A traveller's note

I have been running away from missing you. I willingly do everything that helps me move on to the next stage of my life because everything I knew was decorated with your presence. My life is still pretty much like an after-party clean up. I am learning to feel the things I used to know all over again.   But there's a layer of my humanity that was eroded with your passing. And so I feel things differently, just like your death, it hurts differently. But I record most of my days, I look back and chuckle and think to myself, "who is he kidding?" But it is amazing to be able to reach the level of joy often brought with the love of friends while I am away from family. The point of this note though, was to say I love and miss you. And more so now that I am away from the safety net that is family and friends back home. I was telling Hlonela just the other day that I think the best part about falling in love was mending from a broken heart. The recovery is full of interesting aspects of my life I only heard from people.
This morning I came across words from Muslim scriptures that felt like light into my current darkness of feeling lost without you.

Be in the world as if you were as a stranger or a traveller: when evening time comes, expect not the morning; and when morning time comes expect not the evening; and prepare as long as you are in good health for sickness, and so long as you are alive for death. 

After reading this, I realised that I am startled by feeling better because the intensity of my grief is subsiding. I don't have any feeling of guilt because you've always put yourself before me ensuring my happiness. There's no doubt in my mind about how you feel about how I've carried on since you left. In everything I do, I try to be present. But in all the great things that happen to me, I still look for you. This makes me a difficult person to love or console because sometimes my heart just yearns for you and it won't stop until you just don't arrive. My conclusion is that extreme pain of knowing you are not coming back is what subdues the heart and it lets go. It's a cycle I live with now. It's like the rest of my being is separated from my own heart. My body and my mind are the caretakers of a broken heart.

I love and miss you Lesley. I don't express it every day, but my whole life and everything I do is themed around your death. I am in places I would not be in if you were still alive. Everything about me just says, I miss you. I pray to God of my forefathers that you are resting peace.