Feelings

Feelings are weird. They rarely behave how you expect them to and when they do it's more puzzling than reassuring. The last two months have been a strange ride, and a big part of me can't believe my dad's been gone for that long; yet it's no time at all. By and large it's been an odd mixture of feeling not a lot before either crashing into a pile of tears or laughing so hard I am yet again crying. But in a good way. I think.

One weird thing I've noticed is anything can set me off laughing or sobbing. I was standing waiting for a tube train at a station I've used a gazillion times. It is also the station my dad used for the 37 odd years he worked in London. This tiny thought barely passed through my squidgy brain and it left behind an emotional storm akin to Hurricane Bawbag. Only a sheer force of stubbornness stopped me from sobbing on that platform.

Two days later I read a tumblr post about a guy playing the Sims while drunk, and it made me laugh so hard I couldn't see or breathe. It's not even that funny. Well, it is, if you're a gamer who also tortured poor little sims in a variety of fucked-up-this-is-what-hell-is-like ways. But it cracked me up to the point my sides hurt.

The rest of the time is even stranger. I can have perfectly normal conversations, I enjoy people's company, I am genuinely emotionally engaged with what's going on. But afterwards it seems like someone turned the volume down or forgot to paint the colours in. It's all just a bit "meh".

Essentially this grief business is a complete and utter mind-fuck; just when you think you're maybe getting a grip on it all, a page from a newspaper will drift past on the wind and remind you of that time your loved one did a thing or said a thing. There's absolutely no frickin similarity between that damned bit of paper and the memory but nevertheless your brain goes, "huh, that reminds me of this time you probably don't want to think about right now, but I'm going to make you think about it anyway, because I'm a sadistic prick who is going to make you have feels - whether you want to or not."

The one thing I can say about all this is I am definitely getting a much better understanding of how to write more rounded characters with major emotional issues. In an odd way keeping a part of myself as an observer is helping, as it provides a distance when all of these feelings get a bit too much. Writing what you know has never rung more true for me than right now.