Waking up in Vegas

Last night I saw something that paralyzed me. Absolutely took my breath away. While the "what" that I saw was small and really unimportant, the meaning behind it felt like a shockwave going through me. At once I was angry, hurt, sad, sick, everything. Hot tears barely made it down my face before they evaporated into sticky steam, my skin so warm with rage. As I struggled to find the words , desperate to tell someone how I felt, I found I had no voice and couldn't even begin to describe what I was experiencing.  I didn't care that for what it was, my reaction was disproportionally grandiose. I didn't care what it meant for me to be laying in my bed chewing the inside of my jaw til it bled. A numbness crept over me that quite honestly has not yet fled. When I woke up this morning there was more disappointing news. I laid some more and I cried until it was time for me to get ready for work. I thought about how long I would have until I could fall apart again. Putting myself together with loose ties beginning my countdown. No tears, I promised myself, no tears until I was safe in my own space again. I didn't keep the promise and a few fell at work. No one saw, but I pushed everything down into the place where things go when they don't want to be felt.

I knew I should write but I didn't know where to start or what to say. I didn't want to tell the story because I was tired of telling that story.  I didn't want to admit how incredibly pathetic I felt for believing in the fairy tale. Then sometime around mid afternoon it changed.

I felt the fog lift and I let those things come up. It made me sick to my stomach but I let it.  Purged of the sickness that I'd allowed to stew in my body, I wondered how or when this would feel distant enough to be laughable.  Will I ever laugh again? Yes. When something is really really funny.  I sighed in disbelief. And I got sick again.

When everyone had gone, I sat in my chair and I allowed myself to remember the night before. It felt like a blur; like a night in Vegas except all I could remember was the long walk home and none of the dancing. I felt like I'd just woken up covered in glitter, breath smelling of aged spirits and dashed dreams--fitting because it was.

As I stepped out in the sunshine, I breathed in the crisp air of autumn and made the change at home in my heart. I talked with Mo in the way that we do everyday, and I felt better.  That life, that life is gone. Every part of it that existed in me left me today. It was poison. It couldn't survive within me and so it had to go, and I had to let it.  This life, this life is the one I must learn to navigate.

I can throw the covers up and block out the new day, or I can glisten in the sunshine with the glitter in my hair either way the dusk will chase the dawn.  I don't want to miss life mourning something I thought I should have had .  Let it circle the drain, then let it wash away.

Its funny that when I sat down, laptop in hand with internet that hasn't been working all evening long, I was not expecting to write any of the words I just wrote. I guess when the time was right the things that needed to come came. Like they always do.

What I know for sure is that. I have been broken before, I have been in a million pieces and still remained whole. I have felt like too much winters wind stinging the lungs, and salt on an open wound. And. I have been clean. I have been as healing as the waters of the atlantic. I am a lot of things and now I know one thing that I am not nor will I ever be. The thing is, for the first time in many many years, I am not wishing to be.

I'm the hot mess who believes in fairy tales, falling in love in Paris, wishes on falling stars, thinks there is magic in the ocean and fairy dust on sandy beaches. I am flawed and brilliant, too idealistic for my own good and a dreamer who sometimes doesn't understand the obvious.  I love...without reason and without boundary and sometimes my love is far-reaching and gets away from me but I never want to stop it. Let it drip like wet paint of the canvas of the earth and let it paint the roses red.

It took a lot from me, but it did not take my ability to give. And I can say with earnest that next time I will not love any less or any quieter. May she always be reckless and may she always dance through sunset.  That's me, just waking up.

It's morning.