25/10/2015 - 13:24
At first you can't process the new information. It feels like someone is telling you a story that isnt real. But they're getting emotional and you feel like you're getting emotional because of it, but you still don't quite believe it's real
After a while nothing feels real. It feels like every other Sunday. Or rather every other part of this Sunday is carrying on like nothing life-changing has happened and the disconnect is so huge that to you it's obvious, something so ridiculously horrible isn't real, can't be true and most of all, can't be happening to you.
Mechanical. The things you've been doing everyday for years, your daily routine, feels oddly out of place in this world. Your mind's not in it, and it feels like each limb has to be separately engaged to function.
You start to research - mostly to disprove the reality of the situation. And you think, all these other symptoms aren't present. So it could be something else.
Then you start to pray about it, just in case, and also because even if it isn't that serious, you think, it is serious. And the more you pray about it, the more you search for words, the more you have to think and verbalize in your heart what exactly you're praying for, the tears start brimming and then set themselves loose from your eyes, streaming down and you don't stop them because there's too many to stop. Maybe this is actually happening.
You start to think about how you will handle this, what you'll do and how you'll behave the next day when you have to see your friends or your colleagues. You start to think about how it'll change the way you behave, and you start to hate yourself because even now you're thinking about you. Selfish. It feels like by thinking about it, you're choreographing your public mask of grief. You force yourself to stop thinking about it, but at the back of the mind you continue to wonder whether you're capable of genuinely expressing grief.
You grab a taxi to head over to the hospital, and you wonder what the taxi driver is thinking as he's driving you and your cousins to the hospital.
You haven't told your nearest and dearest, but you tell a stranger, and you feel nothing.