Milk carton best by dates

The two-year anniversary of the crime is stalking me – almost at a cellular level. It’s part of my skin, my bones, my soul. With each day, the tick-tick-tock inside my brain gets incrementally louder. I don’t know how this year will differ from last. I imagine it might be a little easier to keep breathing, but at this point I’m not convinced. Last year I went to work as if nothing was different, but inside my head I was distracted and overwhelmed by the kinds of memories no one should possess.

In days, I will flip the page on my calendar to a new month, the one that haunts me. In the past, it held fond reminders of things like my high school prom, my college graduation, my brother’s birthday – now all overshadowed. One of them, my favorite of the three, is permanently linked to the day of the crime itself. I know that it’s a small issue compared to the damage the actual crime did to my child, to me, to everyone we know, but it still pisses me off. My last positive memory before my life split in two was calling my brother to wish him a happy birthday.

When you have an anniversary date that you celebrate, every reminder is a gift. You buy a gallon of milk, see the date on the carton and get a little thrill that it’s the same day your child was born or you married your best friend. You almost want to hug the carton. Maybe you do a little dance and hoist it up toward the ceiling, like a celebration trophy, before you pour milk into your kid’s cereal bowl. Woohoo, the beautiful day is just around the corner!

It pretty much works the same when you have an anniversary date that you dread – except that it’s the opposite. You almost can’t bear to touch the carton. It might sear your skin on contact, like the memories branded on your brain. When you see that date on your gallon of milk, you get an acidic pit in your stomach that flares up every time you pour a little milk in your coffee. The day looms over you, suffocating you with its proximity. You wish you could vomit out all of the ugly horrors and clear them from your system, but instead you know that you simply must trudge through, cringing every time one of them brushes up against you. You can’t escape them and it’s pointless and exhausting to even try. Every year, for the rest of your life, you are going to feel the same tick-tick-tock of the same damn day coming to remind you of the worst moments of your entire life. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it except keep going.

In my case, I’ve got a bonus day to dread. The two came back to back as part of a package deal. The day of the crime and the day following, which is when I found out what happened and took action. This year, I have an important part of an exciting project due on that second day. I’m hoping that it will so thoroughly consume my attention that I will “forget” to think about what was happening in my life on that day in 2016. Yeah, right. That’s never going to happen. Oddly enough though, something that I was excited about was also randomly scheduled for the same day last year. While it didn’t make me forget what had happened a year before, it did give me a few minutes of happiness on an otherwise dreary day.

Yet, I’m hopeful that this year will be a little easier than last. I’m healing and I can feel it. My focus and concentration have returned – I can even watch an entire movie and keep track of the plot and characters without difficulty. I can’t tell you how many times I started reading a book or watching something without finishing it because I couldn’t follow what was happening from one minute to the next. I’ve stopped checking the locks on the doors a zillion times a night, shaking uncontrollably when stressed, or keeping watch for whatever might be looming just over the horizon. I no longer meet the criteria for PTSD.

For weeks now, I’ve had nightly dreams of my ex and the friends and family withdrawn from my life because of the things he did. But the dreams are softer and less urgent than they were last year. I no longer wake in terror or with a burning anger that takes hours to subside so I can pretend to sleep again. My current dreams are all about sadness and acceptance. And that’s pretty much where I’m at when awake too. It’s not a bad place to be.

Maybe those two days won’t sting quite so much next year or ten years down the road. I’ll see. But just as I can’t go a day, or even a handful of hours, without the memories rattling around my brain, those two days will never again be just two normal days in mid-May.

I think I’m finally coming to terms with that.

The photos from today’s post were taken in March at San Diego’s Balboa Park, one of my all-time favorite places.