The Leaves

My life is a winding river.  Sometimes it is sunny and sometimes it is raining.  Since Hayley’s death there has been a boulder in the middle of my river.  The river is my life, my days.  The water, time.  Every morning a leaf falls into my river and begins it journey.  It encounters many obstacles.  Some are small and some are bigger.  But nothing is as big as the boulder.  Small obstacles are fallen branches or small piles of rocks.  These may be how I feel physically that day.  There may be a branch to navigate around that is my Fibromyalgia pain.  A small rock may be the headache I went to sleep with and it was still there in the morning.  A fallen tree along the edge of the river may be a social engagement I made that I must navigate through.  As my leaf floats along, it may go around the fallen branch or it may go under coming out water logged on the other side.  Tired and floating slower the rest of the day.  As it floats along there are dips and currents.  These are memories that assault me all day every day.  It could be a piece of clothing of hers that is mixed in with my clothes.  It is the pink petals of her flowering plum tree that are littering
her beloved car as it sits lonely in the driveway.  It is a piece of mail with her name on it.  It is a photo on Facebook of one of her friends moving on with their lives, doing the things she should be doing.  The water gets rougher and my leaf must navigate these bends in the river.

Sometimes it gets caught on one of those branches and it doesn’t move on for a long time.  The force of the water, of time, still hits the leaf as it is snagged but it won’t budge.  It is frozen in place.  The water runs over the leaf and the tears keep me in place.  It becomes rough around the edges as the current pushes past.  Something jars it loose.  It is time to pick up Henry.  That lunch date.

The path the leaf takes every single day is always different.  The one thing that is absolutely the same is the big boulder in the middle.  There are only three options for my leaf.  It can go to the right where the water is calm, a memory of love, a smile, a feeling of being the luckiest Mom in the world because she was mine for 19 years.  The leaf rarely goes right.  If it goes left the current is rough and it bounces along getting more water logged until it sinks to the bottom.  That leaf took a xanax.  Then there is the third option, the leaf runs smack into the boulder and is stuck there for the rest of the day.  It is a memory of cpr, her pain, regrets, guilt, sadness, tears and everything I did wrong that holds that leaf against the boulder.  Eventually the leaf drifts to the bottom of the river where its day’s journey ends.

I can’t predict the path the leaf must take.  I can’t tell you what time it will encounter the boulder.  All I can tell you is each and every day as my feet hit the floor another leaf falls into the water.