I can guarantee that there are people who will read this blog, and something or somebody is going to stick in their mind from beginning to end, for others it’s just going to sound like nonsense.

We’ve all done it.  We’ve all, at some point or another, described something as “my life”, or “what I live for.”  Maybe it’s been a person, maybe it’s a past time, maybe it’s something else.  The point is that we’ve all done it, but how often do we really mean it?

You’re maybe sitting there right now trying to tell me that you most definitely do mean it, but the truth is you never really know how much something means until you lose it.  When it’s taken away from you, for whatever reason, and you have to go about life without it.  That’s when you really find out how important something, or somebody, was.

This happened to me.  I was devastated, but I assumed that it would get better in a week or so. Maybe a couple of weeks.  The truth is it doesn’t.  If it does get better that quickly, then you need to face up to the fact that it was as important to you as you originally thought.  I’m not saying that it never gets better, I’m just saying that I would be lying if I told you that I knew it would.

So before you next describe something or somebody as your life, think about it.  Try and imagine a future without them, does it make you cry?  Does losing them leave a void in your life that no matter how hard you try, you just can’t fill? There’s a void in my life that I’ve tried and tried again to fill, but no matter how hard I try nothing can fill it.  It’s still there.  It’s like a wound that just won’t heal, and it cuts deep into your soul, and just when you thought that it was starting to heal then something comes along and rips it open wider than before.  It’s maybe the smallest of things that triggers it, maybe it’s a face or a word or date, but it’s going to bring back so many memories.  Like when you cut yourself in the playground and you thought that they would give you a plaster and tell you to run along, but instead they tell you there’s something in the wound that’s going to have to come out.  It hurts, a lot. Here’s a head up though, the moment you realise that you are trying to fill that void, you are going to feel awful.  You are now trying to replace the thing that you loved more than anything with something else, something that deep down inside you know you will never love nearly so much.

Think about a time when whatever ‘your life’ was the best thing in your life.  When it motivated you, when it inspired you, when it was the reason that you got out of bed in the morning.  When it kept you going when nothing else could.  When it could heal any pain, permanantly.  When it turned your tears into laughter.  You’re remembering all the good times, and for a moment the pain of the loss is gone.  Then you remember that it’s gone, and the pain comes back worse than ever.

There are not the words to describe the way that you feel.  The feeling itself is something that you just can’t put your finger on.  You feel so incredibly empty, like your body is a shell with nothing in it, but at the same time there’s an immense weight holding you down. I’ve cried enough tears over the past months to flood entire nations.  It’s not a physical pain, it’s an emotional wound.  It’s a feeling that will differ between each and every one of us.  No two people will have exactly the same memories, or exactly the same feelings, even if they did absolutely everything together.  It’s just a  fact of life that everybody perceives the same situation in different ways.

You smile like everything’s okay. Life goes on.  Inside you’re dying, you’re dead, but you still smile as if everything is okay.  It’s like a band aid for your soul, but as soon as you get home it falls off and your wound is exposed again.

The only wounds that don’t heal are the ones that kill you, and you’re not dead.