Tales From the Darkside.

voltee ♦ May 31, 2015 ♦ Leave a comment

So I needed a little break, to decompress a bit after my last post.  I was overwhelmed with such a vast variety of emotions, more than I expected.  But they were emotions I needed to feel, so I let myself feel them fully for a few weeks, and then I decided to keep going with this.

It’s helping me.  I’m making a little road map of my grief, in the hopes that I will be able to find my way out of it someday…

Somehow, May is all but gone.  It’s been two whole months, and I can’t believe it.  All at once, it seems like an eternity has passed, and that no time at all has passed. But, regardless, I am still here, still managing to breath.   Here I am.  As I am, now.

Quite different from who I was at the beginning of March.

I am a new person. and I’m trying to get to know myself.

It’s hard.  It’s so much easier to just try not to feel anything, to be numb.  I should know.  I’ve gotten so good at it!  I’ve needed to be numb to make it through these last weeks.  It has helped to just fill up one day and move on to the next.  I don’t know if you can call what I’ve been doing living, but I’ve been surviving.  And that’s a good thing, they tell me.

It isn’t that my heart is broken. That I have lived through. That I can handle. It’s that my entire being is broken. I don’t know how to recover from that.  I don’t know the first step to take.  I’m hoping this might be it.

Yes, I’m still sad.  Sadness is at the center of my everything, tinting the edges of my vision at all times.  It’s a strange thing, though.  Before, sadness was a mood that I felt from time to time.  Now, sadness is a tangible thing, a parasite, living inside me, feeding on me, wanting to swallow me whole.  And this new, invincible sadness is not just emotional. It’s so, so physical. I have never been sad with my entire body before. I didn’t even know that such a thing is possible.

Well.  To tell the truth, that’s just one of the things I know now that I never,ever wanted to know.  I am just brimming with unwanted wisdom these days!

There is something else, too.  Something dark inside of me that was never there before.

It wants me to be bitter.  It wants me to be jealous and hateful.  It makes me want other people to suffer as I have suffered.  It scares me, and I hate it, but I just can’t get rid of it.

It is easier to just give in to it.  Sometimes it feels so good to just shrivel up with hatred.  Sometimes, I am too tired to fight anymore.

But mostly, I try.  My current method is to call up John Lennon, and let him sing some verses of “All You Need Is Love” in his sweet, mellow voice in my head.  It’s pretty effective, I have to say.

Sometimes, it’s even out loud.  When I feel the darkness swelling inside me, a wave of anger and hatred and all that I am not, sometimes the only defense I can think of is to sing “Love, love,love!”

And maybe repeat it a few times.

It works!  Yes, it makes me feel a bit schizo, but that’s a small price to pay, I suppose.

Every day,somehow, I get up, and I fight.  It is so hard, and at the end of each day, when I am driving home, I think, “I did it!  I made it through another one!”  And I feel like the strongest woman in the world!

And then, eventually, five seconds or five minutes or five hours later, I remember that I was not even strong enough to protect my baby.  I couldn’t even manage to do what millions of women do all over the world,  every single day.  And then I feel so utterly weak, so feeble and old and worthless.  And then I begin a brand new fight…

And every morning, I wake up, and I think “This is it.  I just can’t do it.”  I keep thinking that this is going to be a dark day, that this will be the day that I can’t make it through. But somehow, even though there is that darkness I can’t avoid, and there are tears in every single day, I do manage to find some light, too. There does always seem to be a reason, however fleeting, to smile.

So, I cling to that.  It’s all I can do.