Anhedonia

I realized today that a lot of the problem is that there is nothing that look forward to anymore.

It's not that I don't enjoy some things when they happen.  For a while anyway.  Some small things... lying warm and peaceful in bed, a beautiful fall day, my son, moments when the music sweeps me away and I dance.  But there is nothing that I look forward to.  It's like my heart stopped when Michael died.  I stopped believing in a future.

And I say that, and it sounds all melodramatic and like love in the grave or something like that.  But it's not like that.  I think I just had too much.  Michael used to say that if he even let all the pain out, it would kill him.  (The truth of that, I think, is that not letting it out did in the end kill him.)  But I understand a little better now what he meant.  I'm not so numb as I was for a while, but that's worse, and I feel like I have to hold myself encased in armor to keep all the painful things at bay.

I've been watching The West Wing again.  And I can't help remembering now and then how much we enjoyed it the first time.  It was earlier on, when Michael was still more well, and things were on the whole better, and we loved it so much, were so caught up in it.  It's hard not to flash back to those times.

I sit here by myself.  I can't focus, I'm not working well, and I have no idea how I'm going to get done all the things that I need to do.  My hip hurts all the time when I move, and I wonder sometimes if I need to accept that this will never be any better.  I wonder if I'll ever feel like a normal person again, and I wonder if I'll ever feel less desperate for something more than this.

Tomorrow night I'll have a few precious hours with someone who will make me feel better when he's here, and I'll take those few hours, because that's the only time all week that I'll feel like a real person.  Even though this path is nothing but wrong.

I need this to be different.  I need to feel different.  I need it all to turn around, and I need for that to happen now, soon, because I can't bear a lot more of this.  It's like skating on the surface all the time, and every now and again you fall through, into something that is sometimes white-hot, but mostly icy cold and razor sharp and painful beyond words.