You steel your feelings and paste on the happy face hoping that today will be different. You tuck the pain and anxiety into a place far within you and then try to fool yourself into believing that everything will be fine.
How can someone be so very close and at the same time be so very far away? You can reach out and touch them and at the same time, your arm is not long enough to reach across the distance. How is it that you can feel emptier when someone leaves than before they arrived?
You think you’ve handled it. You think that you have come away none the less for wear. Then, hours later you lay your head upon a soft feather pillow and close your eyes thinking you made it, you survived. You breathe in and out very slowly; over and over, concentrating on each breath. The quietness of the night settles in and your breath catches. That is the exact moment you hit the wall, just as the marathon runner hits the wall at mile twenty-one. The tears begin to silently fall and yet you still tell yourself that you are alright. You tell yourself over and over, “I will not cry. I am fine. I will not cry. I am okay.” It doesn’t matter how many times you repeat the mantra, your heart still feels the unbearable, heart breaking, soul wrenching, bring you to your knees pain and you realize you are not okay; you may never again be “okay.” You grip the pillow as though it was a life preserver and you are in the middle of the ocean. Your heart cries out in silent pain; yet that silence is so loud you think the world can hear it. Your heart longs for the time when it was filled to bursting with a love that was returned. It hurts so deep that it takes your breath away and the tears will not stop and you wonder how the mother’s heart within you keeps beating.
