Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Tori
I couldn’t tell you the last time I laughed, the last time I truly felt something other than this agonizing pain that’s present as soon as I wake and follows me into the nights where I may sleep for a few hours if I am lucky.
My mind is a constant loop of questions and anxious thoughts.
What if this, what if that? What if Trent hadn’t deployed?
What if I had never gotten pregnant? What if my baby had survived?
What if my brother, Harry, had never joined the military?
Then maybe I’d have never met Trent, and I’d have been saved from this heartache.
There is a version of myself that wishes I had never known him, and I hate myself for thinking that, but it’s true.
If I was really wishing for something, it would be that I could wake up and have this all be a terrible nightmare.
I know my parents and my friends are worried about me; they stop by daily and try to force me to eat and to step outside. I tried going back to work, but after one hour in the office, I felt like my chest was going to cave in. I haven’t stepped back there since, and it’s been nearly two months.
Harry, Noah, and the others had to return to Afghanistan just a few days after Trent’s funeral.
Harry called to say he would be home soon, but I’ve lost track of the days.
Soon could mean today, it could mean next month.
Who knows? They had no time to grieve, no time to process or maybe they had.
Maybe it’s just me who can’t move on and function, but maybe I had more to process because I’m not only grieving him, but I’m also grieving the version of myself I thought I’d be at this point in my life, the version that died right along with him and our baby.
I’m scared I’ll never get to be that version of myself.
The wife, the mother, the homemaker, but maybe this was who I was destined to become. Alone.
The only light relief I get from my own thoughts is when I take the sleeping pills the doctor prescribed.
It’s exhausting living inside your own head, waking up, and every day feeling the same with no end in sight.
How long is too long to mourn? They say there are stages to grief, but I am unsure what stage I’m in, because it feels like it’s just a cluster of emotions.
Anger, sadness, fear, acceptance, and denial all wrapped up together, and I don’t know how much longer I can do it.
I just want it all to go away, even if it were just for a day. I want to wake up without the heaviness in my chest, for my muscles to feel supple and not tense, for the ache in my heart to fade, and for my mind to be quiet. I seem to have forgotten what true peace feels like.
I pick up Trent’s last letter to read again. The letter every soldier has to write in case they don’t make it back home, just to torture myself again.
My heart splinters all over again every time I reread the words and stroke the pads of my fingers over the space where his fingers touched, and the ink of his pen left his final words for me.
I reach for the box of sleeping pills from the coffee table and lift them toward the light, to try and count the shadows of pills through the orange plastic as I wonder how many it would take.
How many would it take to make it all go away?
How many would I need to consume to be able to get some rest long enough to reset and wake up as the old me and not this version I no longer know?
I feel like a stranger in my own body, and I need it to stop.
I sit up, pop the lid, and pour the tablets out onto the blanket I have been rotting under for days, and reach for my glass of water.
I place the first pill on my tongue, giving it a second for the powdery taste to hit my taste buds, and then take a sip of water and swallow it down.
Then, I take a second and repeat, but instead of stopping at two like I usually do, I keep going.
I stare motionless at the TV showing reruns of Friends, my go-to comfort show, but even that has stopped working.
I repeat the motion: one pill on the tongue, sip, swallow, repeat.
When I’m done, I lie back slowly, staring at the ceiling until my eyelids grow heavy and my body begins to feel weightless.
It’s the most at peace I have felt in months.
There are no thoughts, no noise, no pain, no sadness, just darkness and silence.