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I love you. I miss you so much. Tonight is hard. I miss you so much.

So tired. Questioning life. Didn’t think I’d like Texas so much. Never dreamed of moving there. I love my family and this job is great. But I could love teaching there. I have friends there. It’s warm there. I could have my own family there.

Merp. Finish classes. Pay off debt. Save up. Get ready.

I stopped taking effexor bc I felt like I was only feeling side effects. That mixed with the holidays plus what was going poorly with the boy made for a bad couple of days. I’m back on it now. Realized I was supposed to be taking it twice a day. These headaches and stomach pains are almost unbearable but at least I feel normal. ish.

Steve is in the hospital. He had surgery for spinal stenosis. People here are less scared compared to a few days ago but we’re all still worried.

Gub got engaged over the weekend. So did Sean and kitty.

“This is why I don’t really date. Because how many girls out there are as understanding as you?”

“I don’t want us to end up like you and mike.”

Don’t quite know what I think of the boy. Or the gig. Matt pissed me off last night. He’s sold the story to his wife so many times he’s starting to believe it I guess.

Nasty headache. So tired today. Irritated with drum corps. Just pissy.

Pat asked me to teach at fusion instead of maria. Now maria hates me. Ugh.

Watching Obama on Letterman. Home by Marc broussard was playing as the music bed for some random new show.

I cried with rob at finals. It felt good.

Air conditioning at work. Simon got married this weekend. Band owns my life. And has for the past two weeks.

Mom and Gus are fighting. Years of passive aggressive BS coming to the surface. Dad said he’s probably just pissed bc he can’t eat. Haha.

I’m sensitive to food stuff. Gus tried to eat too quickly and it made him throw up. I felt like I just watched a bunch of peta abuse videos.

I just removed my first water mark. I feel like a ninja.

BATMAN!!! JESUS!!!!!! So good.

It’s been an emotional and frustrating week. I feel like I’ve wasted too much time in my life caring about people who don’t care about me. Helping people out who get better and move on. It’s exhausting. Even just wishing it wasn’t true makes me feel tired and defeated. I have so much on my mind that I’m dying to talk about but the people I’m always available for can’t seem to be bothered. Every god damn ignored text or unanswered call, fuck, because it’s not bad enough that things are shitty enough that you want to talk about it, no now you need to feel like a shit head because you reached out to someone you care about but they can’t talk because you only exist when they are the ones in crisis. Your shit doesn’t, and won’t ever, matter. And in that rare fleeting moment when someoneisthere for you, you’ll have forgotten how to get it out and you’ll say or do anything to distract yourself from crying and feeling like a shit head. Because then it’s not about your problems anymore, it’s about finally letting them out.

Talking to Dan lifted a huge weight off my shoulders.

Bittersweet. Emotional. I’m sad, but thankful that he’s being talked out. I’m happy to know that people are able to just say that they miss him too. I don’t feel alone today.

I always felt some collateral coolness because my birthday was the day after Doozel’s. I don’t regret never telling him that. He would have thought it was creepy and weird.

I’m sitting here on my back porch. I’ve got a bunch of candles lit. Abby is asleep next to me and I’m listening to the summer symphony of bugs and frogs and douchebags on motorcycles. On nights like this we used to sit on this tiny brick wall at the end of my street and talk. Of course, a few days after he died someone took the corner too close and knocked the whole god damn thing down. Because, you know, it’s not enough to be sad, you need some symbolism too. My phone died maybe a week or two after he passed and with it went our last conversations. My car had a cigarette burn from him on the passenger’s seat and his finger prints all over the windshield where he’d hold up my easy pass, but it was totaled in an accident earlier this year. For someone who has always been embarrassingly pack-ratty, I’m glad these things happened. I needed a new phone but I would have held on to that piece of shit forever just to keep his texts. I’d wanted to trade my car in for a while but I know I wouldn’t have been able to. We got covered in bug bites every time we sat on that wall, and as its destruction proves, it wasn’t in the safest of places. I have days when I feel like none of that shit matters because the most important thing he left us with was amazing memories and so much love, and we get to keep those no matter what. But, I also have those days when I want to search rob’s house and my old drum corps bags to see if maybe he left a tshirt or a sweater so just wrap myself up in the sad and smell it like a psychopath.

So here we are again, I guess now it’s going to be “that time of year.” He continues on in our hearts and is never far from our thoughts, but this time of year is going to bring back memories of how we lost, as opposed to the usual perpetual memories of what we lost.

