Ground Zero

After only an hour's worth of real sleep, I woke up to the morning alarm.  I was in his bed but his half was cold.  He had slept downstairs on the couch.  Not incredibly unusual, as we had a fight the night before.  Also, not incredibly unusual.  Then I remembered that this time was different.  This time the fight was a fight that I knew would likely be our last.  He heard my alarm and came upstairs to hold me and cry with me for the next hour.  I eventually showered and somehow got myself ready for work.  I gathered my things and we kissed goodbye, telling each other to have a good day, pretending it was any other morning.  It was the last time I ever saw him.

During my first few moments of consciousness that morning, my only desire was to close my eyes, wake up later, and discover it all having been a bad dream.  For the next few months, but what seemed like eternity, I spent every morning (and nearly every waking moment) that way.  Every morning, I woke up in a cold and half empty bed, realizing where I was, what the reality of my life was, and only wishing it to not be true.  This morning ritual in my psyche made me afraid to sleep at night, for I knew that in my sleep, my dreams would be of our normal life.  But when I woke, my nightmare would still be the same.

I had been through breakups before.  I have lost friends and family to death.  Hell, I have had physical, life threatening injuries that took months to recover from.  None of it prepared me for the pain I felt after that morning.  My entire body hurt from the inside out.  I had a perpetual migraine, I was unable to take full breaths, my stomach was in a constant somersault.  My daily diet consisted of coffee, cigarettes, beer and whatever food my friend Robo forced me to eat when I was drunk.

I hadn't just lost my partner and best friend.  I lost half of my friends (his friends), I lost my (practically) in-laws, I lost my dreams and hopes - OUR dreams and hopes.  I also found myself metaphorically homeless.  I was renting an apartment in the city that I only used as a week-day hotel room for when I needed to be close to the office.  I now was forced to call it home. His home in the mountains was no longer there for me.  No more nights of cooking in the log kitchen while he stoked the wood stove and fat snow flakes fell from the sky.  No more lazy days of him chopping wood while I sewed up the patches in his work pants.  No more long weekends with our friends filling the spare bedrooms.  We had plans together.  A wedding, dogs, eventually little DNA clones of us playing in the acreage surrounding our house.  Our nest was gone.

And just like that, my life as I knew it was crushed.  Though it had been crumbling for quite some time, it seemed to happen in just an instant.  Everything I loved and cared for, my goals, my dreams, what kept me going every day, crumbled that morning.  I felt as if a category 5 tornado rumbled onto everything that was "me."  A tornado with a giant fucking Wrecking Ball in the eye of it.