Seasons change, yet it stays the same.

Spring is here, officially, yet I am still in the same space.  Nothing has changed.  I am still lost.  I am still alone in a sea of strangers who were once my comrades.  I am no longer like them and never will be again.  A wall of sorrow, loss, and despair now separates us.  These now-foreigners smile, say, "How are you?" and other niceties.  They ask, yet do not wish to know.  If I were to reply truthfully, if I told them I die inside every day I live, they'd not know what to say or do.  They'd surely think plenty of me, but (hopefully) those thoughts would not be shared.   If I relate my deepest feelings of despair, I am an interloper.   I am told to get some rest, go home, reflect - as though any of these would ever change my reality.  People do not know what to do with me.  I am now a source of anxiety for them.  If they stay too long in my presence, if they learn too much about what it is to endure my reality, they may also become swallowed by the blackness.  So, they tell me to go, as though this will help.  Nothing will help me.  I will forever be a shadow-mother - my baby will remain dead.  My reality will never deviate from this.  I may have other children, I may go on exotic trips, I may complete my career and grow to be old, but I will always be the one about whom they whisper, "Her baby died.  We don't know what to do with her." And it is true that they do not.  And I cannot fault them for this.  They do not know the oppression of grief and sorrow as I have known it.  They should not know; no one should know; but I do.  I know.  And it is because I know that I no longer belong with the others.  I am no longer one of them.  I am a shadow-mother.  I will always be this, in Winter, in Spring, in Summer, in Fall.  In seemingly lighthearted moments my heart will remain black as pitch.  My smiling eyes will cloak the river of tears that rages daily through my soul.  My laughter will stifle the screams which curdle the blood in my veins.  I want to escape myself.  I want to escape this constant torment of a reality.   Tragically, this is not possible.  This is my "life" now - an immutable death.  So, today while the others celebrate the permutation of the season, I lament the brackish absolute my life has assumed.  I am a shadow-mother.  They are the others - our seasons forever in discord.