Dear Mom

I miss you like crazy. It still blows my mind and breaks me into so many small pieces knowing you are gone. I have tried to talk to you but nothing comes out. It feels like a poor facsimile of communication to try and have a one-sided conversation with you. I know people always tell me to talk to you and that you will hear me, but it's just not the same.

For so many years

, you were the only thing that kept me going, that kept me putting one foot in front of the other. So many times over the years I wanted to give up: because of my heart breaking when I left John, because of my meth addiction, because of my HIV diagnosis...so many times I thought it was the end of me and you always showed me and convinced me I had so much to live for. I believed you. I shook off all the self-pity and kept going.

I do not think I can shake this off. Losing you is more than I can bear. It feels like a tsunami has overwhelmed me and I am drowning. I try to get back into my life and it all rings so hollow and so dim.

I have lost my best friend, I have lost the one person I could talk to about anything, the one person who ever understood me. I feel like I have lost my voice. I have lost my vision. I am just lost, so lost. And nobody understands. People want to talk, they just think if I talk it out I will feel better. And I can't talk, because then I am overwhelmed and overcome and I can't let that out because then I would truly lose it. I am holding on by a thread and it is unraveling.

We are all so lost without you. You were the glue that held us all together. It is so unreal! I keep going back to the few months before you died, or even the year before you died. I keep thinking I should have pushed you into going to the doctor more often when all of your health issues would pop up. But I believed you! I believed you when you said it was no big deal, that it would get better soon. I believed you because I am the same way as I too underemphasize things. I blame dad (the biological one) because he was a hyperchondriac, which makes me fear being that way.

It is so unreal I will never eat breakfast with you at Shoney's or shock you with whatever crazy mess I have made of my hair, or trade books with you, or taste your chili. I try so hard to think of the good things but all it does is remind me that all of the good things in a life without you are gone forever. There will be no more roadtrips where you get mad at me for having to pee every other exit, no more road trips where I sing badly to you to whatever song is on the radio.

They say there is no such thing as too late, but that is not true. Too late can happen so fast, and when it does it is so final. There just was not enough time...that is not true, there was time and I squandered it by never being there as much as I should have been, always having something else to do, none of which was ever important. I was a lazy excuse for a son. I was selfish, even to the end as it killed me to be in the same room, to watch you die in front of me.

I was the last person to see you alive. I can not get the image of you out of my head and all I can see is how much you suffered and it is killing me. The pain is so hard, it is too much to bear and I don't know how much longer I can keep it inside without it killing me. I did not do enough for you. I failed. I miss you so much. It can't be like this! It should not be like this! It is all so wrong, it all went so wrong and it is not fair.

I keep looking for you to come back. I keep picking up my phone. There are so many things I want to tell you every day, little things, stupid things. I read a good book and I start to call you to tell you about it, a celebrity dies and I pick up the phone to tell you first before you can tell me.

There is just not enough time in life. We all think we have forever and that is a lie we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel less guilty when we bail out. I do not want to live anymore. There just is not anything here anymore. I feel like I am in the world alone. I see vague shapes of people but I do not feel anything anymore outside of sadness. I think about killing myself every single day, several times a day, but I have not acted on it because I know how disappointed in me you would be. I go back and forth like a see-saw, thinking about how upset you would be if I ended everything, but then I think that I could see you again. I go up and down on this see-saw and I am tired.

I am so tired. Everything is just too hard. I will try my best to hold on. Nobody understands.