To hear a new song, read a new book, try new food, to make a new friend, I have to do these things without her. I can't share the encounter with her or feel the joy of a shared adventure. The lack of Ruby is all-pervading. There are different levels of understanding and appreciation of these experiences and, in all of them, I am slightly more alone than I used to be. From now on I am the new me in my new normal, that is to say, I am missing something. Maybe it is like seeing a beatiful landscape newly blinded in one eye or hearing a symphony unable to appreciate half the tones. New experiences can be chromatically faded or atonal. I am in the present but without.
To revisit an old event- to hear an old song, to read an old book, to eat food she liked- hurts in a different way as it reopens recently closed wounds. There are many songs I can't listen to, lots of food I can't go near, streets I can't walk down. There are, very gradually, songs I make myself listen to, food I force myself to cook, streets I will tentively and hastily take a short cut through all of which have a direct route to my heart and to my grief.
Occasionally I am caught unaware by a song on the radio that I know she loved or catch a few seconds of a movie on TV she may have incessantly watched, as children do, and the suddenness of that unique jolt is like putting my hand on a hot kettle- I recoil instinctively and with tears of shock.
These different but similar occurrences, with their variations of effect and connection, evolve over time like a sand dune shifting under a persistent zephyr. I know this is all part of griefs' evolution and I know I must expect the unexpected but the constant reminders of something not present can be grinding. It shifts though and that's what counts.
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