Saturday, April 23, 2011

Four and Twenty...




It’s Wednesday April 20th and I’m sharply reminded as I wake up that Rob has been gone three years today and I want nothing to do with it. Despite all of that I wake up feeling good. I want to allow myself to feel good if that’s the case and to feel sad if that’s also the case.
I wander around my room, putting together things I want for this morning in an oversized purse. I’m debating on whether or not I’m going to bring along my computer and after a few minutes I decide not to. I do put my new journal into the bag. I’m excited to start it despite it being rather small and unlined, two qualities I typically avoid in purchasing a new journal, but it’s got so many pages that I figure it’ll keep me occupied for a while.
In the kitchen I make oatmeal and stare out of the window while mindlessly consuming it. I snap out of it when I feel the spoon tap the bottom of the bowl signaling it‘s emptiness. I stand up, leaving the table and leave the bowl in the sink, going back to my room to get my purse and coat. I stop for a moment and stare at my small bookshelf. I see my thick black journal in the middle of a stack of book from winter/spring of 2008. I take a moment to pick it up and flip to April 20th, 2008. Sitting on the edge of my bed I read the words that inhabit the page trying to remember when I stopped writing that afternoon and when I had begun again the next day recording my dad’s phone call. I remembering feeling too overwhelmed to write coherent sentences. There are a lot of fragmented unfinished sentences written in a sketch book that I am forever grateful for. I also blogged a lot following this particular day but not much journaling happened. The idea of journaling then felt like being swallowed up into a tidal wave. To keep it at bay I only let a little bit out at a time.
Reading my words I forgot that I felt I should’ve looked at him harder and longer before saying goodbye but that a feeling of letting go followed that as I was somehow reminded that he already knew how I felt. I’ve let a lot of tiny details pass by over these few years. This is what I was afraid of. Forgetting little nuances of him, of our time together, but there isn’t enough room anymore in my head. New memories are always forming, pushing back the old ones. Nothing is ever truly forgotten, just pushed aside a little making room for new stuff.
I close the journal before reading about my dad calling. That, I will never ever forget. It still resonates in my head as if I’m hearing it for the first time. I put the journal away and head out.
The air is unseasonably chilly, the sky gray and I’m irritated wanting some sunshine. I walk over to the Knockbox for an Americano and sparkling water. After my usual journaling I decide to write an anonymous letter to Rob and send it to the Atlanta coffee shop I was at when dad called. I wanted to tell him all the stuff I didn’t get to in between him leaving my place and climbing into the Jeep.
I wrote and wrote and wrote for two hours. I told him about him leaving my place and how I cried so hard I couldn’t see straight telling myself I knew I could do this on my own again, I could be single again. I didn’t know why I was feeling this way. I told him about my first client Tracy and how I shared that I was irritated with him that he didn’t tell me when he was going to be back in Atlanta. Her response was “He’s just being a guy.” I wanted to feel better after talking to her but I didn’t. Something was bugging me and there wasn’t a single word I could say or action I could take to make it better.
When I was done working, I asked our massage therapist to work in my neck being I had been in a car accident two days before. She agreed and while she worked, we talked. Somehow she told me she thought about being a mortician. She shared that she’s experienced a lot of loss in her twenty four years here and suddenly, I got really uncomfortable. I wanted off that table, as if death were contagious.
I left the salon half an hour later and walked home. I was getting hot and sweaty, annoyed that this walk was taking so long. Once home, I still had not heard from him so I showered and walked up to San Francisco coffee, sitting in the window, writing, hoping to calm down and do something that brought me a lot of happiness besides wondering about him and where he was.
At 4:15pm I texted him asking when could I expect him. He didn’t respond and forty five minutes later, he was dead.
I’m not sure how many pages I had written before folding them and placed them inside a little card I took from a box of them he had given me on Easter Sunday. I didn’t go back to re-read it, just wrote the address on the envelope and sent it off, pleased with my effort.
Back in my apartment, I responded to email before checking the time and needing to catch the bus to see my therapist Beth. I wasn’t sure if this was a good idea or not, seeing her. My anger and squirrelliness is settling in all the sudden and I’m not sure I feel like talking about my feelings.
I stuff a cookie into my mouth on my walk over to her office having stopped at Whole Foods first. “What am I doing?” I ask myself. Physical pain seems better than what’s swirling around in my head.
