Sudden Ambush

"Your past has a way of sneaking up on you. You'll hear broken echoes of it everywhere, like a bad replay. You'll get mad at everyone for reminding you about it, even if it's all in your head."

- Max Payne, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

I hate sneak attacks.  I never know when they're going to happen.  I'm talking true full blown ambushes.  Sometimes, you know the days when your susceptible to being brought down if you think about something in specific, but then there are days where you've got no idea it's coming. 

Those days are the worst and most damaging for me.   I can be in a perfectly good mood and suddenly I'll hear "White Room" by Cream on the radio, or I'll drive past a Harley or Corvette, or someone will say something that resembles the way he spoke, and I lose it.  What makes it worse, is you can try to fight it all you want, but even if the tears don't fall you've already lost your state of mind for the remainder of the day.  

I get quiet.  When there's something going on inside.  I think it's because the bombs are going off so loudly in my head I can no longer form a coherent thought.  It's funny how my mind works.  There are days when I have absolutely no problem talking about my dad's passing, and other days, you just can't get me to say anything on it.  It becomes so overwhelmingly painful that the only thing I want is to go to sleep and never wake again.  

Just a little over 8 years now, and it's still effecting me to the deepest core.  I always thought that it would get easier over time, and in many ways it has, but in most ways, it's still got my mind set in a perpetual argument.  It's awful.  How can someone say that there is now a sense of relief now that someone is gone, almost a joyous thing and yet want so badly to have nothing more than another moment with them? It makes me feel like an awful daughter. 

There's must be a disconnect somewhere.  Then again, I certain I'm full of them.  For the first three years, I thought of him every single day.  And then March 23, 2006 I woke that morning realizing, the day before I hadn't thought of him once.  I was guilt ridden.  How could I not think of him?  Some say remembering a person hurts, I feel forgetting them, even if for a moment, hurts worse by far. 

Funny thing is, the sudden ambushes are usually those jolting reminders that I haven't thought of him that day.  It kills me a little. 

Rest Peacefully Dad.  December 8, 1963 - December 22, 2002