trying to find my way back

I'm trying to find my way back here.  I've been away for a bit.  I have felt that in order to come back here (I say it like its a physical space) that I would have to post about what happened, about losing my boy.  But I'm not ready to do that.  Not even close.  But I missed being here.  I have had things I've wanted to put down somewhere, things and thoughts to share...but here has been a hard place to go.  It's like a room with a closed door that I haven't been able to open.  But I have all this stuff.  And I realize that I've grown rather attached to you, to sharing with you.  And I have all this stuff.  Its not all heavy stuff.  I've got some cool new work I'd love to show you...so I'm putting my toe in the water, I'm venturing in...

Please forgive me if this seems disjointed and reads like you've skipped a chapter.  It's me who skipped a chapter.  I hope that I will be able to write it one day.  In the mean time I'm getting out these thoughts or musings that have been tumbling around in my noggin for the past few weeks.  It might be a little diary-esque.  I apologize.  I just kinda need to get it out and put it somewhere, on a shelf out here in the webosphere.  Maybe you will read, maybe no one will read.  This is quite possibly entirely for self indulgent little ole me.  But here I go...

I've had loss before. Four in the last 20 months in fact. And loss my whole life, like anyone who lives a life. My grandfather, grandmother, my brother, great grandmother, another great grandmother, my aunt...a dog I called my sister, my first cat and other childhood pets....and that's just the loss of death. There is other loss.

But none compare to this. It's not to say I love Clarence more or them less. It's not that. It must be a perfect storm of circumstances. All these things rallied together to make this the hardest (when I say hard I mean rock hard, like concrete, the hardest hard there is...it's the largest expanse of a rock hard parking lot...), it's the hardest loss I've felt. And there is no moving past it that I can see. No getting through it or over it. There is just learning how to live with it as a new member of the family. Because it is. It's always there and it takes up physical space. It's the strangest thing, they seem contradictory of each other - loss and physical space. But I know now that they can be the same.  
I've never understood grief until now.  That's not true.  I've grieved.  I guess what I didn't understand until now is that grief isn't uniform.  I've struggled so much with how differently I've responded to this...I've felt tremendous guilt for not doing the things I did with past loss.  But the thought of doing some of those things (like posting about it here) is utterly paralyzing.

It might be different one day. I can't see it now, but maybe it will. For right now this is our life. And I'm trying to figure it out. I'm trying to learn, each day, how to be and how to get through it as well as possible. Even good when I can.

The hard part is the people in my life. I'm sure they are ready for me to be back. I'm not sure when the me they knew will ever be back. I feel awkward around people who know me.  I feel weird talking about frivolous stuff but I don't want to talk about anything serious.  I just do not know how to be. 
I feel like I've been whittled into something so small that I have nothing to give them.

I feel this need to apologize for this. That part, the apologizing-worrying-what-everyone-thinks part is definitely the old me, the always me. I feel like people probably think I'm being overly dramatic. God forbid they might even be thinking or saying that awful sentence "it's just a dog.". (I really kinda hated even typing those words)
But things happened in a way, each little stone laid out on a path to this outcome. If even one stone, one event, would have been placed differently this might all be different. Either physically different or emotionally different. But the choices we made, the path we took, the outcome we got...it has left me broken, full of red hot anger with no way to fix it, no where to put it. So I'm just living as best I can. I'm working.  I'm working A LOT.  I'm working because it's THE thing that helps.

My grief is my grief.  It's all mine.  It is profound and it's mine.  It will last forever I assume.  And that is why I am whittled down and that is why I need to be a hermit, even more than before, (for a bit) and I need that to be ok.