Archive for the ‘happiness and craziness’ Category

Driving home from work tonight, I fell into a game of What If. That thing you do when you imagine that something catastrophic happens in your world that destroys everything, grinds your life right into the ground, and you have to restart entirely. Have to—it’s not your fault, because there was the Terrible Thing. It alleviates the guilt of that occasional wish you experience, that you could just duck out of your life. Just throw your hands up and slip on a pair of sunglasses and kind of slip out of your life. New place, new name, new accent, if you want. Though I’ve always been really kind of awful at accents.

I decided that I wanted to go someplace warm, and probably that has a lot to do with the wind-chill factor and the single-digit temperatures that are whittling me down to a shivering little nub. And I’m going to leave everything I own. Even the books? Even the books. Even the pictures?

A few weeks ago, as I do, I started running again. The Couch to 5K, that old reliable standby which removes your buttocks from the couch and sets you bouncing and cursing down the road towards ultimate health and total fitness, or at least the ability to run for 3 miles without passing out and then dying in a ditch and then being eaten by wild moose who have trampled down off the mountains when they heard that there was a buffet.

Jennette was my inspiration—she announced, I am going train for the 5K! Oh boy, that was totally easy! she said. And I thought, holy crap, it’s totally easy! I can do it too! And then I might have totally blamed her for leading me astray when, after rising bright and early for a vigorous dawn run, I staggered home and crawled into bed, safely out of range of mooses, and pretty much slept like the biggest Wuss in Wusstown, population me,  for the rest of the day.

I like happy endings. It’s why I read romance novels for so long—I want the romantic kiss and the sunset and the ever-after where the music surges joyfully and has got harmonicas in it and everything is swell and nothing will ever be sad, not ever again.

The problem with happy endings, though, is figuring out where the ending is. Sometimes, it is very very easy. The hero and the heroine kiss, that’s one. The family torn apart is reunited, there’s another. The small, wiry kid wins the national boating championship despite all odds and is hoisted up on his teammates’ shoulders and there is cheering.

Weight loss stories are supposed to have very definitive endings—you reach your goal! You have triumphed! There go the harmonicas, and here comes the hero of our story, wearing a slinky dress in size whatever, newly proud of herself and her accomplishments and her rockin’ bod, and there she goes off over the horizon and into the setting sun that is as hot as she suddenly believes she is and then the credits roll and you are dabbing away a little tear and pressing your fist to your heart because it is throbbing with the beauty of it all, so hard it might just thump right out of your chest.

Min is not actually my dog. No matter how much I loved her the very most more than anything, and no matter how much she loved me greater than pies and ham, she does not actually belong to me, and I do not actually belong to her, except in our hearts. She belongs to E’s brother and now that A has moved to SLC where his job, his school and his fiancee all are, he has taken his dog with him–which means my stewardship is over.

A came and got her Friday night, while I was out. I stumbled home kind of tipsy, was confused when no dog came exploding with joy to see me, limbs akimbo, tongue lolling, stub of a tail beating back and forth in a wild blur. She is supposed to circle around and around me and through my legs and push her face into my knees and cover me with love when I sit down to scratch her butt and then climb on my lap and sigh and put her head down like everything is finally right with the world and she couldn’t imagine anything being any better than it was right there and then, forever.

Hey, look at that. You wait long enough, and the seasons will go and change on you. It won’t say a word of apology for how long it took, how delayed it is, how it didn’t call and let you know what was going on, how it showed up smelling like smoke and with lipstick on its collar and looking a little crosseyed, but you don’t care because it’s spring and it’s finally here and you are just glad that it’s safe and not tied up in the brig of a Somalian pirate ship somewhere getting the pollen beat right out of it.

Spring. Hi. I missed you. You’re cute. Let’s not ever fight again, okay? Because I really did miss you. I missed bare legs and pink collarbones and giant blue skies that seem much closer and clouds that are so much cuddlier. I missed the sun creeping closer and closer and getting goldener and goldener.

It happened with a quickness that is still a little puzzling to me, and makes me think that it was some extended practical joke that was broadcast live somewhere in a European country where smoking is still considered sexy. Things were rough, for a bit—a crazy man and threats of having my dog put down, and money woes, always the money woes, and endless, neverending, eternal fucking winter—but there was Mexico! Sunshine! Sunshine in Mexico! I will be cured! And for a week I was the happiest thing in the land.

And then I came back to a happy cat and my clean apartment and was glad to be home, except that things started to feel inexplicably bad, and badder, and the worst, until a week or so later I was up out of my bed and googling “painless suicide” in my underwear.

Googling “painless suicide” will make you feel a little bit like a dipshit; it will also, probably usefully but not in the way that you hope at three in the morning in your underwear, not provide you with the answers you’re looking for.

I didn’t realize that it had been so long.  It’s felt like forever and ever, but I thought that was just because Time Had Lost All Meaning Down Here in the Bottom of the Well So Deep That When You Look Up You Only See Night’s Endless Blackness and the Cold, Uncaring White Light of Far-Away Stars. No, it turns out that weeks and weeks have passed, without me meaning to have let them, and the fact that they are gone forever with not much to show for them is enough to make me want to start whimpering again. But I’m better, now. I really am.

Not best, but when am I ever? But it was a little scary there, for awhile.

I’ll be back shortly, for reals. I just wanted to say, in the meantime, your emails and your comments–shit, you guys. Thank you.

Since around 2001, I’ve had a online journal, which means that since 2001, I’ve chronicled the majority of my depressive cycles, sometimes in breathtaking detail, and sometimes just with one meaningful post heavy on the choking/drowning/black hole/night sky metaphors that really, you know, capture the feeling of a severe bout of depression and or despair.

Sometimes the post was to explain away an absence of posts for days or weeks or months and sometimes it was to round-about apologize to the friends in the audience who may or may not have been reading who may or may not have even been my friends any more, to say—I’m sorry I’ve been flaking. But it is hard to put on pants when you are choking in a black hole under a night sky that is drowning in sorrow, am I right? Except without the danger of possible embarrassment and potential ridicule and or doubt and or skepticism that might arise if I actually was brave enough to resurface and apologize in person.