Lion and Magic Boy

I quietly fell apart today over the vacuum cleaner, weeping there on the unvacuumed livingroom floor with the vacuum cleaner in pieces spread out around me, mocking me. I cannot get the damned thing back together, having taken it apart to an extent I have done dozens of times before as part of its regular cleaning and maintenance. Now the thing glints at me evilly and refuses to fit back together, one important element somehow having mysteriously grown too large to fit back into its shell.

Maybe that’s my problem too.

I am tired of this, tired of having no one to turn to when I need help, of having no complementary strength to share and rely upon when needed.

I am so fucking lonely it hurts.

The other day Eric reached out and gently and affectionately touched the top of my head, and that touch was so achingly familiar yet so distant that I looked around, convinced there was someone else in the room. It hit me that save for a few days over the past several months, a few magical yet fleeting days, I haven’t felt touch like that in a very long time.

And what I thought was there, what I thought I was moving toward, may not be there at all. Some things simply vanish into illusion when you reach for them, even though you know with the reaching that they await you. I know deep down that it’s more like catching a butterfly, or better yet a hummingbird, something so ephemeral that the merest breath will send it shooting off in another direction. In the end all you can do is wrap an invitation around you and wait. But seeing what lies 2400 miles away from me through the thin but undeniably opaque glass of the screen on my laptop is nearly impossible. I feel with my heart and with every fiber of my being, and then in the reaching destroy the illusion I have built to match the feeling. Between us stretches a gossamer thread that is so incredibly fragile yet strung with the combined weight of the past and the future which threatens to pull it down altogether.

So there is nothing behind me and nothing in front of me. There is nothing but me, suspended alone in space and darkness. There is no one but me, and I feel too tiny, too weak, too ephemeral myself to buoy myself any longer. Worse, there are three incessantly needy little people depending upon me to have some semblance of put-togetherness when I just don’t have any for anyone, not for myself or for them or for anyone.

I am a shell, and my inside no longer fits what I have erected around it.

This afternoon I enticed Eric into his stroller and we went for a long walk. I was hoping to walk away some of the fear, some of the pain, to find balance there, to find my stride again. Instead, I found that more than anything, I simply wanted to just keep walking. I found myself thinking about those women who go out for a walk and keep walking, who go out for a drive and then just keep driving. The allure of simply disappearing, of walking out of one life and into another, was incredible.

I could do that, I whispered to myself. I would do that. I would have, too, maybe, under other circumstances. Not today.

Instead I found myself doing what I predicted I would, putting one foot in front of the other, taking step after step. My dad told me once that walking is really a controlled fall. So I fell, slowly, back to the house, washed off a little of the pain, then made a dinner I couldn’t eat and once again put away the pain and immersed myself in the moment.