At Least They're Committed

Wow! Just like that it stopped. The rigid plates, shifting, grinding, exploding in my head and below my feet have stopped. It’s over.

I suspected that might be the case when I woke up Sunday morning, but I couldn’t be sure until today. I worried Sunday that maybe it was just because I’d had too much Tylenol PM and I was walking around in a lovely, fuzzy, dream state. After all, it’s fallen quiet before — for a moment, a day, sometimes a few days. But the tumult always came back.

So, I didn’t trust the calm until now: not until I made contact with what I knew I could trust to ensure that this time, really, this time life had fallen back into a rhythm. Not how it was, mind you, and not how it should be, no way, just no longer rolling and shifting beneath my feet. And you know what else? I got a message from a friend on Facebook saying ‘thank you for the prayers . . . they worked.’ How often does that happen? (That someone thanks you for praying, not that prayers work. I think they work a lot.)

The foretelling came Saturday, Valentine’s Day, when, taking a break from editing the magazine, I was playing on Facebook and checking out friends (of sort) on Twitter and pinging in the a.m. and p.m. (not that I remember a whole, whole lot about the p.m. except I’d had a lot of wine and there was a lot of giggling on my part :P). I also worked out and watched old videos of the children and we played Rock Band as a family and I sang . . . badly. Who’d have known so much activity would actually make the quaking stop.

It’s been more than six months coming, but I was able to let go of a lot of things: the car accident, the cancer scare, the pain of the tests and the gross humiliation; I let go of the lies that I’ve been fed, the forced, misguided hope I placed in others, the job upheaval, the insecurity, the guilt over not being able to save everyone, the fear of loss and of loss itself.

It’s a new normal and it’s not great but I’m good with it and I’m done with the rest of that shit and I think, I think maybe I’m OK. Yay me!