5 Days

Five days left, and I can't stop thinking about it.

I dream about it.  My brain may not be much up to creative endeavour lately, but oh great God, is it ever still up for the nightly horror movie show.  I need peace and flight and places with dark woods and that blue-eyed boy who shows up every so often but instead, I get hospital corridors, people who are long gone, ashes, dust, and no-win situations.

Five days left, and all I want to be able to do is sing along with Lana Del Ray, want to say that "nothing scares me anymore" and mean it.  But I can't.  Because it does.  It scares the ever-living crap out of me.  Instead, I'm so much more stuck in a place where the best lyric of hers for me is "don't make me sad/ don't make me cry/ sometimes life is not enough and the road gets rough / I don't know why...."

I swear I'm trying.  I don't want to be weak or silly or hypochondriacal.  (Is that a word?  I think that's a word....)  Instead I'm striving for beatific stillness, but to be honest some part of me, some little non-productive part of me, is pulling a Heinlein.  You know what I mean.  When in panic or in doubt....

I have had both of these procedures before.  Neither of them is something a person just goes into joyfully.   One of them hurts like a son-of-a-....  You fill in with a word you like.   It's some of the worst pain I've had from something medical without a person actually cutting me open and me having to heal from that.  That includes having my knee rebuilt.  I think it was better not knowing what was coming last time.  Now, I keep thinking about how much it's going to hurt, how there's not really anything I can do about that pain, and sometimes I can't turn that stupid voice off.  It makes me want to roll into a ball underneath my bed and not come out.  It makes me wish I really could go live in a shoebox under my beautiful pianist's grand the way I always joked that I would and let the music wash over me until everything is okay.

On top of all of this, I have to go about my day-to-day life like a normal person. I have to teach and deal with the needs and behaviors of my students and the demands of my job and pretend that I'm fine.  I have to tell people that I'm just tired.  What I want to do is scream and run, scream and run, because there is some strange comfort in movement as long as it doesn't stop.  Instead, I am trying to focus on turning fear into kindness, into concern for other people.  Maybe if I can do that, I can do some good instead of just running in endless circles like Mom and Dad's kitten chasing her long fluffy tail.

It's been on the tip of my tongue, the tip of my fingers so many times to tell a couple of people special to me, but I can't do it.  It all, after all, may be nothing.  Even though it looms before me like the Reaper raising a bony beckoning hand, it may all be nothing.  I couldn't stand it if I worried them for nothing.  I couldn't stand it if they saw me be so weak and afraid if it turns out there are only shadows, no monsters at all.

I have to pretend everything is fine, that I'm like someone who didn't find herself walking off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote.  You know what I admire most about him right now?  The fact that he's always able to keep going, even when he's on nothing but thin air, as long as he doesn't look down.  Maybe that's the secret.  Maybe if you keep moving and don't look down everything is always going to be okay.

And I know I'm babbling in print.  I know what it looks like, sounds like, fingers moving across keys too quickly, images as frantic and random as the inside of my head is right now.  It's a little release of the tension that gave me a crucifying disorienting migraine three days ago.  If it bothers you, you can merry well quit reading, after all. You can walk away from it.  Again, maybe that perpetual motion will keep you safe from it as well.  In the meantime, I'm just going to go to bed and try not to have nightmares.  Five more days.  Five.  More.  Days.