Day One hundred and seventy six - I'll fall with your knife

The plan... the plan was for me to spend christmas with my son - our last christmas together, though he'd be oblivious to it. He'd then go back to his mom's house and stay there, because traditionally they spend that time together. Sometimes I spent it with them, sometimes not. In truth, it's a time of year I never cared much for. But the previous new year's eve saw me facing a year that promised so much : I was with a woman I truly and deeply loved and who loved me back, the notion of us living together and then starting a family seemed so real, that I couldn't have imagined how the year that followed really turned out to be. I knew I couldn't survive one such year again - in fact, I didn't intend to.

Christmas 2013 I was in my bleakest state of despair, feeling like a failure, like a complete waste of a human being. It stung bad that I couldn't even afford to give my son the smallest christmas gift, I felt like I'd let him down immensely - though he had asked nothing of me. He just wanted to spend that time with me. And I wanted to spend what was left of my time with him. As we spent those few days together, and as he was getting ready to go back home, he asked me if he could stay with me until the new year. I was left stupefied by what he, in his innocence, had asked. Had he, somehow, imagined that I was about to do the ultimate sacrifice of my self? Could it have crossed his fourteen year old mind that I was unhinged, unhealthy, virtuallye beyond any and all salvation and redemption?

What I can tell you is that that year - and especially after the Sofia story - my son had been my only source of comfort. We were often together, and he saw me at my worst. He saw me cry my days away, he saw me becoming a numb, detached carcass of a thing, he saw me diving deeper into the darkest caves. He was by my side as my soul became increasingly weighed down with pain and misery. And truth be told - had it not been for him, I'd have killed myself sooner. Naturally, the only thing I could do was say yes to him staying with me. His presence, his warmth, his love were all I needed. He was - and is - the one light my existence could cling onto.

So the great plan never came to pass. I put that all away, I concentrated on my time with my son. He needed me just as much as I needed him. Little did I know that the first few months of 2014 would prove to be just as hard - if not indeed harder - than anything I'd experienced up to that point. In my mind, things couldn't possibly get any worse. Well, as it turned out they could. And they did.