Not Quite Here

It seems like I have been absent lately, not just from this
blog but also from my life, from who I once was and who I might yet be.  The past week or two has been
especially tentative, and life seems to have been spent in an even more intense
cycle of waiting, hope, despair, and more hope.

For there is hope now, more hope.  Wonderful hope.

And I am ecstatic!

How do I show this? 

The floodgates opened and I cried my heart out.

How do you explain the explosion that occurs when months of
despair are confronted with hope?

I saw my husband again. Out of the fog he walked, the man I
married, a man able to see beyond the increasingly narrow constraints of his
own mind.  It was a joy and a
shock.

I had never allowed myself to grieve for the loss of that
person who had been taken from me. 
How do you grieve for a person who is with you and whom you see
everyday, but who is also only a small part of the person he once had been? How
can you grieve the loss of a life that remains present with you every single
day?  Only after being confronted
with how much had been lost was I able to admit how much I grieved

I cried and cried and cried.  I cried for what I had lost.  I cried for what I had found.  I cried because I tried to convince myself to abandon hope.  I cried because I can't bear to lose him again.

And in crying I found some piece of myself that had been misplaced.

And then I was visited by a plague.  But that is a different story.