Winter Kills

Thursday, December 09, 2010

I still have good days and bad days, although the bad days are blessedly fewer than earlier in the year they can still creep up and smack me down. This new medication is working well for me. I am no longer sleeping for 14 hours at night, only to fall back to sleep 2 hours after I wake up. Yes, the good days are claiming more of my time.

However, last night was a bad night.  A combination of a cold, stress and a wounded soul that was bleeding out into the void kept me awake for a majority of the night. Despite my melatonin tablets. Despite my Rescue remedy. When I did sleep, it was blurry sleep from which you woke startled and unsure of the surroundings. I find myself staring at the quilt on my wall, having no idea what it is until it slowly refocuses into something my brain recognizes.

I signed up to receive the reverb10 prompts at the beginning of December. I had no intention of writing on them, daily, but I was curious.

The prompt that came on the 5th was one that sliced into my very core: What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

Letting go is the hardest thing in the world for me. Despite years of therapy, despite years of a well honed rational voice which can balance and counterbalance issues, it is the things that I desire, the people that I love that I grasp more tightly. Thanks to an oldest child's point of view combined with sheer force of will to MAKE IT WORK, I have been known to be the last man standing on many a project or relationship. Long after everyone else has moved on, I remain among the ashes waiting for the resumption of normalcy.

I had a close friendship die this year. Die? Change? Suspend itself in amber waiting to be reanimated? I can't say for sure, except that it hurt me deeply. The more I tried to fix it, the deeper the gulf became, so that at the end when anger and pleading and crying and withdrawing and gift giving and promises and everything else I could think of hadn't worked, I found myself just sitting by the side of the relationship, puzzled and forlorn.

I suffer Beautifully. Exquisitely. I rend. I gnash, I weep.

I envy the ability of others to simply pick up and move on. Because it is not a skill I seem to possess, it can seem almost magical to me the way one can just get past the wreckage. I, on the other hand, linger over ever sliver of wood, every crack, every fissure. I create stories to make sense of what I see, regardless of if the stories are true or not. I need to make sense out of the senseless and these stories of How and Why and When soothe me.

In my child like view of the people of the world as either Friends ( and therefore people I love) and everyone else, there can be a wonderful directness. You are either part of my circle, my clan, my pack....or you are not.
If you are part of that circle, if I have accepted you as one of my own, then you are close to my heart. I open to you in a way that the rest of the world can not imagine, for I keep myself closed and at a distance publicly.

A lover once told me that when we were in bed, my face opened up. It became, he said, like the Promise of Summer.

But when it closed?

My winter can be colder and more brutal than Montreal in January, scrubbing every tender thing from the earth.

It is Winter now.

3 Baleful Regards:

Elly Lou said...

Beautifully written and heart breaking. Damnit.

SUEB0B said...

Winter is so, so hard for me, even down here in the south. I don't let go easily, either. I don't think I'd be able to write that prompt, because I would have to go back to my dad again, and I just can't go there right now.

Ginnysicle said...

Consider the alternative. Being able to give up easily and cut people off without compunction is terrifying. It makes you question what's broken inside you that you can stop loving someone so quickly and completely.

 
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