And I Laugh at Myself, While the Tears Roll Down

I heard it on the radio, on my Toad the Wet Sprocket Pandora station, since I’m going to this concert and all, and I said, “I have to use that song this week – it’s very appropriate to the vibe of this week!” And that’s pretty much how it goes every time. All weeks are weird weeks. There are no common or boring weeks. There are no common and boring days. Heck, there are no common and boring hours. Maybe I sit down to read or write, or eat, but the interruptions are fascinating and earth-shatteringly annoying. I’ll miss them one day, but interruptions will never stop. I assume I’ll always have pets and chickens and delivery trucks rumbling up the driveway.

Do you ever wake up from oversleeping, or from a really heady dream, and you can’t quite get your head on straight that morning? It’s not too far of a cry from when you take a different way home, and your whole afternoon is colored differently by the atmosphere changes. And it’s not too, too far of a cry from when you feel disassociated or distant from your standings. I used to panic when this happened when I was a child, and every now and then I do again, because it’s haunting and a little terrifying. It’s also comforting, in some ways, because if things are too loud or too colorful (how can anything be too colorful..?) or too smelly or too spicy, your mind tries to cope with it by backing away slowly and holding out its hands. “Hey, hey, we don’t do that here.” I guess it IS terrifying if it becomes a regular thing, or if you don’t know quite how to ground yourself back down to the situation at hand, or back into the world you know. You have to learn.

The world I know fades in and out, and I do too. Things are astonishingly gorgeous and smooth, and also rocky and one panic attack or electricity bill away from terror. I teeter on the edge. My mom went to Ohio over last weekend, and made a stop in Cleveland to see my Uncle’s grave. Almost a year later, is this the world I know now? The one with his giant heart empty shape in it? Also over the weekend, I found out about a childhood friend MY EXACT AGE (we had danced together at the school dance with such energy that we both won new Bon Jovi records), having a severe stroke. He is fighting for his life right now, but I believe his cognition is good. It’s still so terrifying that he’s trapped inside a different body right now, and has to relearn basic functions, and he’s angry as heck, and with such good reason. It’s not the world he knows, and sadly, it’s forever changed. That doesn’t mean the color won’t slowly seep back in. How I hope it does.

And I laugh at myself, these days, and at Schitt’s Creek with Scarlet, and Jack Vale nonsense videos with Des. I laugh until tears stream down my face. I laugh until the color seeps back in. Last year, after I had had the baby, I said to Cassidy, “See, this house doesn’t feel like this house anymore.” The shift was so jarring, that it was a different color and atmosphere – I tried so hard to find the newly renovated house that smelled like new wood and new baby (Rider). Surely the house didn’t feel like the house when he was born, but that was different. That was October and we had a renovation, a pandemic, and a puppy too. Nothing felt right but there was a collective gasp and movement of everyone trying to find the color and the meaning, and the hope. When it was just me, in what I consider a bleak and desolate month (May), with this new baby and this new trauma, well, of course this house didn’t feel like this house. See, sometimes it still doesn’t.

It was black and white, and it needed to be colored in again with the birth and early months of Sawyer. Rainbow colors came shooting through eventually. Of course it was sloppy and it was overdrawn and way outside the lines, but we watched it fill in, and it was beautiful. It’s still being filled in. It’s this world I know and this world I don’t know. Gasping and beautiful and haunting.