Every single dawn through dusk makes for a colossal challenge - one or two steps forward, a stumble, a fall, then an attempt to catch up. Battling against a strong current of negative emotion, trying to remember what positivity feels like, and you take another leap ahead. Moments of laughter temporarily shadow disaster, until fifty steps back to despair and heartbreak.
The wound remains fresh, unhealed and gaping, in the face of life going on, as seemingly cruelly unaltered as it inevitably and invariably does, without you. Yours is on a bewildering pause, where the restart button is temporarily jammed, and unbeknownst to you yet, will never quite play as fluidly again.
Battered and bruised, the heart physically hurts in a sallow chest, filled with nothing, but hollow. No desire to eat, no capacity to sleep, questions and queries, what-ifs and maybes, there will be no reciprocation, no closure. Time heals not such unbridled emotion, and the knowledge that the ticking clock will only make you more able to function, plan, suppress and hide, to achieve a semblance of normal.
When all is said and done, broken and shattered, picking up the pieces and pasting the shards back together one by one, you know deep down that no matter how clean the breaks, microscopic splinters will remain lost in the ether. They float and eschew out of reach and you’re never quite the same whole again. Those missing pieces haunt and daunt forever - time is not your friend.
Only inner strength, willpower and courage carry you through the darkest times and you have to muster those from beneath the sinister veil shrouding your heart and clouding your mind. Little consolation in the moment, but the light at the end of the deep shaft you have fallen into exists and you just have to keep searching.
Take courage, though, that while everything has changed inside, there will eventually be flecks of positivity and growth of self that emanate from the tragedy. Not only for your sake, but for those around you that care and ache at your suffering, must you strive to survive, from dawn til dusk, through slumber and waking, until finally you breach the light and rediscover a semblance of normality. You must.