On the anniversary of his death I lost my composure immediately after reading the first Doozel post of the day on facebook. I called a friend and cried and struggled to repeat the same things I’ve been saying over and over since it happened. My friend encouraged me to stay away from facebook for a while since any mention of him was obviously going to catch me off guard and put me down for a while. Naturally, I ignored this sweet friend and his good sense. Armed with tissues and speed dial (remember when that was a thing?), I was ready to just face the reality and embrace the pain.

But it was quiet. Over the next few days I only saw two or three mentions of him. I feel like I should say something like that was way worse, but the pain is what it is. This kind of loss is like love. You don’t kind of love someone, or extra super love someone. It’s there or it isn’t. The pain is present and absolutely real and nothing is going to make it better or worse. It’s just there.

So I sat. I cried. I called. I looked at pictures. I considered texting him like I did for the first few weeks after it happened, but once reality kicks back in there’s no going backwards. I realized either someone has his phone and the “hey this is _____ I have his phone” text would surely give me a stroke, or someone else has his number now. Regardless, what worked then won’t work now.

I haven’t wanted to talk about him because he was such a private person. What we had was just ours and I liked that. He got it and I got it and that’s it. Heartbreaking now that he’s gone, but bittersweet that I get to keep something about him that I’ll never have to share. I think these things and I try to articulate them in a way that doesn’t make me sound crazy, but fuck it, we’ve all earned a little bit of looking insane.

At the end of the day I was more upset at the silence than I probably would have been with the random mentions of him that may have caught me off guard. This whole thing makes you feel gutted and useless. I thought about the times when he reached out to me because he knew I was upset. After break ups, deaths, changes, fights, all kinds of heartache… He was always there for me to help however he could, which so often meant letting me talk, then telling me his story of why he could relate. Nothing was different by the end of it, but I always felt better and happier.

So here we are. This time of year. For whoever else is feeling this pain and wishing someone else would tell a story they could relate to, here are my words. The fact that a year has gone by without him is preposterous. I feel like I’m still waiting for my heart to start beating again. How can an entire year have passed? The world should have the decency to stop, or at least slow down, to acknowledge what its lost.

And yet we’re back at July.

When you lose such a unique person, it’s hard to think about anything but the pain of what you’ve lost. For this time of the year, I’m going to do my best to focus on why we loved him… what we lost instead of the fact that we lost him. Writing that brought my first tears of the evening, but it’s ok. I’ll think about how he saw me cry way harder at way stupider shit. He cared about so many of the people who loved him and he’d hate to see us devastated because of him. So for this whole god damn stretch, from the end of june until the middle of july, I encourage anyone else who misses him to let this be the time of year when you focus on the happiest memories. For me it’s talking about “our birthday” even though they were on separate days. The way his eyes would get huge and he’d shrug when someone was acting like a psycho around him. How one night on Rob’s porch, no one could get a word in edgewise (mike and kevin included) because god damn it, doozel had shit to say. How Rob and I looked at each other with the “is this really happening?” face. I remember one night at Jamie’s house a bunch of percussion people brought us two tastykakes with birthday candles in them and sung happy birthday to us.

Something I know I’ll remember for the rest of my life whenever it’s this time of year is the support and the love I found. I’ve always known how fortunate I am to have such great people in my life, but after Doozel died “great people” became a gross understatement. For the second time tonight I can’t see through my tears, but this time it’s out of the deepest gratitude for the love I have in my life. My wonderful sister who can see past her own pain and to this day will always stay up late to let me talk about him and tell me what it was like for her when she went through this. All of the people who were connected to each other because of their closeness to him. My bushwacker family, from people I’d marched with 12 years ago to the people who were there with us every weekend that year, his newest friends who were just as devastated to have lost him. Bob Kidd, Stacey Boyer, Peter Priatka, Mendel Lee, Kevin, Mike, Sean… everyone found their own way to juggle their own pain, their job, and found ways to support each other. Most of all Rob Thatcher. From calls in the middle of the night to pulling me aside and letting me cry to sharing his own stories and reopening his own wounds, it’s such a long list of things that he did that kept my head above water and I’ll never be able to find the right words to thank him for that.

