Widow’s Brain

It’s been a little over a month since my girlfriend/boytoy/submissive/beloved passed away in his sleep, shortly after swapping sappy and naughty texts with me about books we were reading. When I look back on this month, it is not a total blank. But time has blurred for me. And I am far less organized than usual. Dishes pile up in the sink for a few days before I remember to wash them (and I don’t have a certain visitor to order to wash them for me anymore).

I learned the term “Widow’s brain”–also called “widow’s fog”–in a bereaved partners support group online. I’m not sure the term “widow” applies to me–I had collared my submissive, we talked about being together for the rest of our lives, and we were together for the rest of his, but compared to many of the people on these forums we weren’t together for all that long. We never lived together, though we visited frequently (less frequently with quarantine, but as two freelancers who each lived alone we decided to count each other as a “household” for pandemic purposes, meeting face to face to offer emotional, moral, and physical support). Still, the fog doesn’t care about those technical distinctions. It has descended.

I spend a lot of time in bed, remembering him. They’re beautiful memories and comforting.

I’m also spending a lot of time writing. I started a journal about a month ago that now has 100,000 words of memories in it, plus many, many sheets of scrap paper covered with notes I haven’t yet typed up. Years from now this will give me something to look back on, perhaps. Right now, I just know the writing gives me something to do. It motivates me to get through each day and it’s helping me make sense of some things.

I have also been working on copyedits to Erato. My ability to spot stray commas seems to be about as sharp as ever, and authors have been awesome and proactive in revising their work to show it at its best. And its best is considerable. These stories are beautiful, though rereading some of them is bittersweet–more memories evoked. My girlfriend was so excited for this anthology and looked forward to reading it with me. Quite a few pieces were personally meaningful to him for their takes on kink and gender, though he knew them mostly by reputation from my texting him about the cool story I was reading. And, well, this may be slightly TMI but part of the point of NSP is that good sex is worth talking about, our last evening and afternoon together were made even better, gilded lilies, thanks to ideas I had from some of the stories I’d been editing. That on its own would be enough to make the work of putting the anthology together worth it.

My goal is still to get the anthology published this October. I think this goal will be doable, though again, widow’s brain has made some progress slower than I would like. For instance, I want to announce the Table of Contents soon. But I hit this weird barrier where my mind doesn’t seem to understand how to format a Table of Contents announcement. I’ll get through it.

I’ll be frank: I think Erato’s amazing authors deserve better than the fogginess. I think I deserve better than the fogginess. My girlfriend deserves to be alive. But it is what it is.

My last post shared some of my girlfriend’s writing (and he was also responsible for this silly and delightful sex toy review). His literary legacy will continue in a number of ways, which I’ll announce as they come up. But recently I received a contract for Rachel Kramer Bussell’s 2021 anthology Coming Soon–my story, about a three-way encounter between a bisexual waitress and a D/s couple, was inspired by a bit of brainstorming with my submissive, and I’m thrilled it’s found a home.

It doesn’t feel quite right to say I miss him because he doesn’t exactly feel gone. I’m thinking about him almost every moment of the day–not a big difference from when he was alive. Except I can’t send him a “Thinking of you” text and hear back “What a coincidence, Ma’am, I was having a delightful reverie of you myself.”

When it gets really hard, I remind myself of what my service submissive would do for me if he was here. Bring me food or coffee. Hug me or rub my feet. Tell me about Braveheart’s historical inaccuracies to take my mind off things. Simply kneel at my side while I cried and talked about my uncertainties or regrets or sadness. He can’t do this for me anymore, but I can feed myself and let myself cry for him.