I woke up on Sunday morning exquisitely sad. I am so sensitive to emotional shifts in myself and others. I have let go of so much that occasionally it all wells up and I can't process it - hence the navel-gazing. I am so actively engaged in being strong. It's only gets difficult sometimes because I want it to look easy. I want you to see me smiling, although not as much as I want to genuinely smile. I want you to believe that I'm doing the right things, and that I'm there for you, and that I'm processing everything in exactly the appropriate way. I want to believe that about myself.
Except sometimes I'm not, fully, and that's why I have mornings like Sunday. I had to talk myself out of bed, into the day I had planned. I wanted to go and support my friend at her show, because I love festivals and I love her and I love why she's there. But something in me felt heavy and dull. Something in me felt sorry for everything - the poverty in Baltimore, the pushy drivers on the highway, myself. Everything.
I wanted to go more than I didn't, I guess, or I wouldn't have gone. Besides, it's always better to put myself in the middle of the cacophony of art and music than to subject myself to the limited world view from my couch. That will never do. And on the way home, after sitting with her for a couple of hours and watching people in one of my favorites cities, I made my way back up the highway, to a dinner with my sister who left this morning to drive thousands of miles away to a new home.
I cried in the car, not just because I would miss her or because of the weight of inevitable change, although that was a big part of it. There was also this sense of letting go, and a feeling of emptiness that instead of living with comfortably, I always rush to try and fill, although fuller is not always better. Healing hurts and it sucks and I hate it. I hate accepting things, and finally acknowledging difficult truths, and knowing there isn't anything I can do other than let the time and tides take it and mold my life into what it's supposed to be, now. I'm painfully aware that there's no more looking back, no more rear view. It's all forward motion, which is somehow, sometimes, more difficult in spite of all that's good.
So anyway, all this shit was colliding in my stupid little mind. And I more or less made myself cry so I wouldn't cry later, because in the place of a person who used to cry all the time is a person who does it just to get it over with, who hates to inflict tears on other people, and to a lesser degree, on herself. I wouldn't even read the card my sister gave me, because I knew it would set me off again. Her fiance called me a chicken. Whatever. I told him that I needed to ration out my emotions. I have too much work to do.
Comments