Expectations and disappointments

I thought I would feel better by now. Maybe because so many other people expect me to feel better, or maybe just because I have unrealistically high expectations of myself. Maybe because I have no clue what I'm doing and I'm wandering around like a newly blind person left with nothing more than darkness, other senses that haven't yet learned to compensate, and a fading memory of the things I used to see (I've also apparently become used to using really bad metaphors and similes...ick).

The fact is that I'm not back to normal and I still haven't made any progress on figuring out what my new normal is. I have few moments where I'm not high-strung, nervous, or angry. Despite my best intentions I can't make it work...this new life of mine. It's not that I don't WANT to be happy. It's that there is nothing that really makes me feel happy. Everything pales in comparison to the happiness and the sadness I've felt this year. I guess that's my problem. I want THAT happiness back. I want something that will erase THAT sadness. But there isn't anything that will do that, is there?

You know, sometimes I sit at my keyboard and write and the words just flow out my fingertips onto the screen through a shower of tears. Sometimes I can barely type for the force of the sobs that escape my body as I get the words down. And then sometimes I feel like the words totally escape me and I wonder where the tears are hiding. Surely they are around the next corner...the next turn of a phrase. I almost don't want to write because I don't want them to fall AGAIN. I'm so tired of crying.

I have work to do. So I will ignore this gnawing feeling that something isn't right today...something even more wrong than usual...and get to it. I can't put my finger on it. I can't put it in words. It's this feeling I've been having since I saw the almost dead cat open its eyes and twitch its tail while laying in the middle of the road waiting to die on Friday...the same feeling I got yesterday while watching the flock of vultures circling our front pasture...a sense that there is some disaster on the way...some impending doom. There is some exhausted part of me that says, "Bring it on...what more could you do to me?" But then I think how the universe doesn't play fair and likes to take on a challenge like that...how it bats us all around like we're little cat toys...giving and taking life on a whim. No, I don't want to tempt fate like that.

I could talk about God here...as Steve and I had a pretty interesting conversation about God on our way to engage in some retail therapy on Saturday. But instead I'd rather talk about my Pumpkin Spice candle and my Eddie Bauer sweater. I've never owned anything Eddie Bauer in my life. I feel like I've turned some sort of corner.

I will never again in my life be able to say that things are just the way they should be. I will never answer that question, "What would you change?" with the trite, "Nothing, everything is the way I would want it if I could do it all again." I don't want this new life. I would even trade my Pumpkin Spice candle and my very first Eddie Bauer sweater if I could change just one thing and have my life back the way it should be.