I feel Like A Mess Some Days

It’s been a year since my best friend, Larissa Attisso, died. A whole year without her. I should call her mum, or write to her. I have a draft in my docs that I started and never finished marked “Dear Felicity” but I didn’t know what to say to someone whose grief and pain and trauma is unfathomable to all, even me. Besides, I can scarcely see through my own fog to reach a hand out to her; I feel ill-equipped to comfort. I feel like a mess some days. Most days. I feel as if I should be doing better; no one talks about her, no one asks how I am doing. The flush of flowers and condolence texts made me think that perhaps grieving was permitted, that my mood was warranted. Suddenly those dried up and now I assume that I should be over it, that I should be laced up and fine in public. No one asks about her.

Should I be fine? I don’t feel fine. Should I be over it? I don’t feel over it. I want to be, I want to not feel the sting of tears in my eyes, I want to not excuse myself to go to the bathroom and do some deep breathing exercises to keep from spiraling. I want to have something in common with these people at work, these friends I meet for drinks, I want to be able to be genuine and feel love and joy and smile and forget, but I can’t. I leave sobbing voicemails on Larry's phone in the cab home, I am filled with dread every time I call that this might be the time I hear "the number you have dialed has not been recognised" and every time I get through to the voicemail, I begin my recording with a sigh of relief. It’s not logical, this voicemail obsession. No one can hear them, more specifically she cannot hear them. Whatever channel I think I am opening, whatever portal to the beyond, is all in my head. There is no one in this cab with me but the driver who is politely pretending not to hear. 

 What am I supposed to do with my grief? At least with these voicemails they feel filed away, it seems as if I have put it in the final spot the universe has reserved for these feelings. Sometimes I whisper them into my phone in the dark, at night, in bed. Or I text, voice note. Penance to an empty confessional booth. I do not pause to examine whether this is a healthy thing to do, I trudge on and make my tiny deposit of sadness in the hopes it will allow me to move on, but it doesn’t help as much as I'd like it to. Somewhere in my brain, in the illogical, magical portion of it, I hope to be surprised by the picking up of the phone, suddenly your voice from somewhere, I would stutter and stumble for sure, but the connection would have been made. The life preserver, thrown out over and over and over again, would have been grabbed from the other side and you, or maybe me, would be able to pull the other in, but which side I'd prefer, I am not sure.

My brain feels chaotic. It is a jumbled mess that I must use to get through the minutiae of the day- feed my child, go to work, bathe, eat, socialise. Somehow, I manage to get these things done, despite the certainty in my skull that I won’t be able to get up, won’t be able to eat, won’t be able to laugh. Somehow, I do. Mostly I achieve this by pushing my feelings down, deep deep down to a place where the pain is still felt but is muffled by everything else I put on top of it, like a pile of coats in the spare room at a party, that soon become indistinguishable from the bed itself. 

I do not mention this method I have to my therapist; I know what she will say. She will tell me it’s not healthy to squash everything down, that I have to allow myself to feel the sadness but really, I would retort if I ever got up the courage to tell Judi this. How the fuck is anyone supposed to do that? It is not feasible in this cold world we have created to make the space for oneself, to allow oneself to cry in public, to make colleagues uncomfortable with the rawness of you, to scare your child with an unprovoked rage at the world. If I want to be any sort of functioning human, if I intend to keep my life as I like it (correction, liked it, before Larissa died) how the fuck am I supposed to behave? I didn’t make these rules. I didn’t say that it was inappropriate to cry to the waiter at lunch because they suggested a house cocktail that Larissa would have loved. I didn’t say that clutching all of her clothes and getting into bed was an unhealthy way to be. I am just here, living in the world you people created, following the rules so I don’t embarrass anyone. 

But the truth is I want to scream, I want to do all of those things, I want my sadness to be noticed like it was in those days of flower deliveries and “I’m so sorry” texts. I want to be babied, I want deliveries of soups and casseroles, I want to feel safe in my sorrow, I want to be able to scream and have everyone nod and agree that this is ok, fine and necessary. But instead, here I am, pushing it all down. What else would you have me do, Judi? I have to eat, I have to make a living, I have to keep going don’t we all have to keep fucking going?

 The indulgence therapy tells us to take just isn’t feasible all the time. I can’t be sad all the time, can I? Who is it helping, who am I helping with all this fucking anger, all this bemusement, all this lost lost lost-ness, all this sobbing down defunct phone lines? I am not sure I am even helping myself. I am not sure I know how to do that.  

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I start taking walks with my dog, only ever by myself, only ever the two of us. I prefer the beach, but a trail will do too, somewhere slightly secluded. I like it because I can talk to myself, or rather, to you. I talk about nothing in particular, I usually don’t even cry, they are banal conversations, the sorts of things we would be talking about if you were still alive. At first on these walks I start by not moving my lips too much just in case a passerby should see me and think, "Poor thing, she’s insane." But after a few outings I feel bolstered by the presence of my dog, as if he is an explanation for my ramblings on the Soho club scene in 2006, or my recollections of our adventures together, long nights and pricey cocktails, cozy movie days and Marilyn Monroe on the screen. I start talking more boldly. I begin to tell you about my life, I tell you how proud you would be of Luka, how funny she is, how stubborn. I know you would particularly like the stubborn part, you loved a woman who knew her mind, knew where to draw the line. I know you would love her. 

I wax lyrical about her, about us, about Adam, about life. I scold you for not being here, as if you are just late for dinner (as you often were) instead of being dead, buried in the ground in Paris so far from me. It feels nice. It feels crazy. It feels sort of nice to feel sort of crazy. 

There is something so cathartic in giving in to the madness. I am starting to understand what Judi wanted from me, she wanted some space, not all of it, not my whole day but just some space for me to be crazy. For me to feel unhinged. For me to do things that would make me feel like I was plunging off the deep end a little, madness wise. I need to feel that crazed because that is the only time I am honest with my feelings, the only time I truly indulge in my insanity. And so, I do not take my whole day and upend it, but rather, I carve out an hour, sometimes two or three, to be batshit. And no one can judge me, not even the dog. 

Communicating with you in this way feels ten times as good as the voicemails and voice notes, I am not whispering into the line or feeling guilt at my madness, instead I am strolling wide strides and talking with an assurance, as if I know you can hear, as if I am certain. And with that I am also striding into my grief, so much of which right now feels like pure insanity. I have to go in, I have to get crazy or else how will I ever speak to you ever again? Surely the universe can allow me this. Surely this is better than the alternative.

 One day, almost two years later Larissa's mum will confess to me that she remembered she had Larry's phone and turned it on to read the messages, find some clues. It will only occur to me later that perhaps in doing so she also found my voicemails, and so that perhaps it felt at the time like a portal to the beyond because it was, but not to the person I thought it would be. It was a portal to the future, and in the future your bereft mother might play my voicemails, hear my broken heart, hear my deep love and loss of you, and perhaps, in some small way, be comforted. 

Eirinie is a black British writer living in the Bay Area. She is currently writing a book about the loss of her best friend and what love looks like after loss.