From One Stop Sign to the Next

The hour between 3 and 4 AM is always the most difficult and these empty streets with dull lights aren't very promising. I have taken the same route home every night but somehow these familiar surroundings tend to look different even though nothing has changed. That is an element of grief; the strange, interesting, nostalgic, yet very bizarre feeling you get one day after experiencing a huge loss. All of a sudden, you begin to see the world through a different kind of lens. It seems the layers get thicker and your vision blurs. For me, the strangest part is, how grief manipulates time. It seems like just yesterday that my father had passed away except there is this notion of yesterday feeling like a hundred years ago and I am caught in the in-between. That's exactly what grief is to me-- the "in-between". You're stuck in-between life before them and life after them (or after whatever it is that you're grieving). On certain days, I drive up over the dull-lit hill with hopes that he will be standing there waiting-- not him per say but his spirit or the energy that once encompassed him, so that I can finally say all I've wanted to say. It is almost as if driving further would bring me back into time and he would be alive again. But there is always a stop sign at the end of the road where I can regain rationality. When it comes to grief it is truly amazing what you experience from one stop sign to the next. But these streets tend to lose their life after awhile. The beauty slowly fades to a more abstract picture, where you hear echo's of your childhood voice. At times I feel like I am barely hanging on, during those times I have to learn that everything happening is a direct result of something else and that there's only a few blocks until the next stop sign.