Holes

I've been called cold-hearted before. Unfeeling. Uncaring. Distant.

I suppose I can understand that.

I'm not awfully demonstrative. I never learned how to put my feelings on display for others to see, and have always felt a bit...I don't know...ashamed, I guess...when I've let things slip. I don't mean in writing...written words are different. I can write 'em and walk away and leave 'em to their own devices. While there's an air of permanence to them, it's a more distant permanence, one I can leave behind for others to mull over at their leisure. Spoken words and actions are so immediate and tend to linger in unsavory ways long after the sponsoring emotion is spent.

Also, when I was kid, visible strong emotion was frowned upon. It smacked of histrionics and bids for attention.

Nature and nurture have combined to make of me a woman who does not wear her feelings on her sleeve...not readily, anyway, and certainly not in public. Given my druthers, I'll just keep myself to myself, keep from dragging anyone else into my nonsense.

The problem with internalizing things is...people tend to think one isn't feeling anything at all, or that one doesn't require commiseration or comfort when one is hurting. Hell, most of the time, folks can't tell that I'm hurting. I'm usually OK with that...who needs all the fuss? Life goes on anyway, doesn't it?

This isn't going where I thought it would. I was thinking about my grandfather and how I mourn him in odd moments. Some twenty years after his death, I still miss him and find an emptiness where his silent, stern, huge presence used to linger. I talk to him, to my Papa, just about every day. When I greet the sun, I say "Hey, Papa" and half the time I don't know if I'm talking to the sun or my grandfather. I never mourned him with tears and wailing and the wearing of black clothes. I've just...missed him...every day since he died.

I imagine that's how it'll be for Snake. I didn't cry at his funeral...not much, anyway, and more for the folks he left behind. But on odd days, in odd moments, I'll remember that my grumpy curmudgeon of a friend isn't here any more...that when it's storming during an event, there won't be a phone call to the tower and a gruff voice lecturing me on the proximity of lightning and how it's bad for the net and (not inconsequently)(although secondary to protecting the communications equipment) for the workers connected to the net by wires...workers who'd probably prefer not to have their brains fried via their ears due to lightning strike.

There won't be a battered old blue truck parked right next to the Emergency Vehicles base, blocking half the drive and sometimes the doorway in. No stern lectures at the beginning of the Petit le Mans about charging the handheld every night and don't forget to bring the charger back at the end!

It'll take years, probably, for me to get used to his absence...if I ever really do. And probably no one except the few of you who're reading this (bless you for your tenacity) will ever know that I do miss him...and all of my dead...deeply. There's a Snake shaped hole that won't ever be filled again...right next to Papa, and Bart, and Fred, and my other grandparents, a host of other friends, and even a few cats, some birds, and a dog or two. I'll mourn quietly and in out of the way places, unseen and unnoticed because that's how I am.

And life does go on, whether we will or no...