525600

She still counts the minutes that I am not here... -Andrew McMahon

Three is a magic number, it doesn't feel magical today even though I keep looking up at the sky, over my shoulder, and into mirrors hoping that heaven will break a rule and let me see my daughter one more time. Three years, how could that be? It was like yesterday that it was her sitting here at this computer playing a marathon game of Literati eating a bowl of nuts and a pile of grapes. She would leave the bowl and the stems for me to pick up and I would act like I was pissed but I really wouldn't be. It wasn't that long ago that we were at a bookstore looking for something she had not read yet, at Target looking for the perfect T to wear to a concert or in Berkeley at Sweet Dreams wandering around touching everything. Now here I am at this computer alone and if feels like a million years since I've heard her voice or smelled her skin.

Today is the day I am allowed to have a full blown pity party. Today I get to count years, months, minutes...525600

There are a few red tulips up in the garden, stragglers, and the lilac so much of it I love the way it smells, it is a female smell; warm, like home. The Trees all have their clothes back on and the apple blossoms arrived just as the pear blossoms blew away. The cherry tree is gone, Stevie's tree, the one that did not make cherries until the year she died, the one I bought her as a present after radiation therapy. She wanted to be able to see cherry blossoms from her window.

I should plant a garden but I can't seem to do it, to put myself out there, invest in any more hope. I will, I always do and since Stevie left it has been mostly half hearted, a habit, an act of caring when I am still so mad at God. My little vegan isn't here to graze my veggie beds stealing the fattest tomato's the second they became ripe. She refused to get her hands dirty but you never knew a child who loved produce as much as she did.

The seasons change and I watch it all happen. Time moves the way it will, it does not stop, it will not turn back. I am not like time...I am forced to move with it but I dare it to stop me from remembering. If I were smarter I would find a way to move backwards through it and find the exact moment I could have done one thing different and saved her life.

Today is a day for tears...

I can't seem to bring her back and I tell myself it must be because she is so happy where she is, that she has long since forgotten this little house and these people she shared a short life with. In some other place she is reunited with people she has known before time who missed her even more than I ever could (not sure how that is possible) and they surround her with the most complete kind of love, a bigger love than I can't remember but I must have known.
My girl.

I survive, I am here, and she is somewhere...too far away.

This is fucked. I know ugly words make me look ugly, that is what I tell the kids but this thing I feel is kinda ugly and the word fits, there isn't another in this language I know.

Today I will take Noah to the orthodontist and let her torture his poor little mouth so that one day he will have a Hollywood smile to go with his black guitar and his beautiful voice. Then I will go to the cemetery and sleep on my cowboy blanket over the place my daughters body is buried. I will talk, sing, cry and wait for magic to happen. Three is a magic number.