If you look into my eyes, can you tell I wept for hours? That I sobbed, hyperventilated, cried out? Or do I look okay now?
If you hear my voice, can you tell three words, sometimes joined, sometimes separate, screamed in my mind most of the afternoon and evening? “WHY?” “Suicide.” “Cooper.” Or do I seem free of torment?
If you pass me in the aisle, can you tell I’m fighting tears in a grocery store for the first time in months? Or do I just look like another tired, masked shopper?
If you spot me parked in a turnaround at Spring Lake, staring across the lake at the finally-green trees, can you tell I’m searching for all the life I can see? Or am I just another weirdo?
Some hours feel impossible to survive and are impossible to explain. From the outside, those hours and the people living them must look like ordinary hours, ordinary people.
From the inside, nothing is ordinary.
Those hours are the worst; both body and mind are conflicted, confused, under attack, and there’s no rescue to be found. In those hours, I want and need to be alone, but also wish for someone to fix it. Fix me.
Driving, wandering, avoiding going home for a while, cycling through jags of crying, I mentally work through my list of safe people — those family and friends who would do anything in their power to help — but nobody on that list is a magician. Nobody on that list can fix me, make my reality a happier place to inhabit. They already pray for me every day. They can’t fix a meltdown. Instead, they’d be stuck watching me ugly cry and trying to figure out what the hell they were supposed to do as I choked out incoherent chunks of words.
There’s nothing to be done, at least nothing I’ve found, and that’s the scariest feeling. On the days I’m so despondent, so hopeless, so damn sad, all I can do is outlast the feeling and pray for a better day tomorrow. Again, I can’t go over it, can’t go under it, can’t go around it, gotta go through it.
So, I drive. I buy groceries that could’ve waited, treat myself to McAlister’s strawberry lemonade, drive to a lake and dream of paddling, of making eye contact with deer and bald eagles. I sit on the couch for hours, coloring leaves and listening to rain fall. And gradually, the scratch of the colored pencil replaces my sad breaths and the rain takes over for my tears. My heart remembers its normal rhythm and my gut unknots. Pseudo-equilibrium returns.
My pillowcase was damp with tears by the time I finally fell asleep, but dry by morning. These storms inside me pass. I return to my baseline sadness of After.
Woods Writes 