A Moment

It's incredible how a room can seem to yawn, its walls becoming farther and farther away while surrounding voices dim and blur, leaving me a distant object in a vast expanse of what should be a normal public space, with normal human connection. If I stop, and grasp for the feeling in a moment, the weight drags me nearly down to a knee.

I don't really know how to make it stop. I want to call someone, but I can't explain. Maybe medications are the answer. Maybe this is what was that "worse before it's better" meant. What's that facial feedback theory? Paste it, and walk faster. Try to leave the weight in a pile on the floor, an invisible block with its indeterminate shape and even more mysterious content. Mention it in a faceless blog.

Why am I still thinking about this, still feeling about this? It's been a year and a half. I can still see him, bleeding right in front of me. I'm at his feet, and I have to step around a pool of blood. His eyes are dead, and they remind me of a dog I had that I watched get hit by a car; except one of the dog's eyes was smashed, and his are still intact. I can still feel the blank space when I looked at him, the skin lifted from his face and laid back down in a mottled, irregular, inhuman kind of way. I can still hear Jon calling me back from wherever I went, finally snatching my attention away and telling me to stop, just stop, that there was nothing more I could have done, that this was not my fault.

I don't really understand. I don't get it. I've seen many scenarios just as bad as this, been stressed, had them careening out of my control. I'm not sure why this one changed me, but I would really like to feel as though I'm me again. The me that doesn't stop in the grocery store, feeling suffocated. That me.

The Dividing Line

"This, I think, is the boundary line of adulthood. Not the crap they claim it is....You cross the boundary the first time you're changed forever. You cross it the first time you know you can never go back."  (A Thousand Pieces of You, Claudia Gray, p. 143)

In a way, life is kind of a like an improvised song. You start it out, not exactly sure in which direction you'll be taken. The notes define you, carving out an audible image of a hundred blurred moments of your life; maybe some of the moments have already happened, while some sit patiently in waiting. The song, choppy as it may sometimes get, reflects you.