My life is moving too fast and your death was so soon

It's been just about two months now since my father passed away and I have been okay. I've been myself with strangers, broken down a little bit but not a lot with my friends, and been a pretty damn good daughter/aunt/sister to my family. I want to be selfish and I know it's alright for me to be so, to selfishly mourn and grieve and focus on my own pain, but I can't. It's not there. Sadness flutters through me like hummingbirds rather than like a bullet train through my heart as it did with the last death. I think of the funeral picture and how contrived it felt, how contrived the entire funeral felt, and I struggle to keep in my mind the picture I carry of him in my head, walking out a doorway and turning to see me, the light of my daddy's life, and a smile filling out his entire face all the way to his bushy eyebrows and round happy chin.

I was so angry about my siblings saying "we have to learn from this, we have to keep in touch more." Screw that! You should have learned when he was alive, not after his death! What the hell is the use of all your after-the-fact repentance when you never called him to say hello? Who were all you people at the funeral and why haven't I seen you over the past several years of loneliness and isolation? You don't deserve to "learn a lesson" from someone's death. No death is worth "a lesson" to some cheap faker who pretends to themselves that they care about someone for their entire life, only to realize that the self-lie has been a truth the whole time and all they needed was to be more genuine. You just had to genuinely love and care for someone WHEN THEY WERE ALIVE is that so hard?! I don't want you to learn a lesson from this, and I sure as hell don't want to learn anything. I learned everything I needed to know from my father, from my father himself when he was alive. He left me nothing to learn after he died, and I'll stick with his wishes.

Anyway. My life moves on. But it's not that interesting.

I sent you my heart

in a little folded packet of words, traveling across the country at a speed unimaginable even to the daylight dreamer. What did you do when you received it, which I know you did? Did you carefully unfold each little crease and crinkle, knowing that hidden in the wrinkles was my love? Or did you, so eager to see the message inside, ignore the packaging and focus only on the darkness of the words themselves without understanding what lay behind and beneath and between the lines? Certainly in the darkest of times we need the brightest of lights to guide our ways, or even a hint or memory of these lights of love. So I sent my light to you to help me with each turn on this teetering walkway crumbling beneath and behind and between my steps, but if you don't shine it back to me, I will be lost. I sent you my heart; I need it back.