SavageTimes

The last time I felt so empty, so bottomed out and hurt, I disassociated from my life for a good two years. It was kind of like sleepwalking.  I ate, I worked, I drove, I made friends.  But everything was distant, removed.  My memories of the time are distilled through murky water, resonating through several layers of glass.

When I came out of it, I still hadn’t dealt with any of my emotions. I’d just buried them.  Deep.  Years later they would resurface, again and again and again, until I faced them, dealt with them as I should have done the first time around.

Live and learn.

This time, I’ve let the emotions roll through me like so many rainstorms, sudden and hard, soft and slow, full of noise and and anger and air and obsecnities, quiet and weary but no less gutwrenching.

For the first few months since my ex-husband decided he wanted to be an ex, I kept to my schedule: running, yoga, grocery shopping, cleaning, getting the kids where they wanted to go, making sure I was there for them whenever they needed me to help them navigate this particular change in circumstances or just life in general. I was not going to let anyone’s choices knock us out of orbit anymore than had already happened.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped going through my motions.  Oh, I covered the kids: got them to school, made sure food and meals were available, laughed at their jokes, talked to them about their day, made sure I was there for them, in whatever way they needed, for however long.  But I started drinking more than one glass of wine after the kids went to bed sometimes. No books, no TV, no talking on the phone.

I stopped running.  I stopped writing.  I had nothing to give myself.  There were no words in the back of my head.

I’ve been so tired.  I’d done everything, everything I knew how to do over the last few years.  I’ve given so much of myself to people who took, and took, and took some more and then just walked away, turned away, shattered my heart.

I started gaining weight, and I didn’t care. I slept a lot.

Then, suddenly, today: maybe it was the band* I was listening to.  Maybe it was the weather.  Maybe it’s the kid gummy vitamins I’ve been taking with my children.  Maybe it’s that I’m off sugar and stopped drinking.  Maybe it’s all of it.

Maybe it’s just time.

Driving from one place to the other with my sick-at-home teenager texting me for various food and things, listening to my music, rainclouds in the sky, pavement still wet from earlier rain, I saw people running on the trail along the river.

That, I thought.  I want that. 

I heard the my feet hitting pavement in my head, felt the tightness of my breath along my back, the air filling my lungs never enough, the heat warming up my muscles, the strange out-of-body release from my thoughts.  I could taste the flat cold of the November air at the back of my throat, see the landscape fall away from me as my body moved across it.

And words skittered along the perimeters of my soul.  Words strung themselves out like Christmas lights across my mind.  Words fell together into phrases, phrases collided into meaning.  Words came to me like rain: fast, fleeting, slow, soft, stinging, healing balm.  Words.

This, I thought.  I want this.  

There is still a sadness in me, and may be for a long time.  I don’t judge or criticize it or ask it when it’s going to leave.  I don’t believe we ever truly “get over” loss.  It just becomes part of our landscape: we eventually remember to laugh again in spite of it, learn to love and trust again. We just adapt: put one foot forward, find purchase no matter what the ground is like, taste the air like it is new, take the bad with the good, don’t hide from anything, live a life fully lived.

*The band I’ve been listening to which may have inspired me moving forward in my processing of life changes, is Ayron Jones and the Way.  You can catch them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U3en84fGHM