Tell me why June is never a picnic.

But since you aren’t here to tell me, I’ll tell you. Each time your birthday approaches, I can’t breathe. Each time I see a year that should have been marked go unmarked, it hurts. I want to scream at you for not being here. For bailing. But I can’t blame you when I know what you were going through. That mixture of emotions is crushing me.

I feel like if I could be simply pissed at you for leaving us all here to struggle without you, the burden wouldn’t be so much. It would hurt less if I could just be furious and hate you for it. If I could look at you and simply feel one way, it wouldn’t hurt like this. Losing my mother was easier, because I only feel love for her and not crushing abandonment. Losing every single one of our cats was easier, because when I think of them I just miss each of their shining souls without the complication of other emotions.

Losing you. I still can’t breathe. Can’t think, can’t function, can’t cry enough tears to be OVER IT. There is no getting over it. How is my soul supposed to just continue without my best friend? How can I be expected to face the day to day challenge that comes with living, without you at my side? There is no miracle waiting for me, no silver lining, no happy ending, no brightness in the crushing darkness. No hope.

Is that what it felt like? Was that what it was to be you and know that you couldn’t be truly you in this world? Is this even the smallest taste of the feeling that made you seek a way out rather than a way forward? Or do I delude myself to even guess that I might feel a fraction of what you felt? I ask the questions, but you aren’t here to answer. You aren’t here to put me on the right path or to even just help me to smile.

I am drowning. Filling moments with survival, but barley keeping my head above the water. I am treading water and your birthday looms ahead like some terrible wave about to crash over me. A date you despised so much that you would literally flee any celebration of it. A date you dreaded so much that the dread lives on inside of me to this day. This summer we should be turning 33, but its no longer we, but just me.

Around me the world just keeps moving on day after day. I know at this pace that there will one day be a day when 30 years lie between when I last saw you and the present and it kills me to know that the day is coming, even if that day is still over 20 years away. (Read that one ten times fast, I dare you.) Some very tiny part of me hopes that day never comes, because that is more bearable than the feeling of that day drawing closer every single second.

Its irrational. As if it matters whether I saw you three years ago or five or ten or thirty, when each of these numbers is a number that means that you are still gone. You are gone. And I have unknown years of missing you yet to live. It is that simple unfairness that haunts me and will continue to do so until my last day on this earth.

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. What a load of bullshit.