I’ve been feeling distant lately. Scattered might be a better word. I walk into a room and have no idea why I entered it. I open the fridge and I stare at the shelves without the slightest hint of what I craved. I need more sleep but I rally against bedtime. I’m hungry, but I’m not. I want to be near people, yet push them away. I long to escape but dread wandering from home. What is this listlessness?

But then I looked at the date and I remembered. Two days until two years.

It’s grief. The kind of grief that surfaces when you aren’t looking. The remembrance that there was a time before and your realize how much time has passed.

You steel yourself against it, you think you are ready, but then it hits and all you can remember to do is hold on and breathe. So you forget things. You wander. You’re listless. You check out. Grief is like that.

But then the day you dread comes and goes and it gets easier to breathe again. You can focus on all the reasons the after was a better place than you expected such pain could lead you. You survived and that’s a good thing and you get to cross off another milestone in your story.

Two days until two years…