same when nothing is the same?  shouldn't there be some kind of acknowledgement by the world?  it doesn't seem right or even possible.

i know what it's like to hold a family member who has lost her child and cannot talk, swallow, or barely breathe.

i know what it's like to hold my friend who has lost her husband, and lie in bed with her, without speaking, for weeks.

i know what it's like to ache for someone else's ache.  to hurt and cry along with and for another heart that is floundering.

i just still don't know the words to say.
there never seem to be any words that are the right ones.
there never seem to be any words that help.
at times like this,
there never seem to be any words
at all.