I have two "friends" on Facebook that were once married for a very long time and have two children together. One of their kids is getting married soon and it occurred to me how bloody weird it must be to spend decades of your life with someone, start a family and then have it end. I thought "I couldn't handle that". And I thought, furthermore, that we as individuals aren't given the tools to be able to handle something of that magnitude. You get a few weeks or a couple of month's grace and then people really want you to pick up where you left off and get on with it.
It's ridiculous, really. The five-stitch scar in my forehead and the two stitches in my lower lip? They're still there and they happened when I was five. They didn't fade. The arm that I fractured in 9th grade still throbs occasionally.
I was in the gym today and the guy that lives below me showed up. His name is Mark. On this particular morning when I decided that since I was up at 4.44am I should just go in to work, I bumped into him in the elevator and he drove me downtown to work since that's where we were both working at the time. I remember watching the sunrise, alone, on the 8th floor of a building on Granville Street. I flamed out very early that day and went home.
In the past couple of years my sleep pattern has disintegrated horribly. I don't want to go to sleep. Going to sleep is like death. When I go to sleep it means that day is over and that when I wake up in the morning on the conveyor belt that is my life, I will be one step closer to things I don't want to do, experiences I don't want to participate in.
Some nights I cannot stand the thought of going to bed alone, and so I don't.
Some nights I'm like that Matthew Good song and it's "whatever puts me all the way out".
Anyways, I suppose the crux of this post is that there are some pretty goddamn scarring things that happen in our life and I don't think we, as a society, deal with them as well as we ought to. Somehow it's less embarrassing to be physically hurt than it is to be emotionally hurt. No one likes to talk about uncomfortable situations, especially ones that might befall them one day. It's much easier to put in stitches.
This is nothing more than a thought that I had today.
Like when I was having some Swiss Gruyere today and I thought "this is the cheese I have been searching for".
2 comments:
Nicely put. Hubby just asked me "what's all the hoopla about bullying, it's been around forever, everyone's been a victim." I had to tell him it's so much different now, it's more emotional when the rest of the world knows about it and not just the kids on the block. I agree sometimes a black eye or a scar is easier to deal with. It's almost a mark of survival. The emotional scar is much deeper, and never fully heels, because your mind won't let it.
Apt.
We never forget transgressions against us, or things that were taken from us.
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