I haven't posted since Saturday, which if you know me is awhile.
I've been thinking. Not of my own accord, mind you.
It started as a runaway thought, not even a blip on the radar, but has taken life in my mind while I try to sleep.
The heartbeat.
It was just a little flutter, really, there on the screen. No discernable shape or form but there it was, marching to the beat of an unheard drummer. The red in the center of the screen clearly screaming that "X" marked the spot.
I surfed BlogExplosion for hours, left comments, read books, called old friends, watched mindless TV. Blocked it out.
But there in the dark it pops back up at me.
It would have been better if my life went back to normal right away. If the surgery was just a surgery.
My clothes now fit the same as they did before dh came home.
I look the same.
But there are things I know that are missing. Silly things, inconsequential things. Like my love of soup. A good friend of mine, when she wants me to know how great something is, says, "Alex, it's as nice as soup." And I know exactly what she's talking about because it has wrapped me up in velvety warmness for years. Campbell's was my only vice. But now, the taste is gone.
Soup chokes me.
Champagne is sour.
The cheery "I'm okay, You're great!" aura that I fight to exude to the kids crumbles.
I am tired.
I am sad.
As I type this now, my fish Opal is dying. She's just a goldfish that I got downtown in Fussa to keep me company. She was 3 dollars. She's not the only one. I've killed fish before. But tonight I watch her, tapping the glass (and probably furthering her death) wanting her to take a swim around the tank and be alive when I wake up tomorrow. But I know she won't be. And I feel a horrible sadness that makes me feel ridiculous but that I know goes deeper than her.
I remember when I used to be a teenager. How TRAGIC! everything was. How every emotion was almost disgustingly too real to bear. And the poetry! Superbly dark and overwritten. And bad. I had a friend Kevin, who wrote a poem we all thought was magic. I only remember scattered words here and there:
My life upon a dream it rides
to wake in arms that hold and hide
the dream that unfolds upon descent,
hell catches what arms unbent
________________ fall away
never again here to stay...
___________ dreams do ride
eternally living a suicide.
Just a silly little poem. As everything was. Love or hate. Take or leave. Forever or never. No greys. A written manifest of the extremes that we struggled to give voice to as we hurtled into adulthood. Maybe it's the meter of it. It was more of a mantra for us at that age, recited over and over again until it took on a life (and rhythm) of its own.
I look back on those days and even though I laugh at the hilarity of it all, I think that if maybe I could emote like that about this, it would be more manageable.
If I could cry for 3 months and be all distraught and teenage angst-y that this might go away. Or at least not keep me awake at night.
I've done horrible things in my life.
dh knows about all of them.
Up until this point, I've slept like a baby.
There's something different about this.
Something out of my control.
Like Opal. I did the best I could. I fed her, changed her water, watched the temperature, monitored the pH. She'll still be dead by morning.
The heartbeat on the screen.
Out of my control.
Dead by morning.