2006-12-19

It's Not About Me Today

A major life-change, like a break-up or death or unemployment or something... these things bring people down, no doubt. They can change everything, from who your friends are to what you wear and how you speak and what you eat for lunch everyday.


Major life events change you.


There's the time when you're In It and you're mourning whatever just left. You drink all the time and you can't completely feel all of your nerve endings because to do so would surely mean that you'll finally begin to bleed from every pore the emotions that you've left idyll over the last several months - those leading up to the event and those in the wake of the event.

Then you realize that things are starting to scar. You maybe don't feel as much.

And that's scary because it means you're letting go, which is what you never wanted to do in the first place.
You bring yourself back down into your original agony.
you know that place by now, it's not scary or new. It's all yours and it feels just right.
For awhile.

Something feels like it's a couple of degrees off.

You have to, kind of, FIND the pain some days. It's not just there like it used to be and you have to ask for it to wash over you.

Which you do and then it does and then you're thinking that it's okay because you can sit in the dark wishing and praying and crying and pretending that nothing is okay.

The times when you ask for your hurt to crush you get further apart, eventually. Maybe you hear a song or you look out your window in the same way that you once did and you feel a genuine sting but mostly, you hover outside of where it really hurts. You would go back inside of it but you can't really find it, so you hover over where it used to be and one day you realize that you're not sure if you want the thing you lost to come back or if you want the anguish and the sadness to come back.

So they do, but they're different.
Now they're working for you. You're psyche stops protecting you and lets you feel every bruise as it blooms in you. You're not hurting as deeply and you're finally thankful for that.
you're not hurting about the loss - you're hurting about the fact that in its wake, everything is different and lonely and sort of.... better.

You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and you see something really beautiful in the color of your eyes when you're this scared. You see that the flush on your cheeks makes you look younger. You see that you're not awful, even when you are.... awful.

One day you clean your floors and you realize that this is the first time you've felt clean in months.

You go shopping and when you come home and flip through the caller ID, you don't expect to see the number that you used to see.

You never really decide to go on with your life, because you truly believed you would never be able to. And, you're kind of not going on with your life.
You're going on with a slightly different life than the one that used to be yours.
Even though it's different, it's nice.

It's got all the elements of the life you thought was yours.
It's natural.
It's organic to you.
It actually is your life, finally.

And then you wait.
Until the next time.
There will be one and it will be terrible.
And then, a few moths later, it will just be part of you like the rest of all the other terrible things that have happened to you.

Pete?
Repeat.

arizonasarah at 3:58 p.m.

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