Time Really Does Heal All Pain

My mom sent me a box of old pictures this week. It was full of old photographs of High school and college, and among those photos were a couple if pictures of my old friend Emily. She passed away in a car accident just after turning 21. It was a pretty tragic event. It happened on her way home for Thanksgiving dinner, and i had a very difficult time coming to terms with her death. Even though I know she came and told me good-bye, and insisted that things were good now. I was angry. I was angry at God for the longest time for taking away my friend. And, I felt guilty for the longest time for not having been a good friend. She was the first of a trilogy of deaths that came later that year and the next. Coupled with my parents divorce, it made for a damn hard couple of years.

I feel like a fool now, when I think back at how dramatic everything seemed to me back then. Like why couldn't the whole world stop when my friends died. Why couldn't everyone share in my pain, feel my grief, and hold me in the time of my sorrow. It was a very hard time, and there were days were I didn't think I'd be able to breath into the next day. Yes, breath. Because being surrounded by so much sorrow and confusion, weighed me down, and that weight sat right on my chest, making me work for every breath. Time slowed for a while, then stopped when I escaped to Puerto Rico for a summer (my never never land). When I returned, I still struggled with the sorrow, and wondered if it would ever end. It's taken almost eight years, but life has gotten better. The pain is gone, and the sorrow comes and goes, but mostly, I have come to terms with it all. I still dream of my friends, long gone. I like to imagine that we speak through my dreams, or sometimes even in waking life--that our bodies are just vessels for our souls, and that our souls live on forever. I feel a peace I haven't felt for a long time, and am happy that I can once again see these old photographs, and harbor a smile, and warmth that comes with the good memories under which they were originally made.