It's been a few weeks. My eyes could use rest from tears and computer screens (the latter due to final assignments and search for distraction). They could stand in for Michelin Man, if you ask me. My appetite is in tact. I think it's how I cope. It's how I know I'm still me. Oh well, good-bye losing-weight-and-looking-fabulous-post-breakup-diet. I'll have to rely on the haircut.
My mornings and nights are tearful. My pillows get drenched in tears (oh so cliche! Dammit!). The bed offers no comfort yet I just lie there hoping I wake up in another era or planet or galaxy or... dimension.
My days are tough. Sometimes I forget to breathe.
Sometimes I yell at myself. What's the deal, girl?! It's only a break-up, for goodness' sake!!! This shit happens all the time!! And then I just cry some more because of the yelling. I swear I'm not a 7-year old.
Sometimes I let myself. Maybe some of you can relate: sometimes a break-up seems more than just a break-up.
Sometimes relief comes. When AH made me laugh at his break-up stories over lunch on the library's sun-bathed lawn. When SS and I obssessed over The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 2004 hit "Maps." When SB asked me good questions and let me cry. When SK sent me an e-mail with links to good stuff and a prayer. When MY called me all the way from Western Africa. Thanks, guys.
When I read. Because other people's words (and life stories) help. See below for a few.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.- C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, excerpts
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me...
There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met H. I've plenty of what are called 'resources.' People get over these things. Come on, I shan't do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace...
Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe in such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'
the mind is a yacht, the heart an oil tanker
The mind tacks swiftly;
the heart is slow to turn.
In a howling gale
the mind can be swamped
and swept off course;
while the heart
has the mass
and the momentum
to hold its bearing.
But if icebergs suddenly appear
or reefs rise out of nowhere,
the mind can find a path around
but the heart will rip itself apart.
- Cameron Semmens, Through the Lover's Window: The Trials and Treasures of Love and Loving
I sense there are a lot more chapters, though I can't be sure I'll write them. How strange this is, to be writing to no one and everyone about this? Is this why there's so many books, poems, and songs about loving and losing? It's an active - desperate - fight for catharsis. It's a hope, too, that maybe someone else understands what you're going through. Or better, that someone else might find your words and be lifted up, despite the 'lowness' of your words.
1 comment:
oh, there are more alright. . .
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