Sitting on the couch across from her I’m all smiles before bitching and moaning about all the crazy that has happened in the previous days including but not limited to being pushed around by strangers on busses, idiot people in my chair, etc etc…
Forcing me to break away from all of this she asks how I’m feeling today.
“I don’t know.” I try not to snap. Do we have to talk about feelings? “I woke up and I was fine, happy even but now I’m angry like I normally am when these anniversaries come up. I know it’s to cover something else up but I can’t seem to get underneath it.
Beth wants me to check in with my body. I spend countless hours leaving my body. Through food, excessive reading, bouts of anger, and running at 100mph from one thing to the next without stopping I do love to stay hovering just above myself to avoid feeling anything.
“Just take a moment,” she begins. “and take a deep breath and see if you can identify what’s there, what are you feeling and where?”
I do as I’m told because this is what I pay her for. I feel…um…my lungs expanding and contracting, my stomach is tight as always, and I see nothing in my mind’s eye except a vast, empty, black space.
I look up at her and relay those details.
“Can you go into the black space? Tell me what’s there?”
I try not to sigh too loudly and get quiet again. “I’m just sad and I don’t want to be.”
“Do you feel the sadness will overwhelm you?”
Tears begin welling and I nod.
“Can you ask it not to?”
I’m quiet. “I’m not sure.”
“OK, so maybe we don’t have to go there. Maybe it doesn’t want to come out now. That’s ok.”
I nod.
“Is it safe to say that you don’t know how to be sad?” she asks.
“Yes. I’ve been praised all my life for being the happy one. I don’t know what to do when I feel sad. It’s most uncomfortable. I can eat until I can’t breathe because the physical pain is way better than the emotional stuff. The physical stuff I can deal with but emotional pain? Not so much.”
“How old is this part of you that refuses to feel sad.”
“Eight? Nine? Ten? I think?”
“I feel like she’s in this dark space by herself. Can you bring her out, out her somewhere else? Maybe give her something to play with?’
I imagine this for a moment. I imagine placing this little person in a brightly colored Alice in Wonderland kind of forest and giving her charms to play with, bright colored markers, paper, scissors etc… I do wonder if I could move aside and stop trying to micro manage my emotions and let them come out… through words, through drawing, collages, through my jewelry making, through actually experiencing my life and not hovering above it?
“Maybe. I may eat along the way to getting her but I can try.” I laugh.
“That’s ok, just take it slowly. You don’t have to do this right away.”
I want to though. I want to know what I keep from myself.
Beth draws a upside down triangle. At the bottom point she writes “sadness”. At the left hand point she writes “Planning/Agenda” and at the right point she writes “Addiction/Overeating”. “Ok, so you have these two parts that keep you from feeling sadness. The planning part keeps you busy and fights with the part that overeats. Instead of it actually reaching the part that over eats it gets redirected to the sadness making it all heavier. The planner wants to be rid of the sadness. She wants this little girl to get over it, snap out of it. This little eight year old just wants to be acknowledged.”
I nod. I want all of this I just don’t know how to get there just yet. Beth feels the planning part of me thought that I would feel happy or better after writing that letter. When that didn’t happen I got mad, and here we are. Yup.
I leave her office not feeling better, or worse or anything. I go to the gym. I hate it and leave, walking to the bank to deposit a check. Jeff is texting me. He’s done with work and wants to meet up. I had not thought beyond Beth but knew I wanted to see him. I meet him at Intelligentsia and wait for him to finish up before leaving.
Neither of us have much of an idea as to what to do. I want him to decide everything for me. It’s me saying though that I wanted to try this tiny little pie place over by my apartment. (Hoosier Mama on Chicago Ave) He agrees and off we go. I don’t even like pie but the place smells so damn good that I need to know about this.
It’s as delicious as it smells. I eat a chocolate slice and Jeff has a ginger custard one. Amazing. I want to hear about his day more than I want to tell him about mine. I relay a few details before we head back to my place where he suggests we eat dinner, split a beer and watch a movie. Perfect.
We have a picnic in my bed while watching Miranda July’s “Me You and Everyone We Know”. I couldn’t feel more content sitting next to him, seeing his reflection in the computer screen and thinking about how lucky I am. Half way through the movie something seemed to shift every so slightly in my mind. I don’t know how to describe it except that it was a gentle reminder that I’m here. Now. I’m here with Jeff and I feel so much love for him that I could melt into him right now and let the world fall away.

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