March 18, 2012

• day one

  I would kill to be the cold
  tracing your body and shaking your bones,
  but I can't sleep at night.
  I can't sleep at night.

  - Now, Now, Wolf 

  -+-

  "If you're cold, just say so."

  I'm cold.

  -+-

  Welcome to Day One.

  Day One is the most pivotal. 

  I like to believe that as long as you can get through Day One, the rest of it will taper off.  Granted, it won't taper off like the drifting volume of a whisper, but it will gradually disappear in waves.  The pain and the sadness return periodically, but it is the slap in the face on Day One that hits the hardest.  Eventually, it becomes that dream that fades in and out of memory. 

  It'll become either a fond token of nostalgia, or it will become a nightmarish blur.  On Day One, it's impossible to predict which direction it will take.  You don't know if it'll become that priceless antique that you save on your mantelpiece, if it'll become an unwanted stain that you can't get out, or if it'll become that patch of dust that you've long forgotten about.

  On Day One, that doesn't really matter.

  What matters more is that on Day One, your universe, which was once small and simple, suddenly turns around.  Suddenly, you realize just how big the universe actually is in comparison to you.  Suddenly, it dwarfs you, and it renders you feeling powerless.  You feel like nothingness.

  On Day One, your challenge is to overcome … nothing.

  People respond to nothingness in a variety of ways.  Oftentimes, it is with various coping methods.  It is in venting, in sleeping in, in pints of ice cream.  It can be in lonesomeness, or it can be in the gathering of friends. 

  Once upon an epoch ago, at the end of a crucial Day One, my life almost ended.  That was how I responded at the time.  Since then, I have borne witness to many Day Ones, various in their situations but all equal in their outcomes.  They started with nothingness, and they've since then all ended in nothingness.  I have spent months stitching together a tapestry of blurs and regrets.  Of lost dreams and what could've beens.  Of Day Zeros that I still play back in my head, over and over, time and time again.

  This time, Day One started with the words, "You've been crying."

  "No," I murmured, ineffectively trying to cast a veil over my lie, "What?"

  Then, "I can see it in your eyes."

  That's the way it always goes when you read like a book.  Like I do.  There is actually very little mystery to me.  I am linear and predictable.  So there should not have been any surprise in my tears, in my heartbroken frustration as I sobbed into an unfamiliar shoulder, one that I've never had to cry into before, 'I can't believe this is happening again.'

  Yet, as I heard the familiar speech, the familiar reason, the familiar apology, there was little I could do besides quietly understand that this was, in fact, actually happening again.  I, too, mustered the familiar responses, truly convinced that this was going to end up just like every other Day One.

  "I'm okay."

  "Christa, don't lie to me."

  "I'll… I'll be okay."

  (sigh)

  Welcome to Day One.

  • 2:37 am
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