Stormy Day

Okay, I'm up.

Disappointing trip to the mailbox, but there was a lovely roll of thunder accompanying me down the driveway and the gentle patter of rain walked me back to the house.

So thick, these clouds.  This darkness pervades, and makes my thoughts thick and slow, too.  I am heavy.  Like the wan light struggling to shed its leaden shrouds, I struggle to shed this weight of shades and shadows.

I wonder, sometimes, is it better to be aware as I am that it's not real?  That this feeling isn't real?  That it's the result of faulty wiring, malfunctioning messages of the mind, misfiring neurons?  Or would it be easier if I didn't know, if I believed this was true and everything and all there was or would be?

Is it better to know that there may be hope? Better to cling to that hope and risk being dashed against the rocks of disappointment for the possible transcendence of its fulfillment?  Or to dwell in a twilight of hopelessness without knowing the lofty heights of potential and clarity?

The lights on the tree sparkle, and Sprout is watching cartoons and laughing like a loon, and I have people who love me despite myself, and I know that is good, but right now it is foreign to me, unreachable.  I can see but not touch, and the more I reach, the more slippery it gets, the farther it recedes, and like trying to hold a fistful of water, the harder I grasp the less I can keep.  I feel so far away.

Today I do not want to be open.  I want to be closed up, to curl around this wounded, tender, never-quite-healed place within me and protect it from the world and everything that hurts.  Today I would like to be bundled in the soft warmth of my cozy bed, perhaps with an adamantine shell for extra protection.  I don't want to feel anything - no hope, no despair, no love, no sorrow, no loss, no joy, no misery, no happiness, none of this wondering when I stopped being worth anything to the people who should value me the most, no wondering when I became so ephemeral in the world that is supposed to help me be solid and present and real, no wishing that I could let go of this need for approval or at least acceptance from places I will never find them.

I do not want to be open.

So I open myself a little more.

In the end, I can't let the illusion become more than what is real.  I can't let it win.  The smile?  Is brittle and may shatter at the slightest provocation, but it is pasted on my face because it doesn't want to be there.  I am open, and every aching, raw, miserable inch of me is there to be poked, prodded, judged, and left deeply scarred, because it's the only way I know for it to scab over and some day, with luck and love and perseverance, maybe heal into a puckered, cicatrix of a whole soul.