What does it mean to grieve? What does it mean to mourn? I find myself plagued by this question. In normal instances people grieve when they lose someone close to them. Death has been rare in my immediate family. Outside of my family I have seen and heard of other people dying but I still could not grasp what it meant to grieve someone. I watched a woman die right before my eyes and while it was traumatizing it did not make me feel grief. I did not mourn her loss because I did not know her. No one had been allowed into my heart ever since it had been defiled when I was just a child, younger than 10.  I was too young to guard it then but now it's all I know. I spent my life numb of most emotions, grief had especially evaded me. I never knew what it felt like to  have something be embedded in your heart and then suddenly ripped away. That is...until them.

Today I woke up at 5am crying in my sleep. In my dream I had been sobbing, clutching my chest as a song played quietly. Its melody becomes more and more powerful with my sobbing. At its climax is when I woke up. My eyes shot open and my lips just finished its last whimper. I was confused but it did not take me long to  realize what was going on. As I wiped a tear from my eye I looked down at my cat, Aziza, as she walked along the bed and over to my waiting hand. I often found that she and her sister were waiting at my side when I wake up from nightmares like this.

"I'm okay, Zi." I tell her now that the hurricane of emotion is subsiding. The numbing spreading as my consciousness grows.  "Just had a sad dream." It had been a year since I had a dream that mourned the loss of my previous relationship. A relationship that took me 4 years to determine was not toxic but was outright abusive. The relationship had lasted for 2 years though we had been friends for 4. As time went on I felt as though I was pushing my friends and family away more and more as I went deeper and deeper into this relationship.  Before I knew it I had fallen down the rabbit hole chasing the White Rabbit.  I was Alice, things that I thought were wrong were quickly becoming the norm. Why is a raven like a writing desk? Why did I allow all of this to happen to me? Some of my friends I didn't speak to for over two years. To them I suddenly disappeared one day. I abandoned them because I thought that I found the perfect person. I didn't need anyone else. Just my White Rabbit. I followed every unspoken rule, every invisible ultimatum that absolved them. I only knew if I didn't I would be hurting them, they would hurt themself or that I would lose them. Lose sight of my White Rabbit, my hope, my future. No one else made me feel anything close to happy in the last decade. I once told them, "My world was black and white until you came into it." Even a puddle of oil has a rainbow at the right angle.

This person is the only one to have seen my heart. They were privy to all of my imperfections, all of my flaws, all of the damage that had been done to me. They were the only person I have let myself be truly vulnerable with. We were vulnerable with each other and for that I thought we could never hurt each other. How foolish I was. I went to painstaking lengths to make sure that I was not doing what I thought would be hurting my partner. I avoided spending time with my family in favor of spending time with them. I stopped talking to friends I had since high school for them. Next thing I know, I'm writing in my journal about how much I'd rather not exist than deal with any of it anymore. How this doesn't feel like a relationship, how my only purpose is to keep them from hurting themselves all the while they were hurting me. I was just a chew toy, a distraction to use and abuse to keep them from thinking of how bad of a person they really are. That's all it ever was. I woke up. The White Rabbit is gone--gone for a long time now. Yet here I am shedding tears in my sleep, mourning something that was never real.