No Title for This

How many days, weeks and months can I feel the same way?
How many times can I complain about church or what people stupidly say?  They aren't getting better.  Church is still about miracles and how great your life is if you do what's right.  People are still frightfully ignorant and insensitive and if they are lucky, they will never be able to understand.

I feel like I'm stuck and there's nothing ahead on the horizon.  Others peoples'  lives are going on.  I see them like I'm looking out a window on a train and the scenery is moving--but I'm still,  in the vacuum of it all.  There's no epiphany.  There's no lesson.  There's void.  There's exhaustion.  There are permanent valleys forming from the rivers that run from my eyes.  There's the PowerPoint  flowchart from rage to guilt to denial and back again.

In the past few days somebody looking in from the outside would've seen me go swimming with my family;  go out on a date with my husband;   go to a family holiday party;   and  light fireworks on the 4th of July.  Today,  I went on a bike ride, out for sushi and bowling with Mikey.  It all sounds so normal and pleasant, doesn't it?  I think I cried either before, during, or after each activity.  I could see Ian in the  pool.  I even said to Lucy,  "I wish Ian were here fighting with you."   I could see him jumping in excitement at the fireworks.  I could see him bowling--not as an almost 17 year old, but at about the same age as Mikey when he thought it was the funnest thing ever.   I thought how much he would've enjoy the sushi and how it's probably because of him that Lucy and Mikey love the raw fish the way they do.  I could see him complaining and refusing to go to the old folks party, especially at Charley's house.  I couldn't really help but think about him during the date--it was dinner after a funeral.

So if all these great activities leave me just as numb as sitting in front of the TV,  why even bother?   I guess the answer to that is:  Mikey and Lucy.

I'm already worried about next month.  When it's been a whole year,  it should either hurt less or I should be a master at faking it, right?  My life should be moving by then, shouldn't it?  Don't I have to stop feeling sorry for myself by then?  I know that eventually  my perpetual mood swings will just drive people away.  People can only tolerate a downer for so long, then they just move on.  Oh, the things I worry about.

In this awful post, there's one good sentence.  Keith and I are still one--even in our suffering.