The 4th of July is finally upon us……

These are my unfiltered thoughts.

Well, today is a first for me. My first 4th of July in which I'll likely not see nor even speak to Sarah since July 4th, 1999!

I anticipated that today would be a tough day for me. That is why I was planning a road trip over the 4th of July so that I could make my first 4th after the "divorce" into a grand event and make a whole new batch of memories surrounding this date. But then I got laid off………and that road trip was history.

So instead, I was planning to have a huge BYOB bash at my house in Marion today. But the problem is, as I've posted many times here, that I live in FUCKING MARION! I have no friends in this town, and I'm 50 miles from the friends I do have. I only had two people interested in coming up, and 1 of them was under 18. Not that there's anything wrong with him, but inviting a minor to a BYOB party could open a huge can of legal worms if anything went wrong, and I don't really want to spend the 4th of July in Jail. So there's no party today.

Instead I'm sitting in my house, drinking beer, and mixing Enemy By Mourning's CD.

I got a call earlier that I didn't see come in. It was from Sarah. She left a voicemail wishing me a happy 4th of July, and said she hopes I get to see some fireworks. What she doesn't understand is that for a while, my plan was to either run from this day or pretend it didn't exist. I can do neither. It's like the Grinch on Christmas when he found out Christmas morning that Christmas still came, even though he tried to get rid of it. The 4th of July is here, and today would have been my official 12 year anniversary with Sarah had she not left me in February.

I'm trying not to get down about it. The fact is that most of the time I no longer am mourning the loss of the relationship, today included. I hope and believe that I'm over it, it'll have been 5 months tomorrow since she moved out! But then again, how long does it take to get over nearly 12 years of being happy and spending every day with one person, then losing that person? It's like I suffered a death in the family in some ways, and I mourned my mother's death for 10 years before I let it go! I don't think this will take that long, but who's to say that it should or should not take a certain amount of time? People try to put calendars on things like this, but there's no way to know how long it will take a person to get over something. Only time will tell.

If I mourn anything still from the relationship, it's me mourning the magnitude of the losses I've suffered. She left, I moved on, but it was a major loss to endure that flipped my entire life upside down and threw it around for a while. It's not been pretty at times.

I know that I mourn something, because I can feel it in the back of my throat. My throat is a little tight when I think of today being the 4th of July. I refuse to allow myself to reminisce because I don't know how I'll handle that. Needless to say, for some reason, I can feel that I'm on the razors edge today. I try to ignore it, but I know I'm there.

So now here I am. it's the 4th of July 2011. I'm trying to decide what to do with my day. I was going to avoid Red White And Boom anyway Friday night, but lucky for me I had a migraine anyway that kicked my ass for 16 hours. I've been ignoring fireworks or any mention of the 4th of July because I'm afraid of what it might bring up. Is the best course of action to ignore and bury? Doubtful. Likely the best course of action is to forage on into what I fear and try to get past it. But do I have the strength to do that today?! Would it be smarter to just let the 4th go past me and ignore it, knowing that it would be another year before I'd have to deal with it again and I'd likely be ok by then?!

I don't know what I'll do. But I know one thing. I never thought I'd be where I am now.

Happy 4th of July.