Underwater
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
If I am still for too long, or alone, or quiet, the sadness comes over me like a wave. I think about how many weeks along I should be, how close we should be getting to meet her, and how I never will meet her the way I planned. In the last few weeks, I’ve been driven to distraction. I am overhauling my finances, thinking about taking my career in a different direction, cleaning the house top to bottom…. all in the interest of keeping things too loud for me to notice that there’s a dark, gray, little corner of my heart that won’t ever light up again.
I feel different somehow, but still the same. It’s a complicated place to inhabit. I really feel like a piece of me has just left. Joy does not have the same all-consuming power. Jokes don’t reach me the same. I feel like I’m swimming just below the surface, hearing the happiness of those above me, and loosely participating in it, but unable to really break through and feel what they feel. There’s always some dread circling the dark waters below me, waiting to pull me back under. Sometimes I think I’ve broken the surface, that I’m fully back, but then the dull, scratchy feeling of something being not quite right inside me reminds me that things are not and cannot be the same.
I can tell her story without weeping, but I cannot say her name without feeling utterly destroyed. It is so heart-sickeningly unfair, and yet I feel guilty for clutching at my pain with the moniker of “unfair.” Loads of unfair and unlucky things happen every day, all around me, to all kinds of people. I am no different, so I have a hard time saying it’s unfair, even though it is. Makes me feel like a whiny kid. I don’t wish to be saddled with this, but I suppose there are worse things.
All I know is I love her, with a new, consuming kind of love I had never experienced before. And that is painful.