There Should Be Words for It

"I'm sorry you have to get up so early."

"I'm sorry too."

And I was. I was. And then in the morning I drove through a thicket of trees and out to the wide-open space beneath a sky swathed in purple-grey clouds that pressed down against red-speckled blue-grey mountains, with the sun curtained behind their ethereal expanse and the moon overhead, three-quarters full. Over and over again the road itself would stretch through autumn-cloaked tree arches. The changing shades of the atmosphere in the early hours, for some inexplicable reason, stabbed to my heart.

I don't know, I don't think I can take this anymore; I don't think I can keep going, keep holding space in this place. It's been a hard week—a hard month, really—funny how it's all by proximity and not direct involvement and still the pain wrings so viciously. My head aches, and a cup of tea is a fine solace when the world is in order but what about when it isn't? What about when the world is screaming?

Tell me, do I truly love living life, or do I just think that I do? Half the time I don't know because it hurts so badly.

Life—you love that. The real life that flashes through the pain; it's what keeps us breathing.

Then I dropped the phone and doubled over on the bed, face buried in my knees: I don't think I want to keep breathing. I think this has always hurt too much. I think I'm tired. But then, that option isn't mine. There's no 'opt out' button; we get what we get, and, as Cheryl Strayed said to a college graduate whining about student loans in her column Dear Sugar, "You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding."

I'm searching for the fragments of life strewn amidst shards of blood-letting death and finding a man with no eyebrows (girls, remember Canon Tallis?), steam rising from a brimfull mug and scraping voices blending harmonious around a fire, words and worlds scrawled by a passing stranger who writes with a voice all too familiar. I'm searching for meaning in ritual, in faith, in the death that comes with every morning and the resurrection from each killing moment. At least, I choose to believe that it is resurrection. Sometimes it feels as if a little more of me has stayed dead every time.

There is no why. Instead of answers there are questions gaping with hunger, questions starving for resolution. I haven't any. I only have this very second of cracked, aching wakefulness, my fingers curled around a cup of tea, the words I scribbled on a page while driving Sunday morning. I only have the weary determination not to succumb to the weight of the load but to try to go on and give everything I have to at least make it a little lighter for others. I have that.

And, for what it's worth, I do love the colour of the November sky.