My roommate, friend and sistah Fran got an enormous brass trunk one time from a family member.  It was heavy and worn, ornate but in a simple way.  It has beads around it and clasps.  I feel like I put everything about my experience involving EC into an identical brass trunk and I carry it with me wherever I go.  I don’t even know what’s in it anymore or why I carry it with me.  It slows me down and exhausts me.

After reading the beginning of The Places That Scare You by Pema Chodron, I closed my eyes and pictured me walking along the beach and dragging that trunk with me.  I stop to take a break and sit down on it.  It has become my go-to place, the thing that causes my exhaustion and a place I look to when I don’t know where else to go.  I see the sand, the water, and pelicans flying.  I see buildings, but they are in the distance.  I don’t have the cars passing, it’s a tranquil moment.  And I open the trunk.  I pull out a scarf and a necklace he gave me in Italy.  I pull out the gondola we rode in Venice, the pizza, pasta, wine and cappuccino we dined on, the drive we took up a mountain, the stops at the castle and walking around a windy turn overlooking Aviano.  I see the movies we watched together, the time we talked for hours and then went to his place and made love right there on the living room floor.  

But after the good memories comes what happened afterwards.  There’s a pain, a big wadded up rotten black ball of pain.  And it’s excruciatingly heavy.  It is bruised in some places, scabbed in some, but mostly it is just scarred now. At one point it was a ball of fire that had to be extinguished.  I didn’t do that so healthily.  But, in my defense, I didn’t really have time.  Life added to it quickly. It needs to be examined and treated.  It was the one time I ever put absolute faith into someone and I thought when I left him in Italy I would be back.  I thought for sure we would make distance an obstacle we overcame.  When he pulled back and where words once filled the days and silence erupted, I felt the most pure and raw rejection of my entire life.  I was ashamed of myself for diving in and loving that man.  

You expect health problems from your parents, dogs to die and jobs to be lost.  I expected those.  I did not expect the love of my life–with whom I had a grand adventure–to distance me and cast me away.  Not for a second time.  This ball of pain I carry around now makes that 18 year old me who was “hurt” look like a paper cut.  Swift, painful and forgotten within a day.  He was everything I had wanted.  A new chapter with a story so that wasn’t easy but so very worth it.  Or so I thought.  When I close my eyes and I see the beach and all these things I have pulled out of the trunk, I know I should leave them there. Toss them into the ocean and walk away. They mean nothing to him–he’s moved on and married–but to me they were the highlight of my life.  It’s everything I ever wanted…except it isn’t.  Here it is all around me and killing me inside.  Walk away, woman, leave it all there and run down the beach to a new adventure.  Go…go….

Why isn’t she going?

Over the course of several years, I have blatantly slandered Insomnia on social media, to groups of people and blamed it for a lot of my problems. But over the last month, I have found insomnia is actually quite blissful. Not only that, but I have found the cure. 

While I would rather be dreaming about well-dressed, dashing men riding up on unicorns (a Bachlorette reference for those with real lives and not secretly in love with the show…that’s a whole other blog), I am not. For whatever reason–and it varies from night to night–I am awake at 2 or 3 am. I used to be miserable waking up and abandoning dreamland. But lately, I realize this is the most perfect time of day. 

Why? Because in the middle of the night, NO ONE BOTHERS ME. Whether my own resentments or legitimate complaint, personalities do not exist this time of day. I have absolutely zero expectations right now. The only expectation is self-inflicted and that’s sleep. If I forgo telling myself I should be sleeping, all is well in the universe. No one is going to text me right now asking or needing something from me. And if they do, they do not expect a response. The dogs are asleep and are quite frankly annoyed I even move about this time of day. I don’t check my work email so I don’t have any bitching to listen to nor any new issue to address. There’s no deadline, nothing is on the front or back burner at 2am. I’m not letting anyone down. It’s completely quiet. 

It’s one of the few hours out of every 24 that I am conscious and all is well in my little world. I soak it up. I’ve learned that approximately 18 of every 24 hours I’ll find I cannot please everyone, I struggle to balance work and home duties, inevitably some coworkers will feel they didn’t get enough notice (even if it’s six months notice), I’ll make an error somewhere (Lord, let it not be an “error a minute” day, amen), or at minimum the bank balance (or lack thereof) will cause some anxiety. But right now, absolutely none of that comes into play. 

I couldn’t be forced to care about the daily frustration of PR and personality management, I could care less about the bank balance, I have complete silence and space without any interruption. Ahhhh, bliss. As if that wasn’t peaceful enough, the fur babies are the most precious sleeping and cuddly bugs EVER at 2am. So I have decided to start making the most of it. I’ll brew coffee and write some, maybe read a little, sit outside and enjoy the stars and the cool temps. 

Amazingly, as soon as I get up and do that–when my body feels like I might be getting ready to start the day where all the bullshit listed above will become reality–I start shutting back down. There’s a revolt of the nervous system and I can usually come back to bed and fall asleep. In about three hours the personalities, the emails, the bills, the dirt and dust needing cleaned up, the myriad of projects unfinished or not yet started, and errands that I need to run will all hit like a ton of bricks and I won’t want to face it. But right now, in the silent, dark, quiet moments of the day everything is beautiful. 

The little Hall Family has expanded. Wilbur is part of us now. He’s quite different from Sadie because he is young and he’s fitting in nicely. I feel guilt about upsetting Sadie’s norm after all the poor girl has been through in her estimated 12 years. But she doesn’t seem to hate me too much. 

Expansion in any capacity is, by design, uncomfortable. The land mines of guilt, solitude, pain, or any combination there of usually await with several of their friends. Over the course of my life, I have found that sometimes expansion is preceded by a feeling of reduction. Things or people go away and there is an empty space. How we fill that void can be directly correlates to the expansion we will gain in our lives. I’ve experienced this a number of ways: divorce, living away from my family, death of loved ones, losing a job, a broken heart, a friendship that is severed. Whatever I focus on and however I occupy my mind afterwards can be attributed to the expansion of my spirit. 

Sometimes I look at Sadie and see a very old and tired dog. But sometimes I look at her and see her eyeing Wilbur, then her ears perk up and go into mischievous mode, and she’ll start playing with him. Even if it’s just for a few seconds, my heart expands when her eyes light up. 

So yes, the Hall Family is larger by ten pounds, but happier by tenfold. 

#AdventuresOfWilburSadieAndApryl