Lean on me.

I found this picture on my computer last week. My junior year of high school I visited Goshen with Micah and several other friends; a road trip to check out the college. It was at just the end of winter, with snow melting on the ground, and my sister snapped this picture as we were walking back from the Music Center---Micah and I leaning on each other, the sun illuminating our backs.

Last year in college I leaned on Micah tremendously. I held on to the identity I felt with him, the identity we had formed together, and the identity his death had given me. I needed to lean on that. It was the only way I could endure my grief and in turn survive being away from home after everything. My lens of life was solely through leaning on him, and that's how I interacted with people and the world.

Last weekend was 1.5 years since the accident. Am I still "leaning" on Micah? It's a question I've been trying to ask myself. In many ways, the pure absence of him has taught me independence of self in a way I don't think I ever would have imagined. I've found ways to incorporate his absence into my life, ways I certainly didn't have a year ago. I've been to workshops and sessions and therapy and read books and journaled and cried. I've done as much as I've can, or at least as much as I've been able to do.

And yet such a large part of him makes up my identity. A part of me that I'll never let go. A part of me that will always want to claim that Micah and I shared something wonderful but it was so unfairly, prematurely whisked away.

In some sense my transition back to Goshen has been rougher than I've imagined it would be; mostly because I feel more in a limbo of these two identities than ever before. Now that I've "worked" through my "stuff," who am I? Last year it was okay to be where I was, but now what? After a year and a half of intense grief, I'm ready to be "me" more than I've ever been before---how can I be true to that yet also honor the identity with Micah I know I'll always have? I want to be able to lean on both, proudly and confidently.