Such a wistful nostalgia that I feel, putting the pen to the paper again. This journal has recorded my life for two and a half years now. The memories in its pages are uncountable. Every date that I write brings back thoughts of prior years and the people and places I have seen and loved. I could not tell you exactly where I was on the fifth of June two years ago, but I know it was early summer in Bree-land, and I was newly married. I was the happiest woman to ever draw breath in all the world. I thought our sun-drenched, love-filled days would be forever.
I am so very weary of being "the widow". I am so weary of talking about it. Of having to feel this bitter emptiness within my breast. Of seeing the pity in peoples' faces. Their careful smiles. The way they handle me like a fragile piece of pottery, lest my heart shatter and crumble and leave them repulsed at the sight.
Every time I think I have begun to become something else, the grief finds a way back to me. All it takes is a question about my travels north, or where I came from. I am too open, too willing to tell the truth.
There is no way to strip myself of this identity. I long to shed it, like a snake slipping free of its old skin. But I cannot. I can never stop being a widow. It is a title thrust unjustly upon me by the cruel indifference of Fate. A stain, a mark, a scar that I can never be rid of.
I wish I were a stronger soul. I wish I could examine my heart and these thoughts with a cool, indifferent mind. Instead, I find myself bathed in sorrow, and then rage. An indignant, resentful wrath, that I should be held captive by my own mind and soul. For these feelings are such that I cannot control them. I have no more power to escape myself than I could escape the sea if I were set into the midst of its depths.
I believed that coming home would be some sort of...harbor for my spirit. That being in the land of my blood and my kin would ease the hurts and soothe the grief. I don't suppose it would be true to say it has not been this for me in some small measure. To have remained behind in Bree would have been intolerable without him. I had to escape it. And I am not ungrateful for the friendships that have blossomed here, nor the moments of peace and hope I have felt. It is not guilt that I feel, for being unable to escape my own prison, though I wish I could, with every fiber of my being. For I have tried! With all sincerity and earnestness and desire to succeed! No one could accuse me of not trying. I simply have failed.
I would like to have some sense that there is something else for me in this world. Some purpose, some hope, some path yet to tread. I want to believe it. I want to feel it. But wanting is not having.
There will be no recording of my daily life here today. I have always vowed not to force the pen to do any particular bidding, but simply to flow with whatever thoughts wish to be told. And while I thought to write of horses and stables and the people of Snowbourn, my heart is not in it. Saexwyrd and Beorggar are heavy in my thoughts. But even the heaviness of which I speak is part of my curse. I would not feel so uncertain, so confused, so downcast, if I weren’t that which I am; the damnable widow.
I wonder now if my time here is at an end. I do not think it was a mistake to come here. The path felt right, and so it has for the past half-year. I wish I felt some kind of peace, some “settled down” contentment that would tell me I had found a true home again. But I have not felt that way since I was in Bree. And it only felt like home because he was there. He was my home. I would have been “home” anywhere in the world, so long as it was with him.
Perhaps I will become that which I have feared and railed against. The thing I have sought to stave off for so long now. I see nothing in front of me but doubt and darkness. And when the thought of wandering the hard, empty places of the world until I waste away does not frighten me, perhaps it is time to do something about it.
I only hope I do not bring grief to anyone else.
