Life is a dancefloor....

"Might as well let go, you can't take back what you've done..."

That's part of my problem.  For some reason, I'm literally hard-wired to obsess.  At least, that's what the shrink said by looking over the waves of my brain.  I suppose he got bored with me, or he's just kind of letting me do my own thing during October, because I'd told him it would be crazy-busy.

I've got to work on my birthday, which is a first in a while, but being the type of retail, I don't mind it.  At least that day I get to work early, so off early, which means dinner, possibly.  I don't really think too much about it.  Frankly, the only thing I want for my birthday, I can't have.  And that would be just to hear my sister call and wish me a happy birthday, as we were apt to do on our birthdays.  Just call and chat.

Last month I found myself calling her phone number, just to see if the voice mail was still there.  Nope.  I couldn't have checked it, so I wonder about the calls she never got to return sometimes.  It worries me, fascinates me, and humbles me, the realization of how completely her life just stopped.  Bill collectors and catalogs still frequent the mail.  I had to donate a lot of her clothes (when I got here, we were the same size....a few months past and I'm much smaller now....plus, well, we just aren' t into the same kind of style of dress....go figure), and she has art supplies here I have yet to go through.  So much stuff, so little time.  And well, there's other things.

She's got photographs of being out with people I've never seen before, to places I never knew she traveled to.  I am sure she loved her friends very much, but it was just another indicator about how very different our lives were.  Sometimes it makes me feel really alienated, like I never really knew her at all.  And in other moments, we we spoke and the exact same thoughts crossed our minds, I felt deeply we were cut from the same cloth.

And now....now all I have to analyze is what went on before, and soon enough, those memories will erode in their sharpness, and it scares me to forget them.

And then I think about my stepbrother, about how long he had to suffer with schizophrenia, and it makes me truly sad.  I mean, it emphasizes the fact that in all acutality, I lost both my sister and stepbrother a long time ago.  Estranged.  And the thing that makes it the most pointed is the fact that I have a hard time recounting the last time I saw them before their deaths.  In my stepbrother's instance, I think years have passed.  In the instance of my sister....I'd seen her a few weeks before, but before that particular visit?  I can't remember.

Gods help me, it's really been long enough I can't remember.

It still doesn't make me feel less of either of them, I love them all the more for having watched.  Having been blessed enough to be there.  Not entirely under the circumstances any of us would choose, but I got one gift I can't be ungrateful for.  I got to say goodbye, which is a lot more than some people ever get.

Just sometimes I feel really alone.