She sits alone in the dark, not for the first time

The glow from the TV the only light illuminating the silent tears that fall.

Life is now a funny sort of paradox

With everything as it should be and yet nothing is right at all.

But it is not only at home in the dark

Where the pain of grief and loneliness resides like an unwelcome guest.

She is now set apart. It’s no one’s fault

Her grief isolates her even in a room full of people, she’s different from the rest.

She is often completely incredulous

How can the earth spin and the sun shine when her world has irreparably changed

She is jealous of those whose life is as it was

It’s irrational and she knows it but it’s the new normal in a life so rearranged.

“You’re so brave and strong” she hears all the time.

Words that harden her resolve to maintain the mask she wears.

Not friends nor family know the truth

That loneliness is her closest companion, the new general state of affairs.

Once sure of herself, confident, happy, relaxed

She now has an almost compulsive need to know what’s next.

Because the one thing she could not have planned for

Took not only her love but her life, the simple and complex.

She is afraid that life will now always be as it is.

She is scared that she won’t be able to keep up the façade forever.

That this storm that continuously rages within

Will wear her down whatever, whenever, wherever, whomever.

Deep down inside her though

In a place she is almost too scared to acknowledge lies a small belief

That even though it will never be the same

Someday, somehow life could be different from this life of grief

And so now, with a small resolve

She dries her eyes, turns the TV off and retreats, at least for now it seems

To her only place of respite

Where neither reality nor fiction matter somehow – her dreams.

Always & forever….