Wanting the Universe They Are In

I thought I was done. I wasn’t.

For a while, my book was an active being in my life.

I was writing every day. Living inside it. At one point, I genuinely thought Patrick was going to divorce me. I was completely in it — feeling everything as it hit — and it honestly felt like it had to come out. Everything I had been holding in for decades poured onto the page, and that doesn’t happen without reliving it to some extent.

When I finally decided it was done — that I needed to stop tweaking, editing, circling — I missed it.

I missed writing every day.
I missed using every spare moment to get it finished.
I missed the way the past and the present stayed in constant conversation.

It felt a little like losing a friend.

Eventually, I stopped rereading pieces every day and shifted into the strange, quieter phase of sending it out into the world — hoping someone would see what I see in it.

Yesterday, I received deeply thoughtful feedback from someone kind enough to read the whole book. And it pulled me right back inside.

When I think about the book being finished, I feel relief — that I survived the telling of it — but also the sense that it marks a line in my life:
before writing the book and after writing the book.

I carried this for decades.
I got it out.

It isn’t solved. I’m not healed. But I pulled it out of the dark and into the light.

Survival may be the truest resolution the book offers — not just surviving what happened, but surviving the act of telling it. Letting others witness what I’ve been carrying.

And it has been heavy.

There is no closure. There will never be closure. This is a witness’s account of grief, pain, and humanity — not a story that ties itself shut.

There isn’t an answer that would ever resolve it.

My mom, Zee, and Kevin live in my heart — and I believe, in my soul — but there is an agony in longing for them to be real, here, physically with me.

Love with nowhere physical to go.

I want them here.
I want them physically here.
I want the weight, the sound, the presence — the interruption of ordinary life.

I want to walk in the door and hear Zee crying and spinning in circles, deliriously happy to see me.
I want my mom in the kitchen telling me I need to eat something, singing to my dad.
I want Kevin to be my real brother — someone who knows me because he always has.

And if I were offered the chance to live in the timeline where that was real — where they were all still here — I would go in a heartbeat.

I’m not grieving the events as much as what never got to unfold. The life that should have existed. The family that ended before it could really begin.

Kevin would have shared everything with Kara and me — our parents as witnesses to who we were becoming. Another person who would have truly known us. That thought makes me feel warm and hollow at the same time.

Somehow, I was given the capacity for deep attachment. I’m pretty sure that was my mother’s doing. Love doesn’t weaken with time. It just loses its place to land.

Some losses aren’t puzzles.
They’re landscape changes.

I can’t solve this. I can only learn where the cliffs are and build a life that doesn’t pretend they aren’t there.

My heart longs for the family that knew me before I had to become strong. That was home.

This is where I live now.

And still — I find myself wanting the universe they are in.