I’m having one of those days. One of those days where despite my best efforts to get up, just get up, get dressed – despite it all. I just can’t get up.
I am paralyzed by fear. Fear of death and earthquakes, children and cancer and nothingness. And everything. The everythingness of it has me trapped in this bedroom i call home.
I have run so far this week. I have stomped and shuffled until i can’t take another step. And it’s not working. I can’t shake this feeling that everything disappoints me. Makes me sad. I want so much for my children, for my family, for you. There is so much to lose.
I picture myself in a car madly, desperately trying to drive faster than a tsunami. I watched that on the news last night. I should have known better than to turn on the news after work. Dog tired, emotionally empty, the devastation and terror in Japan consumed and overwhelmed me. Pushed me over that proverbial edge. So surreal this world is to me now. Watching people die in real time. How am i supposed to deal with that? How can you ask me to comprehend that and then go about my life. Reading tweets that are, at best, in poor taste. Seeing people use righteousness as an excuse to spew hate. There is so much awful in the world right now.
I feel like a fragile soul borne to feel the pain of a million deaths.
Melodramatic melodrama played out in a bedroom over-looking a lake on a little island in the Pacific ocean. A woman in the middle of her life prone to quiet sitting and tearful running. Both of which equal out the screaming mind and fluttering heart.
It’s all so fucked up. I just don’t know on a day like today how to stay positive. How to protect my children. To entertain and to care for. I can mindlessly wander while they are at school. In and out of each of their rooms picking up discarded laundry and tidbits from their lives. Friends numbers scribbled on desks and candy wrappers. Hold their clothing to my face and breathe them in. Straighten and tidy. Domestic duties done efficiently, robot like. Fourteen years of parenting and homemaking have made me an efficient little robot. Is that the sum of my life?
Is this how it will be then? Taking care of but never feeling taken care of. Working so hard in an effort to hide the fact that i can’t really take care of anything. I have no control over what happens in my world, in this world. I just have to live it with my children. Hope for the best. Maybe, like my nightmare last night, a pack of cougars and lions and mighty cats will hunt us down and i won’t be able to do a damn thing to protect them.
Such a dramatic thing today.
This morning in a misery pool i googled photos of dysplasia in the mouth. Just to make myself feel a little bit worse. My next appointment at the cancer clinic is coming up and i always start to obsess. Nervously flossing and rinsing and checking in the mirror. Mentally comparing this horrible thing in my mouth to where it was at the last appointment. Micro changes smacking me. And i turn away, close that door. Ignore.
“You have no idea what i think in my head.” that’s what i told the handsome young chef as he tried, once again, to make some crack that was meant to make me laugh, but really was an inside joke amongst kitchen staff to poke fun at us floor staff. He stopped for a moment. Took pause. That made me smile, giggle silently.
Are we married? I’m not really sure. We were married for a long time. And then we weren’t. And i filled out a bunch of paperwork and had us legally separated. Now we are together, but it seems that to be married there should have been some kind of formality. Some signing of things in front of witnesses and friends. And it’s been hard. When it’s good, it’s so good. And when it’s bad, like today and yesterday and maybe the day before that too, i feel disjointed. He says he doesn’t believe in true love, that we are not destined to be together. He explained it to me and it made no sense. When we are not walking side by side everything else feels heavier. My chest is in constant struggle. I reach for asthma puffers for relief. But the weight doesn’t dissipate. I wait for our circling of each other to fall back in rhythm.
You should hear inside my head today. Earthquakes and children, sex and marriage, lions and tigers and bears. A million people screaming. One woman in a bedroom high above the pacific ocean screaming soft, quiet, loud.
