Tuesday, 17th May. I had dreaded that day, but now it has come and gone I think I can begin to deal with it, aided by the words that follow.
Why did my drive home from work on that one Tuesday seem so surreal and yet everyone look so normal? It just seemed plain wrong to me that the vast majority of you lived through that Tuesday like it was just another day on a calendar, unremarkable and unremarked, and a simple stepping stone for you along the pathway to your weekend. Why couldn’t you feel that it wasn’t just a ‘Tuesday’? Surely you could tell this? Well, even though I knew you couldn’t possibly know I still invoked my Bedouin ancestors and wished a pox on your indifference, though your blind apathy towards me was not the worst.
No, the worst were you who caused me to recoil with distaste at the thought that that Tuesday could be a day of celebration for you; perhaps an anniversary of some fond event or maybe the rejoicing of a birth? That day was your special Tuesday and I envy that it will move with you through time, conjuring annual blushes of warm reminiscence when I will have naught but pangs of regret and loss. My mother would slap me (and slap me again!), for begrudging you your day of joy; but still I begrudged you it.
That drive home was made in a haze of hurt and mean-spirit, and I took perverted consolation in knowing there must be balance in all things. For each of you who rejoiced on that day there will have been one who wept. For each of you who remembered that Tuesday with delight, there will be another who did so with dismay. For each of you who celebrated a birth on the 17th of May, there will have been another who mourned a death, and it is into the camp of mourning I also fall.
Tuesday, 17th May! I damn you for marking the one-year anniversary of The Sundering; that tragic day when my beautiful, blue companion was irrevocably taken from me.
As I drove home by that ill-fated route I glanced at each of you as I passed you by and in the seconds available to me I judged you and placed you into your respective camps; indifference, rejoicing and mourning. You! You are a ‘rejoicer’, and no, I will not give you space to merge into my lane of mourning. I care not that I am being peevish and uncharitable and if I am so far gone that I can’t think to stop myself, well I really don’t care. This grim haze is mine and I embrace it.
But I must steady myself now for I know it approaches. I can tell because these once familiar landmarks, noticed but not really seen, and now transformed into dread signposts with no purpose but to recall my doom and presage a renewal of pain, are dragging me back from my morose thoughts and into painful awareness. Yes, it approaches, that place which waits to mock me (at best), or catch me off guard and again take me (if it can). How do I steel myself to fight the temptation? How many times have I approached this exit since The Sundering and told myself, “Don’t look!”… one hundred and fifty? Probably more. And how many times have I had my will crushed and my eyes drawn to the blue bruises splashed along the dirty concrete barrier? I hated myself as I again gave in, and again I waited once more to be condemned by the accusing patches of blue paint spread along the barrier.
But the pain that I thought would be worse on this day did not come. Something felt different. I don’t know what exactly, but my heart did not tighten and my stomach did not fall away like I expected it must. As my eyes travelled at 100km/h along the barrier it occurred to me that the evidence of my demise had almost faded to the point that maybe now I am the only person who can see it. It seemed like a sign to me that I am weighed down by an anchor of my own making and I have ownership of whether I move forward or not.
It was with these thoughts that the remainder of the drive home was spent reflecting on The Sundering and considering my progression through the stages of grief (is that too strong a word for the loss of a car?). Maybe, just maybe, I am moving towards acceptance? Is this possibly The Salvation? I turn these thoughts over in my head and test them for the flaws which might prove the lie, but for the most part what I find is evidence of corroboration.
I recall that last week was the first week that I had not actively searched for another mariner blue NA, something I have routinely done over the last nine or so months. Not only didn’t I search, but I didn’t even register the fact until a work colleague asked me on Monday how the search was going. Similarly, when I walk into my garage and see the blue car sitting there it does not sting me like it used to, and the initial discomfort I had with the parting-out process has shifted to a sense of warmness that there are parts of my car driving all over the country.
Be that as it may, I’m still not completely sure that I feel all chocolates-and-roses about where I am at. The last Dodgy Day had a mariner blue sitting in one of the work bays and it was all I could do to stop from throwing myself across its bonnet and bubbling like a child… that doesn’t feel like complete acceptance to me.
It would feel like a betrayal if I was too easily able to forget that my loss felt like such a terrible thing, weighing me down with guilt and transporting me to dark places with my only company being Mister “What if?” and his caustic chidings riding in my mind’s slipstream as he replayed the events in my head, time, and time again. But on this particular Tuesday, one year on, I think I started to accept that in the grand scheme of things writing-off my beautiful blue companion of 25 years was terrible, but not tragic, and more so given I walked away with nothing more than a set of sore ribs. Better that my blue lady is the donor, and not I.
And so, as I mark the end of the first anniversary of The Sundering I conclude that even though my sense of loss was real it can now maybe be contained both in a little pocket of remembrance in my heart, and in the words of what is already looking to be quite a self-indulgent journal, a memorial for the Blue and a journal for the Red.
