I feel that, at the moment, I am completely and totally helpless.

My roommate's mother has died. Around the same time my own did, only one year later, and I'm conflicted. On one hand, there is an almost automatic connection between her and I now, and one would think that I would have the answers on how she should deal with it.

I don't. I feel like I don't have a fucking clue.

I watched my own mother fade away. I knew it was coming. It was like I was the only person in my family who had no hope, and maybe that's what made it seem like I took it easier.

What many people don't realize, mainly because it'd be a weird thing for people to assume, is that I look at myself as her successor in terms of personality, temperament, intelligence, ambition, and efficiency. My mother was many things, not perfect, but most of all, she got the fucking job done for everybody that she loved, and I'm always going to love her in return for that.

Krystal and her mom, and I have to assume because I only know what she's told me to go from, is completely different. Supposedly she was unloving, cruel, and completely unstable. Krystal carries so much baggage from this, so much that I wish I had some way of just clearing it all away. This isn't the first time I've felt this way, and not the first person I've felt this way about. I used to think that I had some kind of heroic knight complex, that I had to make myself feel better my building and rebuilding someone away from all of their pain. But it's not a complex, really. I look back to three years ago and I still care about Shanna. I'm kind of a fucked up person when it comes to knowing exactly what I care about, or even what Im feeling, but the truth of the matter is three years ago, against all my efforts something went terribly wrong and it's like I didn't do any good at all in the end. If I didn't care about her, it would have been easy to get over. Move on to the next project, right?

Nope. I probably think about Shanna more then I think about Megan. Not to say that I loved Megan any less, in fact I loved Megan much more, but even now sometimes I feel like I should have acted differently then, misguided 18 year old that I was. What happened between Shanna and I was so much more negative than what happened with Megan. Megan will meet someone new (unless she already has) and she'll grow and she'll be happy. I'm sure of that. Shanna, even though part of her may still keep the image of us in her, will do the same.

But I'm still struggling. When Shanna and I were together, I felt like I was ill-equipped consistently to help her with her problems. I mean, she had PTSD, was sexually abused and the best part of her life died when she was 13, so there's a certain level of understanding for my part in knowing what I could or couldn't have done, but this is what gets me now:

Krystal's mom has died, something I feel affinity towards, and I still feel helpless. I feel like there's something somewhere deep inside of me that knows what to do, but I'm either too dishonest to figure it out or I feel that trying to help her will make things worse. Or even that, why I feel like I have to in the first place.

But I'm always aware of the answer to that question in the first place. It's because I love her, in the way that we all do. She's quirky and intelligent and attractive, and all these good qualities appeal to everyone in the sense that we want to bring every single good goddamn quality that's been repressed in her out in the world, because the more she gets to express herself the happier she gets to be. Which is the simple end of it all, really. That I want her to be happy.

This is also all getting me to re-examine the death of my own mother, and how it affected me. You know that I've only cried over it four times since it happened? Once, when it happened right in front of me, second when we put her ashes out to sea, third in a moment of vulnerability by myself in my old apartment, and fourth right now writing this journal.

I think I'm realizing now that this is the first time I'm truly coming to terms with it, and the depressing part of it is what I'm realizing is that it'll never really go away, and the fact that my mother is dead is now a part of who I am, and it's not something I'm supposed to overcome, nor is it something that I let destroy my own life, but just something that is also who I am, and that it'll never stop being sad, and that I'll never really be able to think about my mother without a small part of me feeling hurt (even if what I think about is the way she would watch a Disney movie with me at 2 a.m. because I couldn't sleep, when she knew that it was her who could lull me, and not the movie).

Is because I loved her why I'm not over it? How I'm realizing now, what I've always known even at a miniscule level and now is kind of just blowing up at me, that I'm hardly over it all? Or is something about this arbitrary, that something inside of us all will die when our mothers leave us, because that's just what is supposed to happen, whether our mothers loved us unconditionally or mistreated us because something about them was just fucking broken?

It's this. If our mothers gave us the love that we all deserve, then that is what we will miss. If they mistreated us, it is the fact it can never be fixed and that the part of you that feels incomplete is even emptier because making peace is going to be so much harder. If a person never knows their mother, or parents for that matter, it is that everything that they know will tell them that this lack has treated them all the worser for it.

Is the understand between Krystal and I arbitrary, then? Is it barely there because of the inherent differences in our relationships to them?

I don't really believe that there is no way for me to understand what she's going through. I didn't understand Shanna because, frankly, I couldn't. My father was alive, I was never raped and I didnt live surrounded by meth labs. I believe that right now I don't truly understand what she's going through because I don't yet understand my own situation. The one thing I do know now is that I'm still struggling through it, and I hope that one day, even though I can't tell her how to feel or give her any steps on how to overcome this, that we can find solace in each other no matter how different our mothers were to us.

But right now, her pain is too fresh for anything to happen, really. She's not done reacting to it, and she won't finish for a long time. If it's anything like me, anyway.