I noticed my brain is not functioning well. Multiple times a day I ask myself if I ate a meal or drank water. Did I actually take out the trash? I called to cancel my medical insurance twice. I keep forgetting I already asked and answered these questions. I feel scattered. I ordered a habit tracker because I am worried about functioning. I feel like I forgot how. I did not consider how hard it would be to live alone. I have somehow managed to eat three meals every day, shower, make my bed, work, and walk Dottie enough there are no accidents in the house. I feel accomplished and barely able to do anything else.

I downloaded a cleaning checklist that organizes various tasks over the course of a month to keep your home clean. I need things to help me stay organized. Tuesdays are for vacuuming the sofa, although I do not think I need to do that weekly as it seems excessive. I was too tired on Tuesday to complete this task, so I did it yesterday. As I vacuumed, I watched strands of your coarse, dirty-blonde hair succumb to the Dyson pull. I cannot stop thinking about it. Your hair. Should I have kept some? How do I live in a world where I will never touch it again? At the hospital, I kept running my fingers through it, feeling the spaces between curls, identifying all the grey you pretended was not there. As I find fragments of you in my new life here, I feel like I am getting rid of you and I feel guilty. There will be a time where I never vacuum your hair again and I do not understand how to fit that into this version of my world. I feel ridiculous for crying about it, but here I am. Crying about something as silly as your hair.

I used to equate my divorce and all the events that created the divorce to feeling like a death. I hate myself for so naively writing about something I thought I understood. I look back at that person and feel sorry for how much she will learn about the true meaning of loss and pain. I wish I could tell her it only gets worse and that she really cannot imagine or prepare for it. That it will be hard to remember that she ate, drank water, and walked her dog. That she will cry over vacuuming hair. That she will wake up tomorrow and continue trying to do this all again despite a lot of evidence suggesting not to. The person I was had no idea about what she was talking. Divorce is not death, it is life. It is a beginning, a cleansing, a reason to vacuum. Death is death. It is forever. It is wondering if you should have vacuumed at all. It is not a new beginning and it totally fucking sucks.