This morning I was in Meijer looking at Christmas lights for my drum for the parade on Friday night and also for some decorations for the office at work. I was browsing around the Christmas stuff and saw Christmas socks. And it made me kind of sad.
What did Rachel want last year for Christmas? Socks. So she got socks. Actually, a lot of socks. She wasn’t much of the type that wore socks that came in big packages, she had lots of individual pairs of socks, most of them different. She once told me about how a local actor had once said he’d been naked on stage twice and how much more naked he felt the time he couldn’t wear socks and how much she related to that. That girl loves her socks.
I started thinking about what my mom was saying this weekend, about how part of dealing with the end of a relationship is a lot like dealing with the death of a close loved one. You have a lot invested in it, and both are a loss. Both dramatically change the way you live day to day and both require major adjustments to be made. I remember the therapist I see for my ADD saying a similar thing back when I went to see him about being put back on anti-depressants (see my post Brain Medicine for more on that). I also think back to the bit of wisdom that I always find myself going back to from Jeph Loeb said by Wolverine. That a loss like that is like being shot in the stomach with a cannonball and as it begins to heal, you hear a song, someone laughs, the wind blows the right way, or in my case that you see Christmas socks, and it rips that hole wide open again.
Christmas Eve will be hard for me this year, I can already tell, because that’s when Rachel and I got engaged (see my post Engagement). Or well when we officially announced that we were engaged. Another thing my mom was saying though was that you have to let the anniversaries pass. I was that way with Will and Nick when they passed, I’ll probably be the same with this as well.
In some way it’s funny that the little innocuous things in life can mean so much when you realize that they’re gone. Like how this year I won’t have anyone to buy socks for at Christmas, and that makes me a little sad.
