It’s happened often over the last decade. Driving to work with tears running down my face. It isn’t conducive to a good morning in the office, especially if you haven’t put on the right mascara. By the time you arrive, there’s a dark, murky line making its slow way down your cheeks, leaving you resembling a flushed, maybe even sunburnt zebra. Combine that with broken parking barriers, spilt coffee, and the cancellation of the meeting you’ve just driven an hour to attend, and you wonder why you ever opened the curtains. It isn’t the menopause, or a female hormone imbalance; it is just another wave of grief, lapping surprisingly softly at my edges, on a dismal Wednesday morning in January, a reminder that it’s still there even when no one wants to talk about it.
To my mind, everyone thinks that healing is a process that happens over time. That’s what people say, isn’t it? ‘Time will heal’, or ‘just give it time’. You don’t see it coming, but eventually you wake up, have a meet-cute moment and live the rest of your life in married bliss, or in lustful sin. I could go with either – story over. But it isn’t like that for me; it isn’t beautiful or poetic. There isn’t this iridescent road that I follow to find my heart. Instead, it’s a bit like an endless rainy day. Grey and boring. Sometimes it’s even awkward.
Truth is, we are all broken. Somewhere. Some of us wear it like a birthday badge, pinned to our chest, and it’s all we can talk about; others sit on it. Tucking it away like some sordid laundry we are afraid to wash. Either way, I find the record stuck, and I have no time for the scenario. I’m not a cry into my tea girl, so I don’t see why anyone else should be. I know that isn’t a kind response, but it appears to be my default setting, because I seem to have landed at this boring middle ground. It is probably a ‘stage’, or a curve or a loop or some other thing that has a name, but for me, it’s more like an annoying drip from a broken downpipe, or a Mediterranean tide that never seems to come in or go out. It’s just there, slapping gently on the sand, as if it were pleased with itself for bucking the tidal trend.
Annoyingly, everything else still goes on too.
Trump dominates the fake news, plastic is still the scourge of human invention, and I continue to get up, go to sleep, and get up again. I eat my delectable supper, cooked by a kind, talented human, I chat, I drink my wine, smile… but everything tastes like sand, and I feel robbed, like there is a part of this healing business I am missing because I’m too busy just getting on with it. Grief hasn’t given me anything, no roaring meltdown, no brick road, not even a cobble, just this enduringly awkward and unfinished dark mass, ebbing and flowing like warm breath on a cold morning.
Today is Friday, a day for finishing off loose ends, followed by homemade pizza, cold beer, and conversations about the week, work, and weekend chores. It’s certainly not rock and roll, or the Ritz, but it’s home, safe and warm, full of dogs, laughter, and food. Comforting, not shiny. And as this healing process stagnates, bringing an impasse to my routine, I find that I can allow myself to write again. Pulling at submerged threads from familiar, Eliot-Esque wasteland, I think: this cul-de-sac of worn tarmac and dead ends can’t be it. This can’t be where I end up, balancing life in one hand and a banal, thin-skinned scab in the other. I want more. More than grey middle ground, more than silence, more than tepid, tasteless wine. So, after months of procrastination, on this tempestuous day, wind shaking the windows, blue sky snaking out of angry storm clouds, I’m going to do something else. Make this more than just a standoff. I’m going to press the publish button and see what happens next.
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