This Time Last Year

After seeing a friend post a picture using an app called "Timehop," I decided to download it. The app syncs with your phone's photo gallery, Instagram, and Facebook accounts to show you pictures that were taken on each date years prior.

Every morning I've been opening the app with both anticipation and dread. The pictures that it's found from seven, five, or three years ago have been making me laugh. It's given me the opportunity to relive high school graduation parties, college, studying abroad, and everything in between. But the pictures from one year ago have been the most interesting for me to see. As the days get closer to May 28th I am constantly reminded that it's almost been an entire year since Blake has been in our lives.

More so than ever before, I find myself starting sentences in my mind with "This time last year..." as I recall so many lasts:

This time last year Blake and I went to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium and had one of the best days of my entire life.

This time last year I dropped him off at the San Jose Airport for the last time.

This time last year I took off two days of work so I could spend an entire week with Blake for Memorial Day Weekend.

This time last year...

This time last year...

Although the nostalgia has been somewhat upsetting, I've been surprised by how okay I feel. It's almost scary how detached I am from the memories of this time last year that the app places on my screen. I look at the pictures with love and fondness, but it feels kind of like I'm looking at people I knew a long time ago. The couple looks vaguely familiar, as if they were my close friends from another lifetime.

As the days of reminiscing have gone on, I've started to believe that this feeling of loving detachment comes from the fact that this time last year, I was a different person. Maybe the reason why the couple looks like people I knew in another lifetime is because it really was another lifetime. Maybe life as I knew it has finally started to come to a close and a new life has started to begin.

It's new and scary and a bit uncomfortable, but I finally feel like I'm ready. 

Detroit Hyena

Since Blake's death, I've tested out hundreds of ways to cope. The most controversial of which has been befriending a heroin addict in Detroit. Five months ago, in a strange mixture of compulsive interest and morbid curiosity, I looked up "#heroin" on Instagram. What I found shocked, terrified, and intrigued me all at the same time. With one simple search I was given unlimited access into a private world. From the safety of my bedroom I got an intimate look into the lives of people who share their drug use through pictures. It was all there: everything I read about, but had never been exposed to.

There was one person's profile that I kept coming back to. She seemed to take pride in her drug use and the scars it left on her body and life. She was so open, honest, and unashamed. But as much as it scared me to see her photos, I could sense a goodness in her. While looking through her profile I felt a magnetic connection to her that can only be explained by fate. 

A week or two into my secret fascination with her account, I finally decided to make contact. What started out as a simple question turned into several comments back and fourth. Then emails. Then texts. I explained how my boyfriend died from a heroin addiction I knew nothing about and she detailed her 15 year-long battle with the same drug. We listened to each other, cried together, helped each other reach a new level of understanding. We made an unspoken commitment to leave judgment at the door and support each other unconditionally.

In the five months since we became friends, Hyena has committed to sobriety and relapsed several times. And on a night I'll never forget, she talked to me during her suicide attempt as I desperately tried to remind her how much she had left to teach the world. And to teach me. Her story was far from pretty, but I've always been convinced that she deserved a happy ending. Through it all, I held the hope that deep down she believed she deserved one too.

  

Detroit Hyena is now 27 days sober. Although her other attempts at sobriety have ended in using again, I know it's different this time. I know this because everything about her is different this time. 

I feel different too. In an unexplainable way, from across the country and with completely different life struggles, I feel like she and I have made this journey together. When I look at her only one word comes to mind: metamorphosis. It's been an incredibly gruesome past few months, but through the turmoil I believe there's been somewhat of a rebirth, for her and for me. 

Through Hyena, an unknown junkie from Detroit posting pictures on the internet, I learned that kind questions grounded in a desire to understand are the passageway to greater awareness. An awareness about those who are different than you and, more importantly, about yourself. I am forever grateful for the day that the strange mixture of compulsive interest and morbid curiosity lead me to her. I told her before, "I don't always support your choices, but I will always support you." And now, with incredible pride and love, I can finally say I support both.

Congratulations on your 27 days, Detroit Hyena. Here's to 27 and forever more.

Here's the link to her blog. She's an incredible writer: http://detroithyena.blogspot.com/

Quieting the Mind

I woke up this morning with my usual scroll through Instagram. I like to slowly transition into being awake by mindlessly checking in on the world. A couple weeks back I was feeling particularly inspired and decided to follow an account called "Radiate Positivity." I know, I know, total barf. But honestly, reading positive quotes actually does make me feel better sometimes. Plus I have a deep appreciation for sentences that seem lyrically put together like a piece of poetry. Although some of the quotes on the page are cheesy, every once in a while I read one that speaks to me in the most powerful way. Cue this quote on my newsfeed this morning:

The vibrant red was like an alarm. It burned my eyes as I read it: "The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to quiet the mind." Talk about a wake up call.

