It is still 99 degrees at 8pm. The man who hits rocks with a metal baseball bat has been out on the grass the past two nights and he makes me nervous. Is it because hitting rocks into a field with a metal bath is an atypical choice? Is that because a softball made contact with my head not once, not twice, but three times the first day of softball camp? Regardless, the sound of the rock hitting the metal sends shivers down my spine and echoes in my memory even now. There is the satisfying tangy thud of a softball, a baseball, or even a tennis ball as a metal bat hits it into oblivion. Rocks sound like metal tastes in the mouth, earthy and unpleasant.
Tonight, as I sat in the grass with Dottie and enjoyed the absence of the man who hits rocks, I was almost entirely alone aside from a man reading a book on the jungle gym. There were more dragon flies last week than this week. No one is playing pickle ball. No dogs are at the dog park. 99 degrees at 8pm is enough reason for people to shelter elsewhere, to find comfort in whatever illusion of air flow exists in their home.
I watched Dottie trot around smelling every blade of grass before giving chase to a lizard and pondered why it bothers me so much I keep hitting roadblocks on selling Jeffrey’s bike. I finally committed to selling it, to getting it ready for sale, and asked my dad to come over to help me. The things to tune are minor although require some problem solving I lack the capacity to do alone. The display on the bike is missing the screws which required some trial and error in both research and procurement. When we finally found the correct screws, we realized the rear tire was flat. I ordered a new one, not realizing the tube was the thing that needed repair. So tonight, once again, we were delayed in getting the bike to a “sellable” place. I feel like an idiot for forgetting bikes can have a tire and a tube. These are things I used to know more easily before Jeffrey died, when my brain had the space for more than crippling grief.
Of course, in researching the bike, I learned the company is in Santa Cruz, where I was last weekend. So, I could have brought it with me, had them fix it, had them buy it from me. But no. I’m here in Chico 21 months after Jeffrey died with a bike I cannot ride because it was his bike. While it’s normally obscured by my sofa, right now it is sitting upside down in my living room mocking me. I kept it to sell because I helped purchase it and I knew in the fog of leaving Seattle I would need the money. I bought it when I believed I could make someone happy by giving them the life they claimed they wanted. I bought a lot of things in desperate attempts to make Jeffrey happy. Maybe those softballs really did have impact.
I need the bike out of my apartment in a way that feels cavernous. I am scared to feel how much I do not want it in my life because I might fall into the pit that holds all of my despair. I am still scared I cannot climb out of that pit. I am working to build a ladder. But the ladder needs a tire tube, two wrenches I did not have on hand, and the right screws. I have looked at this bike every single day since Jeffrey died. I see it and see everything he ever wanted for his life that never was and never could or will be. I see his fantasy of access to a world he could not quite touch. I did not want to put his bike in storage because I worried if I did not look at it, it would disappear entirely from my awareness, a monster under the bed. I need it gone. This is a stupid, solvable problem, but I need it gone. I need to get to the place of feeling everything it means to sell Jeffrey’s bike 21 months after he died, but I cannot do the grief of what Jeffrey on a bicycle means multiple times. To sell the bike, I need to be in the place where the grief does not exist. I am not yet integrated.
In EMDR on Friday, I explained to my therapist a breakthrough from the night before. As I lay in bed underneath a Black Hole my new Galaxy light made, I marinated in the absolute joy the light brings me. My dad got me this light for my birthday I sincerely do not recall a more favored gift. Every night since receiving it, I sleep under the Milky Way or a constellation or a black hole and sit in wonderment at the simple joy they bring. To feel wonder and awe is a gift. As soon as I registered the joy, my brain connected to the loneliness in a punch so startling I messaged Randy before I could forget it:
I really love my galaxy light so deeply. And it is so hard to have no one to share it with.
As soon as I hit send, I started sobbing in a convulsive, uninhibited way. I realized I needed to unrestraint my voice and let audible sobs proclaim my anguish outward. I began to panic and recognized my brain warn me: You’re going to have a panic attack if you don’t restrain these tears. I clasped my hands over my chest and felt the weight of me holding my broken heart. You’re going to have a panic attack if you don’t restrain these tears. I reached my right hand for Dottie and focused on the texture of her soft, course hair. Then I once again touched the loneliness. I let myself feel sorry for me. You’re going to have a panic attack if you don’t restrain these tears. I sent my attention to my left hand holding my heart, then my right hand on Dottie, and went back in. You are heartbroken and you do not have to be strong right now. You’re going to have a panic attack if you don’t restrain these tears. Left hand on heart. Right hand on Dottie. I stayed in that cycle for an unknown amount of time. Eventually the panicked thoughts accosted me in a way that told me I needed to stop, to contain what I was feeling.
As my lungs slowed their gasp for air, I realized I had not been able to feel what I was feeling before Thursday. That my loneliness and my heartbreak were only in words inside my brain, not in my body. I felt relieved the work I have done for 21 months has gotten me here, to a place where I can help my body feel the magnitude of complex feelings, if even for a handful of moments, and bypass a panic attack. A live version of Clearest Blue by Chvrches started playing and tears formed once more as I saturated in what it felt like to be in a feeling I could only describe as the clearest blue.
As I sat in the grass with Dottie tonight, my brain suggested something I know is true. The obstacles with selling Jeffrey’s bike are multiple and represent something I have yet to access in EMDR. The week Jeffrey died was one complication after another. I could not feel any of what was happening because I needed to function, I needed to show up at the hospital day after day for whatever torture was next. This bike is a microcosm of that week. One unexpected problem after another, a delayed grief out of protective necessity.
My EMDR therapist and I agreed I am ready to start processing the week Jeffrey died. I am both not ready and ready. I am scared of the moments when I am alone in the aftermath of opening this particular vault because I cannot carry what happened by myself. But that is the point of this healing journey, to help make what happened something I can carry, something I have a ladder to climb in order to gain perspective. I no longer want this trauma sitting on me, suffocating my ability to live. Because I want to see and feel the clearest blue.