We lost a lot, but you can’t lose something you never had. Mike was telling me one night that he had wondered if he would have just been better off never knowing him. How painful it was to get to know this amazing person and feel like you gained such an incredible friend just to lose him in less than a year. But he was so thankful that he got a part of that limited time. The heartbreak of losing him never eclipsed the joy of having him in his life. I think we all can relate to mike on that one. Doozel was so many great things. If he were here right now I’d ask him to be my thesaurus and tell me a better word for “cool” because that’s always the default word when I think of him but I feel like such an uneducated ass saying “Doozel was a cool guy.” But fuck it, he was cool as hell. I’m going to spend these next few days trying to remember every random ass story, every great one liner, everything, all the things that made me so happy to have him in my life. Beyond that I’m going to remember how lucky I am to still have all the other people who loved him too.

Despite the fact that he would never be on facebook for any reason, there’s only one thing I can think to say to wrap this up…

I love you Doozel.

I figured out how to print my own pictures at target. I’m a million years late, I know. I printed the one of us at nick’s wedding. I’d never even seen it before. Tonight is rough.

So happy to not have any drum corps bullshit in my life. Just hearing what’s happening and knowing what’s bound to happen, I’m so relieved to be away from it.

I love that the people I see and talk to the most are a source of peace and common sense.

We’re getting ac in the library! Holy crap

May have just picked up a pit band gig and we’re getting AC in the library. I love working here!

Everyone is talking about jeff choice. So far no one has mentioned how he died. Just that he went into the hospital thinking it was pneumonia and died 2 weeks later. So curious.

So thankful for Christian and other work friends that I can talk to. I talked to james for a while last night. Weirdo. Egon is coming to Philly next month. I’m having fun pPplanning stuff for all of us to do. I’m excited that he and RT are hitting it off so well.

I miss talking to dooz. Hearing how he also gets tired of people’s bullshit.

Nail polish bubbles make me want to kill people.

Yep.

Went shopping with sarah yesterday. Got her some cute sundresses. Babysitting the girls tonight. Hoping I’m done early enough to swing by the pick for jrs birthday. I will not invite my looming fear that everyone hates me. lol. Not good for parties.

Fuck its hot at work!

92 degrees outside. 95 degrees in the library. I want to ask dan if it would be ok to get a portable AC unit in here but I don’t want to be a pain in the ass. But god damn it’s hard to focus in this heat.

Mike told me that when you do e, you wind up feeling depressed for like a week after because the high burns up all your serotonin. Sitting here knowing what’s going down and not being anywhere near anyone’s fucking drum corps drama feels like the exact opposite. I’ve burned up so much irritation throughout the years that now that I’m on the outside, I feel so relieved to not be anywhere near any of it.

I introduced RT and Egon. They seem to be hitting it off. I hope it works out. They’d be a good match for each other. Two cool people who deserve cool people. And Anderson Cooper came out. Love it. Love him.

I worry too much about what other people might be thinking.

Last night was great. I talked to some friends at work. Just having someone to listen to what’s bothering you and agree that someone is being ridiculous helps so much. The kids were great last night. Met a new guy on staff who knows one of my favorite people from iup. Drove home feeling refreshed and grateful.

Looking forward to sleep as soon as I get home. I got in late last night and woke up at 5 with Abby because the storm had her wigging out. Feeling pretty pooped.

Teaching these turds makes me happy. Especially when they’re really cool after a night of acting like brats.

Trying to reason with a fool makes you the foolish one.

I can’t do anything if people are going to pass judgment based on half of an inaccurate story. I can’t be upset over losing people who won’t give me the benefit of the doubt. I can’t get this irritated over people who ultimately don’t matter.

First night of teaching Stevens SUCKS.

You can’t just erase treating someone like shit because your guilt made you apologize.

Mood swings. Crazy bitch mood swings. Talking to egon helps. Looking forward to talking to rob.

I’m happy that so many people loved him. I find comfort in knowing I’m not the only broken heart.

The first fb post I saw about him, oddly enough, was by ZL who I forgot even knew him. Did he get the days mixed up or does he know the actual day he died? It caught me off guard and I cried to matt for an hour.

DG just made a post that dooz would have ripped to shreds. That made me feel better.

The pain with this is overwhelming. I guess bc I really wasn’t expecting it. Feels like I’m bleeding to death and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. A weird panic that comes from getting sucked under this wave of emotion. I just want to get away from everyone and cry with someone else who misses him.

Don’t want to deal with anyone.