It’s wet outside. Cold and grey, the kind of weather that leaves you chilled to the bone, wishing for a warm patch of sunlight, or to be a cat, curled up under the covers of the bed.

+++

Writing every day is hard. This is probably why I ought to keep doing it.

:The hard things are always worth it, in the end:

- which sounds like the punchline to a dirty joke, but is decidedly not a euphamism.

Unless it’s a euphamism for life, in which case, carry on.

+++

Every time I stand up, someone steals my chair.

Everytime I sit down, I’m suddenly needed elsewhere.

I’m starting to suspect that this is the euphamism for life. Bugger trying to be happy in this moment, or taking a second to reflect.

No, you’ve got to aim for overall happiness, so that you can survive the shouting and the stolen chairs and the moments filled with annoyance.

+++

Or maybe I’m wrong and this is just so hard because my hands are cold and somehow, I’ve managed to gouge a hole in my hand and I’m bleeding all over the keyboard.

Literally.

Not metaphorically.

I am literally, bleeding all over the keyboard. The space bar and lower keys at least.

Maybe that should be the euphamism.

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.

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

***
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.

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.’

I look around. It’s dusty here and a little damp. It seems I left my blog in the darkness and it’s started to grow moss.

Never mind, I like moss anyway. It gives character and somewhere for the bugs to crawl. What use is light if there is no darkness to balance it out.

I’ve been stuck. Caring too much, wanting too much, not wanting enough. The landscape has shifted under my feet and riding out an earthquake appears to be harder than surfing a wave. I don’t want what you’ve got, I want what I want.

I want to write. And I’m going to, even if I’m tired. Even when it hurts, I’m going to write.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

***

I’ve lived in my house for three years now and it wasn’t until my grandmother died that I hung pictures on the walls. Her pictures, the paintings and photographs that had lived in her house for as long as I could remember. I hung them and I thought of her and missed what used to be.

But you can’t go backwards. This life of ours dictates forward movement only and here I am, moving along. A snails pace sometimes, but it’s movement. Time passes and I pass with it.

Yesterday, I went looking for a manila folder I knew I had. Dusty and tired I eventually found it, the detritus of high school. Inside, paintings from another time, done when I had time to spare and no one wiping snot on my trousers.

Carefully, I pinned them to my walls, wondering if I was still the same person who painted them.

I haven’t painted in years, now.

***

Blogging is strange for me lately. Peeling off layers of my own skin to poke around underneath and see what falls out.

It’s still a shark tank out there and while I’ve got my oxygen, I’m not sure I’m going to last much longer.

Autumn came, seemingly overnight. I’m not entirely sure where my summer went, but I know that it’s gone and I’ve lost my chance to lay in the sun.

I’ve got writers block and I don’t know if I’m falling apart or not. Not writing, I’m twitchy, but forcing it isn’t feeling much better.

Good things have been happening, in a relatively consistent stream and yet, I’m still left laughing maniacally at an email that comes through, because fucking hell, could this whole situation be any more bizarre? Sometimes it’s like an elaborate dance I’m dancing, keeping all my balls up in the air and my feet away from the cracks. Blogging is insanity personified and I’m pretty sure twitter is the gaping jaws swallowing all my cohesive thoughts.

I wonder if I’m going mad and content myself that as long as I’m still trying to work it out, then I’m probably not. My head feels all messy and I’m coping, I’m functioning, okay? but there’s the dark underbelly I can’t think about, or talk about, or write out.

I’m pretty sure I’m going mad, I’m just not convinced it’s an entirely bad thing. It feels like an imagination overload and imagination is a good thing when it involves giant scenarios with small heroes and large problems, less of an asset when it makes you run through your emergency drills over and over and wonder how things would look if that person fell down that cliff.

My imagination is a bit of an arsehole sometimes.

I’m forcing it out, making it work. Every hill can be climbed right? You’ve just got to keep walking?

Yes.

I think I’m going mad, but sometimes, you’ve just to write stuff and trust that people will know you’re still okay. Things just need out.

Writing is cathartic for me and sometimes, I need to write things out before my head explodes from the words and the hurt going around and around and around.

Sometimes though, once I’ve written them and gotten some feedback, it’s better. The words stop and the insanity stops and I can shake off the hurt and move forward again.

