Pieces

I am in that place again....that deep dark place inside myself where sadness, anger, guilt, regret and jealousy are all muddled together into a puddle of self-pity and self-loathing.  This place is so real.  I try to talk myself out of it or escape from it almost daily but these attempts are futile.  These attempts are a mask I wear for my husband, family, friends and all other onlookers.  I fashion this apathetic facade from the sweet sugary syrup of escapism so that I appear to be ok.  If I appear to be ok then they won't see the huge gaping wounds to my pride and my ego that have become ripe with the rot of decaying dreams.  Sometimes the mask is sewn together with some type of remnant of the pride that  I once took in my work and my dreams.  But really, this is not that bright and joyful, listless pride that I once had in what I was becoming.  Those dreams I left behind.  My friend that I once shared that dream with would tell you that I let that dream slip away long ago.  But I don't know that that is entirely true.  I don't know when it got away.  I just know the event that officially marked it "gone."  And like fleeting flame blown out with a single gust of wind, the light was gone.  An so then like a stamp in a passport of life, it was final.  I had left that dream and that happy place behind forever and I had been set adrift on a turbulent sea unknown.  

I have found other happy moments, I have found other small joys, but that dreary darkness is still pitted, thick and heavy, just beneath my fragile plaid skin.  It bubbles up like a noxious suffocating black oil when I am alone...when I am truly alone to face myself.  My failed self.  What I have has whithered away to the darkness like a shadow of something great that could have been but has now vanished into obscurity.  Who is this person now?  What am I?  As I stare at the portrait of my former self that lay obliterated before my very eyes, all I can do is gasp, shudder and tear up as I look at the crumbled ruin.  I know not where to begin again or how to salvage any piece of what I once had.  I can only wallow in this loss--in a blasphemous range of emotion that I am ashamed of.  What do you do when the very definition of self becomes nothingness?  But the pieces are still there, like shards of a broken mirror reflecting the shattered light of something once precious back at you.  I just don't know what to do but succumb to this broken dream as it lays dead before me.  I am enveloped in this sadness and sense of failure.  To look at the crumbled pieces, and to know that there is no way to reassemble what stood before, is an unbearable sorrow to endure.

Somehow I must turn away and begin again.