Today she would've been twenty-five. Instead, she remains twenty-three. Forever twenty-three. Life has not stood still and the rest of us continue to age, without her. It's simple and incomprehensible all at the same time. Paradoxical.
Less than two years since her departure and still I wrestle with the unsolvable mystery of it all. Who was she? Why was her life destined to be so short? Was it destiny, or was it preventable? Was it premeditated or was it impulsive? Did she leave as an act of selfless love to spare her kids the inevitable trauma of growing up with a borderlined, bipolar mother? Or did she leave in spite of her kids? And who can I blame? Can I blame the people she called friends? Can I blame genetics for having assaulted her from both sides? Can I blame myself for being so unaware, so self-absorbed, so medicated all her life? Or, is there some sort of lifescript that we must all succumb to? Was it, in fact, the final chapter in Christina's lifescript to take her own life?
Today, my tears are fresh, but sharp like shards of broken glass. I cry the tears I held so tightly in those minutes, hours, days, and weeks after she died. I was in shock and I was in denial. The paradoxical blending of disbelief and acknowledgement tightly wrapped in trauma kept me in a state of other-worldness. I...had become...comfortably numb. But today, Monday, January 7, 2013, what would've been her 25th birthday, the psychic anesthesia has worn off and I cry for her. I want her back. I want this craziness to be over. I want to wake from this nightmare. I want her to be alive again and I want to make her let us love her. Why wouldn't / couldn't she let us in?
Today, she would've been twenty-five. But she's not. Instead, she is now my twenty-five year old twenty-three year old daughter.
Why, Christina? WHY???