This time, I don’t need to leave the post up. I’ve got no real need to sit and wait for the vitriolic emails to appear in my inbox. And don’t doubt me here, I know they’d appear. This is the Internet and I’ve always known my writing could be found by everybody.

My family is difficult and nuanced and complicated. They are annoying and forgetful and biased. Even when I don’t like them very much, I still love them. I suspect they’re very much like every other family out there.

The people who need to know how I feel already do and the people who made me feel that way in the first place, well, I’m doubting that a shitfest will make me feel better.

I suspect my twitter stream has more spies than Russia and I am fine with that. My twitter stream is not private, in any way shape or form. If my highschool principal was so inclined, he could read what I was up to. In real life, I am intensely introverted. My blog and writing help to combat that and keep me balanced.

So really, this is just me saying that while I don’t feel better as such, I’m not letting it hurt anymore and I’m walking away.

A drop falls on my hand and I look at it, mildly annoyed. Shaking my hand, I continue with my evening, my hand slightly damp.

This is how it starts. A drop falls and leaves a wet patch that chafes and irritates me.

A second drop falls, followed shortly after by a cup of water thrown on my head. Gasping, I look around, soaked to the shoulders and wondering where it came from.

Before I know it, I’m in the middle of an icy ocean, fully clothed and wondering where the fuck my shore is. Shaking, cold, I swim towards the light until I can drag myself out of the water, to stand, dripping and shivering; sand caking between my toes as my teeth chatter a rhythym.

That is how it ends.

The trigger is something different each time:

A waft of perfume;

a photo on the wall;

a stray thought that I can’t shake.

A trigger that once pulled, drags me towards it’s culmination.

Sometimes, I walk silently, waiting for the drip.

Other times, I scream and wail; kicking and screaming like a child.

I’m BUSY. Can’t you see I’m busy? I don’t have time to swim right now.

FUCK YOU.

It’s inevitable; the drip.

This is what soul pain is. It starts with a drip and ends with a slow icy slog towards shore, knowing that you’re going to be cleaning sand out of your toes for days.

And you never know what your trigger will be until it hits you, like a brick wall at high speed.

SLAP.

No thought for what you were doing, suddenly you’re swimming.

Again.

Stop.

Just stop,

Take your moment; this moment and stop. Breathe in and savour the smells of living and stop thinking, because the world is likely to overpower you with it’s wrongness.

With the wrongness of a 6 year old not knowing what a tomato was, with the wrongness of a chicken living 39 days from birth to slaughter, with the wrongness of oil spilling into the Gulf and the cheers when the leak is stopped, but why are we cheering? Aren’t there still eleventy million barrels of oil floating on the water down there? Aren’t there still pelicans suffering and turtles being burned and a journalistic silence being held?

Why are we smiling?

Because it could have been worse.

Worse? It is worse. THIS is the worse.

When the spill was stopped, we shouldn’t have cheered. It was not a success. It was a chance to just stop and breathe out.

In relief.

In disgust.

No cheers, because things are still broken. Stopping the spill is not better.

Things are not suddenly fixed.

The wrongness is still there, lurking under the surface, tainting the smell of seagulls with a darker undercurrent.

When hormones can produce you a chicken for eating in 39 days, we should not be cheering for profit margins and congratulating ourselves on a faster turnover. When did people become removed from suffering? When did we become so overloaded with wrong that we couldn’t see for the dark? When did humans lose their humanity?

But, but there’s too much. I … I can’t.

Stop.

Just stop.

Take measure of where you are and breathe deeply.

When the tipping point comes, when you say ENOUGH and you stop.

Then stop.

{source}

I like to stop and watch humanity swirl past me, a rock in a river of flooding water. Catching glimpses of reality; the way light falls on her hair, a chubby ankle as a baby learns to walk, a smile for the stranger.

I like to watch and listen, silent against a wall, a small smile as I pick up bits of someone else’s life. A he said she said conversation, a teenager with angst, a mother at the end of her rope.

I like to live inside my head, holding imaginary conversations, wondering if this time, this sentence, will it be the branch that breaks the dam and leaves me head down, drowning in a sea of words – a beautiful thing.

I like to lay on my back in the grass in the warm sunshine, feeling the earth support me as I breathe in time with the world.

I like my imagination.