The Loss of a Friend

 Nothing prepares you for that call.  That moment of hearing those words.  Your heart and head immediately go into full out war with each other.  Your heart hears the truth and breaks and your mind goes into denial and won’t accept what it’s heard.  You are left with this constant conflict.  You can’t accept that what you have heard is the truth it doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t fit.  But your heart is in pain, suffocating at the words you have heard, knowing that you have lost something very precious and no matter what you do you cannot get it back. 

It’s been 3 weeks now, since that phone call, and the conflict between head and heart still continues.  I can be having just a normal conversation about day to day things, and my eyes start to water.  The more I wipe them the more they fall.  Until I realise that even though my mind isn’t thinking about her right then and there, my heart is and the huge loss it feels just keeps on overflowing. 

While pinteresting the other day, I saw a site that had a whole lot of free downloadable scrapbooking pages.  My mind prompted me to reach over for my phone to bbm her to tell her I’d pinned it for her,  just as my heart reminded me she wasn’t going to get the message. 

I keep waiting for my heart and mind to make the connection.  One they can agree on.  But they’re just not getting there.  My heart is grieving.  My mind just cannot grasp how someone who has been so apart of my life for 14 years isn’t going to be there anymore. 

But then how do you explain to your mind that all the hopes and dreams you’ve spoken about, that still need to materialise, are not going to materialise for one of you.   We’ve been speaking about them for 14 years!  The time is coming soon, we are nearly there.  You can’t not be apart of it? 

So many memories come back to me at random times.  I remember her giving Cas her first piece of birthday cake at Kayla’s second birthday party.  I know the photo’s there in the album.  She’s holding Cas, whose wearing a yellow party dress, and her face is covered in cake and icing.  My heart wants me to go and open the album to look at it and remember.  But my mind won’t let me.  What else will I find in there?  More memories that I may have forgotten?  More things to make me remember how big a role she played in my life.  In my girls lives.  Another nail hitting home that there won’t be any more.  No more new memories, life events etc that she will be apart of. 

I think of all the tea’s and “counselling sessions”  she would urgently bbm me for.   All the tears and frustrations and the hurts we would share.   And I think of all the times we sat out on her deck having tea, laughing, remembering, dreaming………

You can tell me as many times as you want to that it was her time.  But this is probably the only point that my head and heart can agree on:  It wasn’t her time.  Something went wrong.  It was too soon for her to go.  Nobody was ready.  She wasn’t ready.  She was still dreaming of the things yet to come.  The life events that she was going to be apart of.  I wasn’t ready.  We were going to finally get to do our birthday tea together these holiday’s.  She had my gift, I had hers.  We’d been double booking each other for weeks.  So we’d decided to do it these holidays.  So much had been happening we had so much to tell each other.  And we were so looking forward to sitting down and catching up over tea.  But she still has my gift.  I still have hers.  It wasn’t her time.  There was still too much that needed to be done. 

Sending out Christmas and New years messages, and skipping her name, just felt wrong.  My head telling me to just send it anyway.  My heart telling me to accept that she’s gone. 

I know she’s gone.  I understand that.  But I don’t really believe it.  It makes no sense at all.  Just this permanent conflict between mind and heart.  And this permanent unbearable loss.  The knowledge that I have lost someone so valuable and precious.

 I have no regrets, just this incredible need to have more.  More memories being made, more chats, more tea, more craft failures and successes, more inspiration, more encouragement and advice, more laughs, more tears.  I want to have more of all of these things.   And I want to have them with her. 

I miss you my friend.  So much more than I can ever say.  I kind of believe though, that I don’t actually need to find the words to express it, but that you will just look down from heaven and look straight into my heart and see all the words that can never be spoken.