Abyss

The Holidays are bittersweet for me, a mixture of excitement at the celebrations and a hollow ache at all the loss of family. It intensifies the occurrence of nausea, one of the few stubbornly persistent left over symptoms of the trauma of the losses. I recently renewed a friendship with a fellow graduate student from my years at UT in Austin, Texas, an engineering student from Panama. He has a brother, two sisters, and they all have families nearby,and both his parents are still alive. This kind of happiness triggered a sensation I had been trying to pull together into a visual image. What eventually came to mind was the view of me sitting on the floor of a room, and being pushed into a corner, and when I finally was able to get up, and tried to get across the room, so I could leave, the floor is gone, and all that is left is an abyss, bottomless, and so definite, that even now as I write about it, I have to fight nausea. It is a feeling of paralysis like in a bad dream,a nightmare like paralysis struggling with every inch of will to not panic, and instead find a way to build a bridge across the abyss, a bridge made of the invisible threads of fierce determination to defy any and all laws of gravity that obviously no longer exist in that room. Acceptance is a big part of healing emotional wounds, but it sure helps to know that the laws that were in existence before your world fell apart, still exist. I am not so sure about that. I do not know what the answer to this dilemma is. It is hard to even put the feeling into words, it is like trying to speak, thinking words will come out, because they always did before, and realizing now the words are there, but no sound is connected to them, and when you try to use sign language, people look at you like you are insane, and ask you to just speak up already. I have always been fond of surrealism but there are days now that my life feels like a walk in a Dali painting. Rather than me looking at a surrealist painting, it feels like I am part of the painting, and I cannot get out of the frame, no matter how I try. It is not something you want to think about much, let alone try to explain to anyone, if you can avoid it. Six more weeks, and it will be March again, time to go outside, clean up the backyard, and start planting flowers, feeling the first hints of a spring sun , of renewal through nature. That always calms my spirit, and soothes the goblins trying to scare my sanity, my resolve not to let the abyss and its invisible monsters keep me in that desperate corner. Six weeks and counting.