Although I'm usually a big fan of analyzing everything and then analyzing that analysis, as I read these sentences I knew it was time to tell my thoughts to shut up. Maybe I don't need to "process" every little thing that I feel. Maybe sometimes it's better to just let things go, push past them, and allow myself to be present.

So I did. I committed today to quieting my mind. And honestly, I don't think I've had a more productive day since before Blake died. I wrote two papers, worked on a project, and studied for a midterm. I focused completely on the tasks at hand and channeled all of my thoughts towards them. Whenever my mind started to wander, I silenced it. Not today, today I was in control.

But now, as I lie in bed, I'm up to my usual nightly reflection. I feel good about how I went about my day today, but also somewhat bothered. I'm starting to think that I misread the quote and interpreted it in a helpful, but incomplete way.

After looking at it again, I do feel like I was true to the meaning of quote today. I stopped letting my thoughts distract me so I could get important things done. This must have been what my soul needed today to start regaining a sense of normalcy. But other days? Maybe a quiet mind will lead me down a path of reflection, introspection, action, confrontation, or inquisition. A quiet mind doesn't always mean ignoring or suppressing my thoughts, it just means giving myself a pause to figure out what my soul is telling me it needs.

If I give myself a chance to clear my head, I believe that I will always know what's best for me. What I need will look different every day, so it's important that I give myself a daily space for checking in. By quieting my mind, I can listen to the wisdom that's already inside of me.

The Blue Heart

Somewhere in my darkest moments of searching for strength, I rediscovered the word resilience. For me, resilience meant acknowledging the weight in my heart and committing to fight each day by carrying it with respect. This pledge of resilience was sparked by a quote that I found: "Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.'" I posted a picture of it on my Instagram with a caption that read "Resilience" followed by a blue heart and a bear.

The bear was a pretty straightforward choice because Bear was a name that I called Blake. The blue heart was chosen mainly because I remembered Blake telling me that his best friends from high school used to call him Blue. I'm pretty sure he got this nickname simply because he liked to wear a lot of blue clothing (high school boys are so creative). I also chose a blue heart because it didn't feel right to use a cheerful pink heart when mine felt so sad. I chose blue because it reflected the sadness of loss. And from that point forward, all of my Instagrams about Blake included the little blue heart emoji.

(Fast forward to a couple months later) As I shared in the post about Blake's birthday, I had a really hard time figuring out what to say to him as I sat at his grave. For several minutes I stared at the assortment of sand, shells, and sea glass that Blake's mom had offered me to give to him as a present. While zoning out, one of the dark blue pieces of sea glass caught my eye. I picked it up and noticed that it was almost heart shaped. I squeezed it tightly in the palm of my hand, brought it up to my heart, and sent a message to Blake. Finding the heart gave me the inspiration I needed to connect with him. 

After I finished, I looked over the piece of blue sea glass again and realized that it was almost the exact same size and shape as the heart already engraved on Blake's headstone. When Blake's mom and Nana came back over, I told them the story and showed how it matched up perfectly. Blake's mom thought that this must be a sign and encouraged me to get super glue to affix the sea glass to his headstone. Now the blue heart is a permanent part of it.

As I was reflecting on this meaningful moment after I got home from Blake's birthday weekend, I decided that I wanted to get a piece of jewelry with what had now become a very significant blue heart. Not only was the blue heart something I had been using all along in the captions of my pictures of Blake, but now a blue heart in the form of sea glass had popped out at me and helped me find the strength to deliver Blake a birthday message at his grave. On top of all of that, while I was searching for jewelry with blue stones, I discovered that the blue sapphire is the birthstone of September, the month Blake was born in. It was all too serendipitous and perfect.

The blue heart necklace I ordered arrived in the mail yesterday. When I wear it, I will think about the different blue hearts that have become part of my life thanks to Blake. I will think of Blake's best friends, who gave him the nickname Blue that inspired the little blue heart emoji in all of my pictures. I will think of his family, who generously allowed the blue heart shaped sea glass to become part of his headstone in the same way they have lovingly taken me in. And I will undoubtably think of the loss of my true love, Blake, whom I will carry with me forever inside of my own blue heart. 

But most importantly, when I wear this blue heart I will think about resilience, the word I vowed to live by when my connection with the blue heart first began. The blue heart will remind me that courage doesn't always roar. Resilience is not about bouncing back immediately with smiles and positivity. Sometimes bravery is a quieter determination, slow, but with consistent resolve to always try again tomorrow.