As the days grow shorter and the nights grow longer, I have a greater fear inside of me that I'm not sure if I can handle. When my mom died, apart of me died with her. And in this past year, it has been a crazy roller coaster of emotions. Sometimes, I feel like it's an amusement park of emotions. The first few weeks after she died, I had hallucinations and nightmares. I would wake up with her sitting on the floor next to me. Call it what you will, but I believe she was watching out for me. In the next few months, Adam and I moved, we started culinary school, and dropped out. In that time I gained an intense amount of weight. Depression does that to you. I remember not being able to sleep and having to take really strong doses of sleeping pills to attempt to sleep. Then came our wedding. I'll get to that in a later post. After that, cue the nightmares again. As the anniversary of her passing comes on Wednesday, I'm scared. If it weren't for the perfume bottle I have, I probably wouldn't remember what she smelled like. If it weren't for my vivid dreams and pictures I wouldn't remember what she looked like. But what happens when I forget? I've spent the last year bottling up everything that I've felt about my mom and the purpose of this blog isn't to make people feel bad. It's to cherish memories and to get my feelings out. For far too long I've been holding things in.  Like the title of this blog, it's time I spread my wings and let my thoughts go.