The longest strangest shortest month
28 February 2011 06:35 AM Categories: The struggle | Writing prompts
Because it’s been a crazy unstable reach into my chest and rip out my heart kind of month, with all the intensity of tsunami, the build-up, the actual crash of the wave, and the aftermath, the search for the dead and injured, the extrication of belongings from the mud. I’ve been exposed and hidden all at once. I’ve courted danger and have turned my heart to stone. I walk along the muddy avenues, giddy with relief and fear for what I’ll find.
My legs are taut, my face is scratched, my hair tousles around me. Underneath my fingernails are mud and grit and blood. I look at my hands and remember what I’ve lost, remember what functions in my life, the careful tenting of various feelings and insecurities, the cordoning off of emotion.
Is that so bad? To live a functional life? I don’t know yet how to balance the two, the great chasm of emotion within me and the stability that I crave. They pull me in opposite directions. They threaten to split me in two. Can I figure out how to marry them so that I have stability and emotion all at once, without throwing over the rest of my life?
I give the appearance of calm, can even feel calm, when somewhere in my chest, in the bone, the feelings crackle and sizzle. I’m angry, I’m sad, I’m guilty, I’m culpable. I don’t trust my emotions anymore, my barometer on the situation. It’s both hair trigger and totally off. I see the tsunami coming and I walk on the beach. I see the gentle lap of waves against sand and I run for higher ground. I misinterpret my gut and go for melodrama.
February is almost over, thank goodness. My heart still beats and the ache has lessened. But it's changed me, this month, it's distilled my will into something strong and shiny, metallic and hard, a protective talisman. I will find balance. I will figure out what need to change in my life based on knowing my own mind. I will not return to ignorance. I will write my way into newness, will take the anger that encircles me like smoke and form it into wings. Into a cup. Into something that I pour the rest of myself into, out of, the small slow transformation, the alchemy of rationality plus emotion plus art.
From a photo prompt with a sweet-looking yellow lab on a couch. Behind the couch was a little sign saying "What the fuck?" Edited a tiny bit from the original for clarity and expansion.
Image: My twisted hands.
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