May

May 16th, 2024

May used to be my favorite month, and now it’s the hardest.

It’s not fair, which is perfect because my dad spent my childhood preparing and then reminding me that life would never be.

I was born on the first of May, she was born on the last, and her day — Mother’s Day — falls on the second Sunday.

She died in October but, due to life’s hilariously unfair mean streak, her celebration of life wasn’t held until — you guessed it — the following May, three years ago.

Like a magnet reversing polarity, all my body wants to do in the month of May is get out of it, and once I do, I’m repelled through the rest of the months until I’m pulled right back into it, before I even get to process the year that was.

In May, I feel like I don’t have skin.

Everything feels raw. A flick feels like a slap and a slap feels like closed fist, a meat tenderizer on exposed nerves. Anything hurts. I’m always tired. I was under the impression that grief was like a hiker, taking steps gradually up and down, but that its overall direction was higher ground; I was told the bitterness got better.

This attitude may be true for most of the year but it is not true for May.

I’m not sure how I do anything in May. To the rest of the world I look the same as I did in April; I talk like I did in March; I give high fives and fist bumps like I did in February; I gossip about the weather like I did in January.

But I am my own dark doppelganger.

I’m not the same in May and there isn’t anything I can do about it and this is the worst fucking part: I wouldn’t change this feeling if I could.

Because the pain I feel in May is the cost of the love I had and the love I have. I have to pay for the priceless.

I know this and I accept this and the only reason I don’t drive myself into the ocean is because I get the pain. This pain that reminds me that everything is real, and that loss only matters if what you lost mattered at all.

Mama’s boys make the mistake of loving someone the most who won’t always be there for us by design.

I made a mistake at the beginning of this essay.

May is my favorite month, which is why it is the hardest. Every year, May tears me apart so I can be put together better.