Clouds

I saw Cloud Atlas tonight.  It probably wasn't the right movie to see at this moment.  Themes of love and death and the continuity of personas over time... it's not something that I can take comfort from or even be enchanted by the magic of it all.  Although it was an amazing movie.

Throughout the movie I had one panic attack after another... just the mini-things that I've been having with some regularity, feeling like I have to leap up, to get free.  Feeling like I can't breathe.  The trouble is that I feel trapped in my own body as much as anything else, and I see no way of freeing myself of that.  It's hideous.

I thought I'd gotten past that, but I think that too much caffeine today plus a bunch of other things tipped that biochemical balance over.  I'm pretty sure that chemistry is the catalyst for these things, because the worst times have always been related to other stuff.  But it doesn't matter that much, except that maybe I can prevent them.  I hadn't been feeling so much this way since I started meditating and yoga... and deep breathing was the thing that kept me from screaming tonight.

But it's all larger than that.  Love and death and despair, and my anger with pretty much all the men of my life... and myself, too.  That I keep hooking myself into things that bring me heartbreak, tying myself into love, or what passes for it, and then the bonds smother me and close me in.  I'm torn, all the time, between wanting arms around me and wanting to be free, to breathe, to not want those things at all.

I don't know how to find any peace with this.  I feel like a victim of the legacies of Michael's family and mine... trapped in the cycle of damage that all the previous generations created.  And at the same time, the one complete and perfect thing is my son.  The one thing that I haven't screwed up... although that's more of a tribute to him than to me.

Phillip Larkin was so right and so wrong, all at once.

I don't have any idea where to go from here.  All the paths that I can see from here, including the one on which I have my feet firmly planted, feel wrong and alien. 

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.

Another year

Happy birthday to me.

One year later.

Michael is dead.
Jonathan is in college.
Caitlin is in college and really out of my problem radar.
I am 50 lbs. lighter.

My life is so different from what it was a year ago that I cannot recognize it.

The people are different.
Even the cats are different.

I don't even know how to begin to make sense of what has happened to me.  I sat in a committee meeting today, and talked to other professors, and it was like a different species.  I stopped my career a decade ago, and they went on.  And I have no idea how to be those people. 

I don't know where my life is going, what is happening.  I get sucked into this longing to be with someone else and fear that I will never again have that.  And I get so, so afraid about that, and it's the fear that is the worst thing.  I went around and around on this today.  I almost went out tonight just to see if I could find someone to take home.  Because I feel like no one sees me; that I am more confident and attractive than I have ever been in my life.  But I am... old?  And no one sees me, and no one will want to make the rest of his life with me.

And I don't want to be alone.  That's the truth. 

But I need to learn how to be alone.  Not as a step to not being alone, but because it's the right thing to do.  Because it's the path to happiness.  But I can't seem to find my way to that.  It's like a stepping stone in my head... like a way to get to what I really want.  As if doing that is grabbing the ring, and then I can have what I really want. 

I hate it.  I hate feeling that way.  I just want to be happy.  The kind of happy that I feel when I'm with the man who I should stay the hell away from.  The man who cannot give me what I want.  The man who is probably going to bring nothing but trouble to either one of us.  But when I'm with him, I feel like a real person again.  And that is all wrong.

Spiderweb connections

The trouble is that the only person who really cares about your life is you, and people to whom you are intimately tied... partners, parents, children at little bit.

I miss that connection.

I don't mind my own company.  Sometimes I quite like it.  I have things to do, if I would just do them.  I have a sex life of sorts, and someone who gives me affection, though not nearly often enough.  But I want to come home and share the crappy things that happened in my day.  The car key that didn't work and freaked me the hell out.  The fact that I saw knitting guy at the store, the shawl he was making, and that I thought about asking him about piano.  What happened in classes.  The econ review that's upcoming.  My annoyance with my honors students.  And please, someone, kick my ass about the tax stuff, and what are we going to do about the apartment roof?

No one wants to hear that.  I mean, it's not like they wouldn't listen, but it's minutiae, things that don't matter, the spider-silk connections of day-to-day life.  My son has his own life, my lover doesn't care, not really, my friends have lives of their own.  That sounds pathetic, and that's not what I mean, not the narrative that I'm telling.  It's just true, and it's the thing that I lack, the thing that is making me the most crazy, and the thing that I don't know how to replace.

I have to change the story.  I have to change what I'm doing and how I'm thinking about it.  I have to put actions in here to make this different and better.

six months

If I keep running really fast, I won't notice all the crap behind me.

I miss you.  And I don't.

You are not going to make your truth mine

It's not going to happen.

You tried to destroy me along with you, but it is not going to happen.

I loved you.  I will always love you.  But I am not going to let you take me with you.  I wouldn't do it when you were alive, and I am not going to do it now.

Gloss right the hell over

Don't get me wrong.  People have been incredibly awesomely great to me.

And I know that it's partly that people don't get it, and that they don't know what to say.  But still.

It gets on my last nerve when I say, it's quiet around here, and people say, "oh, you'll find things to fill the time!"  Or, "join some groups!"  Or anything that comes in a cheery perky let's-move-on tone.

It's not easy like that.  You don't just fill in the spaces where people used to be.  You don't just retool your life in 30 seconds.  And you can't just join clubs and get out there and fill time.  Because there aren't those clubs, there aren't those things that just piece in like that.  It's not an instant restart, and even if it was, it wouldn't be simple like that.

I don't mind the awkwardness, the fact that you don't have any solutions for me.  I know that there aren't any quick solutions.  I don't want them.  (Well, sure, if you had them, I'd take it.)  I just want you not to trivialize the kind of pain that I'm in every single day by acting like it doesn't exist, that every night isn't incredibly, awfully hard.  I want you to see that and acknowledge that, even if it's uncomfortable for you.