Waking up at 3:00 a.m. sucks. Waking up at 3:00 a.m. with a feeling you just can’t put your finger on sucks even more. It’s been a couple days in a row now where this massive wave of emotion has pulled me out of a perfectly good sleep and tanked my whole morning.
For the last couple days/week, I have been thinking about Mom and David. Little queues or pieces of memories just popping into my mind and “sucker punching” me when I least expect it. A little snippet of a song takes me away to a place I had no intention of visiting at the time.
Perhaps it’s just the holiday. Independence Day—although I didn’t realize it until recently—was one of my favorite holidays. Growing up, it meant that we were for the most part living full-time on the beach, and I would be sleeping outside more than inside, listening to the water lapping softly against the sand less than a hundred feet from my spot on the deck chair.
It was the day where you could have a couple beers, cook some food and wander aimlessly down Melba Street visiting neighbors and friends and seeing what was on their grill, refreshing your beer.
It was a time for Jason, (depending on the year) a cousin or a nephew, a very athletic David, and not-so-athletic I to toss around a football, play a game of sandbar Wiffle ball, or take the boat out for a spin and drag the kids around on an inner tube at high speed where fear rode the narrow line with enjoyment and somehow you wanted more.
I’ve missed, now more than normal, having both of them with me. I find myself reaching for the phone to text David something funny, or anticipating a call from Mom to ask me for the millionth time about when exactly I was planning on coming up to the house.
As I peruse the various updates of other people’s holiday, as you do when you wake up each and every morning at 3:00 a.m., I notice an entire group of people moving on where I cannot, or am not able to currently. Sure, I host a pretty good party, and I have fun sharing and celebrating with my friends and their friends. But I know there is a chapter in my life that is gone forever. That thing you can never get back. One of those things you did actually truly appreciate, so instead of you not realizing how important it was until it was gone, it’s twice that. Twice that because you never wanted to lose it, and when you did it was like a house fire, like a burglary.
Something is taken from you that you had no intention of leaving. Couple that with the loss of David and my mom, and I guess I understand why I am waking up at 3:00 in the morning. It doesn’t make it any easier. In fact, it is much worse. The double whammy.
It is the one point in my life where I no longer want my independence. I want to celebrate my dependence I had on both of them to be there for me and me for them. It is the dependence we built for each other that created the bond we had and the memories we did. I am trying to currently hide from them, to put them away in that little storage bin of my mind and ask them to come back another time. If there is anything I want more now it’s more dependence than independence. But I am not provided that opportunity.
I have only real photographs of those days; it was before digital had taken hold. I don’t need to walk up the ladder to pull out the photo albums of those days: I can close my eyes, and I am taken there. I see them all. I can visualize the sandbars and the neighbors, the family, the smells and sounds.
It is my dependence on them that I miss the most right now. These are the feelings that don’t get easier with time.
