I love the smell of the rain. Those first moments when water that formed in clouds above us falls, eventually hitting the pavement. Humans created pavement to improve how often people walked through feces. Pavement also created safer passageways for fire trucks and medical care even in adverse weather. Americans did not start paving until the mid-19^th century. Less than two hundred years in the history of the planet is very recent. An ambulance got to me as I gave Jeffrey CPR because someone said “The New World should be paved”. All of this swirls inside of me as aerosol releases from the water drops sitting on the surface of the pavement outside. A gift.

Writing lately has been difficult. I cannot do it without an edible. My body does not relax enough sober, too afraid of the inevitable panic attack I will have. Something about THC allows my body to let my brain go there, back to the week he died. While I do not always have a panic attack when I write, their frequency has increased and I am too tired and in demand at my job to recover from how exhausted I am after each attack. The topics I am trying to process are so massive, my body short circuits. I picture a librarian trying to hold a stack of books as it tumbles onto the ground, those painful few seconds where you can see the floor grow closer and your brain realizing there will be humiliating impact. I am scared I will always be this way, that what happened will always be bigger than I am.

The amount of marination I have done in this fear has pushed me into finding an EMDR therapist. I have spent the past two months in observation of “am I getting better?” and feel I am at a place to actually explore how far I can push my body in healing. I want to help my body process the multiple stage traumatic loss that happened to me the week Jeffrey died. I am not the same person anymore, and it feels overwhelming to integrate this new me with what happened. When I try to put them together, I panic. It is almost eighteen months since I found Jeffrey on my living room floor, and it feels like forty years. So much has happened. So much is not the same. Part of me is not ready to give up on my present circumstances improving. Since Jeffrey died, I promised myself I would listen and trust my instincts more. I told myself I will know what to do when I am ready. So, here I am: I am ready for EMDR now. That is why you waited, Natalie. You were not ready before now. Another Part of me is really worried to feel any hope this will ever change. I want to have a big, beautiful, and loving life. To not accept my life as it is now feels like betrayal to any potential future. I want to be as present as I can for whatever happens next. I want to trust myself to know what I need. I was lost for so long. Now realizing just how much of me I have found, I want to find all of me.

I am doing my best to live my life around this experience. I have consistently treated myself to Roselle’s for a cocktail and dinner on Thursday night after work. I am attending the free bands at The Barn on Saturday night. I have met someone new at The Barn each time and gotten several of their numbers. Two introductions converted to more time spent outside of the show. One followed up with me after the fact. I feel proud of myself for being in public alone, for talking to people and putting myself out there. It is a dopamine hit and confidence boost I need.

I am so proud of myself. And I am exhausted. I am having a struggle under the weight of the grief my body is still holding. I need multiple days to recover, but I am having less time to recover because I am trying to practice my brain’s social muscles and practice trusting myself.

I am protecting Sundays as my day where I do not leave the house if I can avoid it. I do not let myself shower as a security measure (no one needs to see that). I am so grateful to have the energy to even do anything and yet so aware of how much more healing I need to do by how tired I am. I increased my exercise time to a minimum of an hour, 7 days a week, with reset days being spent on longer walks. My body is increasing its capacity for distress in all areas. Despite these physical increases in my exercise, I have not lost any weight. I am not saying this because I have shame about weight loss, but becuase it is interesting to me. This is my body getting older or is it that I feel like my body is holding onto everything it can, that it is stuck in the worst week of my life? I am again filled with wet cement. I am moving any possible way to unkink the tension my muscles hold as I restrain the intense horror within me.

I tell myself my body is a miracle worker, that it is working so hard for me with what I went through. That I am strong. I feel in relationship with my body, extremely attuned to the things it says I need. Alignment. There is alignment here. And then something happens and I remember a sound or a machine I do not know during the week in the ICU and a panic attack interrupts the connection. I watch my thoughts escape me, unleashing a cortisol firestorm.

Panic.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Inhale.

Hold.

Exhale.

Hold.

Inhale.

So here I am, in reflection of how despite being the strongest I have ever been, I am still not strong enough to hold the week Jeffrey died. I told my therapist I feel like a light turned on in a room I did not even know was there. I cannot unsee the leaded Grief Jacket I wear now. I need the jacket because I stand one hundred yards away from a house on fire, a fight I keep having in my honor because giving up on me is what I used to do. I am not that person anymore. I force myself to keep walking towards the fire even as I feel the burn of my melting skin. I do not know what is next, but that I am going.

Thunder rolls in low and thick in the distance. Dottie looks at me to see if I am okay. And I remember that feeling any of this means I am here.

I am alive.