It was April.

It was April 10th of this year, to be exact. My father just told someone my mother died in March. No, she died in April.

I miss her terribly.

My whole world is different - in the obvious ways - but also completely upside down in ways that are invisible to others.

I think on the outside my life looks almost exactly the same as it did before she left.

It makes me crazy to run into people and then have to tell them that my mother has died/passed/left us. Small towns.

It is getting a hell of a lot less painful, though. At first it was like razors ripping through my skin, tearing through muscle, piercing my organs and infecting my soul. Today it was more of an irritation - the kind that starts out innocuous enough but then gets worried and blows up into a painful rash or infection for you to suffer through and the world to see, right on the surface --unable to hide your shame, guilt, hideousness.

April 10, 2011. Right at the end of tax season. At the beginning of a year that was looking up, one where she was feeling better (overall) and I had a lot of hope. Hope -- for the future, for things to come. I was finally feeling better. I had gotten out of the nearly two-year long fog that had stole my life, a depression so deep and dark that I sit here today petrified of ever falling back into it knowing I may never find my way back out again.

We went to a family function recently and a cousin that I hadn't seen since well before - well, before - saw me crack. It was just an instant, but like the pinhole that weakens the dam, I was exposed and couldn't regain my composure. A flood was going to come. I excused myself and went and sat with my pain alone, I believe in the bathroom. Hell, I could have gone to the car or the corner. I don't know where I took solace but I can't seem to share my pain. Not with anyone.

That brings up an entire new subject - but one, perhaps, for another time. My pain is spilling out all over the place. Happiness is causing me pain. Like a thousand knives cutting into my flesh.

April 10, 2011 precariously close to midnight, almost April 11. Does the time matter? Will we track it in the stars like one does a birth?

Do you believe the dead can hear our thoughts?

I miss you, Mama.