Shifting Perspectives
November 2022
A mostly unfortunate reality that is just now settling in, is that the further away I get from what happened, the more it’s finally coming into focus. For the first eight months, I was so close to it that it was impossible to see. Impossible to fully comprehend. I knew the details, and I knew it was substantial, but despite what I thought at the time, I really wasn’t grasping it so much as sleepwalking and swimming through it. But now with some time, with a little more distance, I can assess the whole thing a little less blurry-eyed and it isn’t very pleasant.
I liken it to being placed at the base of Half Dome in Yosemite and being told, “Check this shit out - it’s huge.” Looking up and thinking, well yeah, that’s a big rock, for sure. Then you start to walk away from it. And every few hundred yards or so you look back and think, oh yeah, I see. But it isn’t until you get a few miles away, turn around, and look back down the valley that you finally get a handle on the full scale of what you were in, what you just walked out of. There wasn’t just one big rock face, there were quite a few, and some other pretty imposing landscape items that they didn’t tell you about. That’s where I’m at now and honestly, I don’t know if I want to take in any more than what I can assess from here.
Time and distance are allowing me to finally see and understand other things as well. For example, I couldn’t quite grasp why I cried every damn time I went for a hike or off into nature alone, and it was frustrating. I was there to help my body feel better and for my soul to heal. But mostly what I felt was sad. My initial thoughts were that sure, no distractions, the mind wanders, you think about what happened, and you cry.
And in the abstract, I kind of understood that that’s what I was supposed to do. The peace and quiet would help me process grief in a much better way and in an infinitely better setting than say, the barber’s chair or the Halloween aisle at Target. But it wasn’t until recently it dawned on me, almost embarrassingly, that of course this makes me sad. This was absolutely our favorite shit in the world to do together and now she’s not fucking here to share it with.
Every time I see something breathtaking, I well up. And I’m sure to some degree I do so because it’s beautiful and that’s just kind of who I am at this point. But now I think more so, it’s because she would have loved it and will never get to see it. And I’m more than ready to move on past this vantage. I’m hoping that soon I can get beyond that bend up ahead and take in something different than what I can see from here because a change of scenery is very much needed.