Navelgazing

My wedding is in seventeen days and my grandmother continues to be dead. These things are not related, yet they chase each other around and around inside my head. I cannot help but think that everything would be so much easier without the lack that death leaves.

Missing someone doesn’t have a timeline. Instead, it shows up and takes your breath away every time you wish that they were here, standing right next to you.

Seventeen days.

It’s isn’t that I’m not looking forward to it (I am) I just want things to be different. Slightly less grief-y and dark. Less cold and more sun. You know, in my perfect world.

Of course, if my world was perfect we would be able to cure cancer, turn back time and render people mute, all with the power of our minds.

Imperfect is what we’ve got and sometimes things are better and sometimes they are not.

That’s the way life goes.

***

Day nine of NaBloPoMo and I’m going mad.

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Watching the cursor blink makes me want to walk away from the computer and stick my head in a bucket of sand.

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It smells like Summer outside, all warm air and green growing things. The garden is alternating between dead and alive, depending on how tasty the plants are to slugs at any given time. I’ve hidden pools of water in nooks and crannies, all the better to coax the birds in, but the cats seem to think that I’m delivering small feathered treats just for them and the slugs continue to eat everything in sight.

This morning made me wish for a laptop and a space to sit in the early morning sun and write, but never mind. Here I am, one battered window away from the outside, writing while my children leap and scream around me.

***

Warmth is like a balm to my soul. I hadn’t realised how much I was hating the cold and grey until it lifted and I felt my insides loosen. Did you know that you can hold all of your muscles tightly clenched for months at a time? It doesn’t change anything, but there you go.

You could do it too I bet.

Maybe you already are.

***

Breathe.

Relax.

Feel your insides unclench and your sadness rise to the top.

Stop pushing it down.

Carrying a brick is just as heavy even if you’ve forgotten that it’s there, in the pit of your stomach.

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Give me your broken, your battered, your dark. Give me your tortured past and your stories of hurt. Offer them up to me and I will keep them safe, here in the darkest depths of my soul.

Your pain shows me that I am not alone (never alone).

You are not alone either.

I want to flip the world over and discover the underbelly. The soft, dark, rotting underbelly. No one is as perfect as they think they are. We’re all a little shattered, here, inside our minds.

You can glue something back together, but it will never be the same again.

***

If you keep pushing everything down; the pain, the emotion, the hurt and anger; sometime in the future, your brain will decide that you’re safe (right when you’re not expecting it) and shatter into a million tiny pieces. People will look at you and wonder, why is she broken now? What changed?

Nothing changed, and everything, all at once.

As they scratch their heads and wonder, pondering uselessly on your sanity, you’ll be left sitting in the middle of the room, the shattered remains of your mind falling on the floor, as you try and find the glue to glue it all back together.

The good glue, the one that holds everything together, even as the salt water of tears threatens to dissolve everything again and the white heat of anger melts you.

Not everyone finds the good glue.

Some of us have nothing more than sticky tape and string, hopes and prayers, tangled remnants of song lyrics, to hold our brains together. I cannot say that this is an effective way to parcel up your sanity for use again. Maybe you should put it in a box and save it for later instead.

That’s what I did.

***

If you keep your sanity in a tidy little box and place it carefully inside your closet, closing the door after it, when people ask you:

‘Have you lost your mind?’

You can reply:

‘No. No I haven’t. I know exactly where it is – it just doesn’t work very well anymore.’

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