Coatlucie

Some time ago, I lost somebody that I loved deeply. We don't need to go into the specifics, since it's not ultimately relevant to what I have to tell you. But there was a loss, and I felt it down to the bone. After a few days of crying in bed and self-pity, I decided that I wanted to read other people's stories of grief. I would find strength, I thought, in the fact that these strangers had felt just as low as I did and had managed to get through it. It was very simple: all I had to do was fire up Tumblr and type in 'grief' as my search tag. My dashboard was immediately full of people with broken hearts, dreams, lives - all wondering how they'd gotten there and if it would ever get better. Happily, if you read a particularly moving entry and clicked over to the rest of their journal, the people always eventually overcame their sadness. It seemed that it was always quite sudden, too - they just woke up one day, free of the monster on their backs that had been plaguing them. I began to expect and look forward to the day that I would experience my surprising relief, as well. Except... it never happened. Each day that I woke up, I seemed to feel her absence even more. Everything reminded me of our lives that had been so thoroughly entwined: grabbing my favorite latte from Starbucks reminded me of the little cafe that we went to after school to do our homework and giggle at our fellow students, terrible pop-rap songs transported me to our silly fake-name dedications to each other on the local radio station, hearing about politics on the daily news reminded me of the summer we spent canvassing door-to-door for her favorite politician - she was everywhere. Even new things started to bear her face when a popular animation company released a trailer for their next animated film - and the heroine, with her unique looks, was a dead ringer for the girl that I'd lost. I couldn't escape my grief anywhere except for when I was submerging myself in the sorrows of these others - the faceless Tumblr people became my salvation. I stopped going out for coffee with friends, I stopped watching the news, I stopped listening to music - I hoped that by completely excluding myself from everything with her fingerprints on it in the real world, that I would give myself time to heal. I began to exist solely in my perfect bubble of absorbing and finding hope in the end of other people's grief. 'I just woke up one day, and it was gone' - that's the sentiment that I kept reading. I started to wonder why my day refused to come, why each day I woke up feeling like my burdens had multiplied rather than unloaded. I would sit in bed, motionless, lightless beyond the laptop screen's glare as I found more and more people who were experiencing pain. Eventually, I'd fall asleep - never having left the bed, except perhaps to use the restroom or eat some stale cereal - and the cycle would repeat when I awoke. One night, something interrupted my pattern. I woke up around 1 AM with such a vivid, visceral cocktail of anger, fright, and loss that for a moment I couldn't even breathe, and then I remembered my dream: I had been a little boy who, upon seeing his elderly grandmother being mauled by his beloved dog, had taken up a brick and smashed the puppy's head in. It was so real... I could still hear my mournful wails as I realized that I'd been too late, and had lost both my grandmother and my faithful collie and was now alone with all that blood. I flipped open my laptop like a maniac, desparate to read about someone's cheating boyfriend or lost job to distract me from my dream. It worked, for a time, until I stumbled onto a post from a few hours earlier - a post from a young mother, saying that she'd come home from work to find her 11-year-old son, brick in hand, crying over the bodies of his grandma and pet dog. She went on to detail my dream, exactly. I felt a chill to my very core, but no matter how many times I refreshed the dashboard, the post remained. How was this possibly reality? I must have sat there in shock for an hour, at least. I finally worked up th