Where it will go

I have been laid low a few times in my life. Luckily (or perhaps sadly, depending on your perspective and how much you like to see me suffer), not too terribly many times. Nonetheless, this weekend I found myself on my floor in a heap, a demon of despair escaping from my lungs in great heaves. It was not pretty and it was not cathartic. It just felt like death. The death of all the good things inside me I had gotten cozy with over the past few months. It felt like getting kicked in the spiritual groin by a playground bully who stood over me and laughed at me for having the audacity to be happy. It felt like being spit on by someone you’d thought all along was your good friend. It just wouldn’t stop aching. It pulsed. I wanted to vomit up everything I had ever swallowed. Everything.

It didn’t go away for two days. I drove two hours to my parents’ house in a complete haze. I’d catch my vision blurring and my focus shifting from the road to the white line to the grooves on the side of the highway to the gravel to the grass to the what the fuck wake up you are running off the road. I should not have been driving. But I couldn’t stay in the house in my pajamas, either, loopy on sleeping pills. I had to get out. Get away. Get some space. Get some time. I thought so hard. I could have bored holes in concrete with those thoughts. They wouldn’t relent and when they did, I sobbed at the emptiness in my gut. I envisioned my drafty house, completely quiet, and I was angry. I cussed to the mirages on the road and the dead raccoons I swerved past. I got phone calls and text messages and @ replies and DMs and I could not respond. I did not have the energy or the words and I wanted to disappear.

I suppose I was (am) being a tad melodramatic but heartbreak — good ol’ out-of-left-field heartbreak — is never the time for emotional reservation, the way I’ve got it figured. You’ve got to go ahead and punch a hole and just let that abscess drain or you will be ripe with infection later. I feel a little silly for airing such intimately dirty laundry on the internet but I thought one good shaming deserved another, and whatever came of it, he would at least know that breaking my heart comes with a bit of a price. It’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but having my friends lob unflattering names at you has to hurt the ego at least a smidge, doesn’t it? And I am not above a strategic Googlebomb if push comes to shove.

When I pulled into my parents’ driveway, I saw my dad standing there, waiting for me. I couldn’t even make it all the way to him before the floodgates opened. He held me as I shuddered and sobbed. My brother put his hand on my shoulder for extra support and I cried in part out of gratitude for them. That evening I moped. Just thinking thinking thinking. What to do, what to do. I snuck out from time to time to be alone and that was, perhaps, not my best move, as sitting out under that inky country sky and those vast country stars has a way of making a person feel even more alone and insignificant than any sort of relationship breakdown. I saw a shooting star. I could not think of a thing to wish for.

Monday my parents took me to Shiloh so we could piddle and I could take pictures, if I wanted, because that’s something that usually cheers me up. We packed a picnic lunch and ate cold hot dogs in the car while we cruised past recently cleaned monuments and I listened as my dad told me the things he would do differently if he ran the park. We parked and walked down a wooded path and I sat in the grass and closed in with my lens on a buckeye moth. I listened to the wind in the trees in the same field where a line of thousands of Confederate troops had surprised Union scouts eons ago. My dad hung back in the distance, swapping stories with some folks from Eastern Kentucky and their big schnauzer, who growled at me upon my return, until I let him get a good long sniff of my hand.

My parents worried about me the whole way home, and did their best to keep conversation light. Except for when mom kept talking about all the things she and dad wanted to bequeath to us kids before they died. “I don’t want to talk about that now,” I said. “Yes, but we have to talk about those things,” she said. “I know, but not right now,” I pleaded. She got it. It was dark before I headed back to Memphis, anxious to get back to the house and the cats and get on with the business of getting on. I had half resolved to do this, this, and this … and yet.

I don’t know where this post is going.

All that thinking and all that anger have left me not quite ready to give up. I am learning some things about my capacity for forgiveness, for understanding, for love in unlikely and painful circumstances. I spent all weekend wallowing in my victimhood and felt no better for it. I realized at some point that I do not want to live as a Wronged Woman and that I have a say in this situation and its direction. I am beginning to understand that people do stupid, hurtful shit to the people they love for no reason, other than because they are fickle, imperfect humans and the human capacity for mistake-making is vastly greater than the human capacity to understand why those mistakes are made. I know some mistakes are worse than others. I am given to the belief that stupid mistakes can be a catalyst for positive things. That awful shit will crystallize what’s important in a life and, if worked on, can raise you up and spur you on.

These are not excuses or rationalizations for what was clearly fucked-up behavior. These are things I have been working to understand so that I can grow from this experience. I do not want to be a bitter person, as is my nature — both born and learned — and I do not want to be a heartbreak waiting to happen. I do not want pity. I do not wish to be complicit in destructive behavior by turning a blind eye to it, but I also refuse to allow this destructive behavior to happen just because of fear or emotional damage that I can’t get at. People do some stupid shit when they are scared. I know I can’t heal old wounds or change natures but I can love fully and clearly and deliberately, with everything I’ve got. If that ends up not being enough, then it will hurt again and it will hurt harder than before, but at least I will know that I did not act rashly or out of pain and spite, and that maybe whatever love I put out there in the world might come back to me in some way.

I don’t know where anything is going.

But for now I intend to see some things through.