Half Full or Half Empty?

Everyone has heard it before: You can choose to either look at the glass half empty, or you can choose to look at the glass half full.

My heart is incredibly full today. After a little less than a month of excited anticipation our wedding pictures came in! My amazing running partner/best photographer-in-the-world delivered our album today. We had an amazing time looking through all the posed pictures and the more natural (albeit slightly less attractive photos) of us rhythmically dominating the reception.

 

 



My glass is certainly full. My parents threw us a beautiful wedding. So many friends and family came to celebrate with us and the night went as close to planned as possible. I had a wonderful night.

But someone was missing. My glass is half empty.

Robby should have been in each of these pictures. He should have been on the groom's side in a handsome gray tuxedo. He might have been shown (after having been dragged) on the dance floor doing the Cupid Shuffle with us. But he wasn't.

I couldn't bring myself on this day to have a picture of him around, a choice I can only hope he understands and can forgive. It would have been too hard to see his face smiling at me through a photo rather than smiling at me at the end of the aisle. Second in line only to the best man.

I have a husband who loves me and makes me the happiest woman in the world.
I also have a brother who isn't physically home and this thought makes me feel like the loneliest person in the entire world.

I have two loving parents who support me and do everything in their power to ensure my success and happiness.
I also have two loving parents who often cry and half wish they were dead.

I have everything to be thankful for, yet so much to feel very sad about. It's hard in moments of celebration when I feel so happy and so full only to feel an increasingly familiar emptiness. It feels like a hole in my stomach and a twitch in my chest. I'm celebrating, and he is missing. It's a mixture of guilt and longing. How is it that I can feel so happy when my brother is missing? How should I react? Should I cry? Be alone? Sometimes I don't know how to express what I feel. So I ignore it. I save it for a moment when I can be alone; a moment to cry into the void of my empty glass.

A concept that I think many people misunderstand or fail to acknowledge is that it is possible to feel very sad and very lonely every single moment of every single day and also be incredibly happy for every single one of those moments. I don't believe that human emotion can be narrowed down to simply half-full or half-empty. The glass is always both.

Today I am so happy. I have been able to relive every moment of my beautiful wedding.
Today I am so sad. I have relived every moment of my beautiful wedding and cannot find my brother anywhere other than in my tattoo. (Written by him in a Valentine's Day card in 2013, it reads: Love you nat -Robby)