The Misery Game: Currently Level 2 or Maybe 3?

So this is Monday, 17 August. This is week 12, or 12 weeks since Darren passed away.

This is the kind of time I am waking up, back into my usual world of remembering every inch of it and remembering that it is all going to kick off now.

It is kind of a busy day today. I have the car getting lifted for the MOT, Daniel has a dentist appointment, and I need to speak to someone about my services.

I have gone and bought the new limited-edition pressing of the Fontaines D.C. album, just because. I am glad that I know I am back listening to their music again, because I just couldn’t there- not that I was able to listen to much. But anytime they came up on the playlists of Spotify, I couldn’t listen. It was too hard to.

So, that is today. It is now 9.20, back I go on the never-ending memory loop. I should be getting up about now, remembering and finding him.

Strange Dreams

My dreams are strange, wild mixes now of my mother being in my dreams and Darren being in my dreams. The strange thing is, neither of them were really in my dreams before they passed. I did not have that many dreams about my mother after she passed, but now, they both seem to feature.

In one, I live in New York and Darren and I are hustling for work. I am thinking that I need to go back home to my mother. Then I wake up and realise that she is dead. What am I doing?

Then comes the next revelation. Fuck, Darren is dead. What the fuck?

The Different Levels of It

I also think that I am still in the middle of it all, but nowhere near normal in the head. Well, I do think there are different levels to it all, but it is like a really shit fucking game.

The day it happens, you are on level one. Then you go to level two, probably after the cremation. But I am somewhere near the end of level two and level three, and level three is starting to realise that this is fucking it. This is where we are at.

Now he is gone. I think I have realised he is gone, and that is level 3. I have no idea how many levels there are to this shit game, I just presume it’s fucking endless.

The Summer Stopping

I do not think it has particularly helped that this all happened during the summer. I do not know whether it is something that happens all over Ireland, or whether it happens in the UK, Europe, or anywhere else in the world, but we stop. We literally stop.

July and August are the summer holidays here. Work stops. I mean, work happens in a sense, but there is no point trying to get sales in or things like that because everybody is on holiday. Everything goes way down a level.

You have the Twelfth fortnight. People are either away for a fortnight or having their holidays at some other point in the summer. But more or less, the system stops. You do not really see people again until around September.

I think with Darren dying at the end of May, and Daniel finishing his exams just a week before, then having June, July and August to sit through and stew has been an incredibly hard, hard kind of thing.

The normality of school, the normality of work, people being about, people being back at work, the programmes that I am meant to be on, just little things like that, knowing that everything is running again, I think will be very helpful.

Not that there was a good time for all that to happen. Fuck me, imagine it happened over Christmas. But it happened at a time when there was literally a lot of stopping.

I think I need to do a few courses or something like that, just to get me out of the house. Even looking at Sociology to help Daniel. I just need to realise that it is 17 August. We are getting there.

But fuck me, it has been a long, long, long slog. A long, long period of time to go through.

That is my cheery motivational talk for the day. Trying to do some work.