Tell me why

How can attachment hurt so much? How can something that is meant to make a baby feel safe, secure and protected go so wrong and cause so much pain for a whole fucking lifetime? How is it possible that being away from someone can hurt this much when it was possible to live for 32 years without knowing that person? How can it have got better and then be like this again? Is it going to hurt like this until I see K next year, if that is even when it is? Is it going to cycle like this the whole time, flooding me and leaving me unable to breathe or function? How can the absence of someone feel so acute, like it is actually killing me, as if I am dying, when they are still here? How can these intolerable feelings be the result of something that happened so long ago? And how can it hurt so much to not have two hours with K that it is making the rest of my life so impossible to bear when I was always away from her basically all the time? How can those two hours each week have had such an impact? Where does pain come from? How can it all be there still, waiting to flood me, making me wish for death because the pain of being apart from someone is too much to bear?

This honestly does not feel survivable. I am speaking to K at 11.15 tomorrow as planned and it feels so far away. The thought of all the months ahead without seeing her, being with her, feeling her presence, it is torture. And alongside that the constant fear that even after all that time we won’t be able to resume in-person work, something will happen and we will have to end, after an agonising year of waiting. I wanted to write that I hate myself for feeling like this, but maybe this is where the healing lies. I don’t know how to love myself through this, it feels too unsafe, as if the feelings will get bigger if I allow them and acknowledge just how bad this feels.  I can’t believe I’m back to holding out for a crumb of contact, after 2 years of feeling so much more settled. It is so unfair.

It could be a year without seeing K, how is that even possible to survive when 11 weeks has left me here? And why can I not take in that she is still here? She sent photos this afternoon of Little Miffy in her garden, she says “Little Miffy is you really” and so a part of me is always with her, and it filled me up for half an hour and then it is gone and I feel abandoned again even though nothing has happened. Nothing has changed. Nothing is enough. It is like waves of grief again, grief that is not about her but is so bound up with her that it doesn’t even matter where it’s from anymore.

I feel so alone. It is impossible for anyone I know to understand this pain, that she is still here and yet it feels as though she isn’t and that the loss of two hours with someone each week has left me with the worst pain imaginable. The months ahead feel unbearable and I just want to be someone else. I hate being like this. I just want K, only K, nothing else comes close. I am supposed to feel this about my mum and instead I had to wait 32 years to be soothed by someone who was never even mine.