It’s incredible how humans adapt to their situations, no matter how dire they are. And even when they are not dire, when they are just difficult, sad, regretful, somehow people find a way to go on about the business of living. There’s so much that parents try to protect us from. So much they often see that we cannot.
Well, Chicago isn’t cold yet, thank goodness. Last few days it’s been really nice out. Temperature around 50 and sunny. My morning ritual on Sundays now is to go to walk to Division and get two empanadas for breakfast. I pack a ziplock bag with little pieces of crackers for the ducks and walk around looking for areas in the park where my face can soak in the sun and I can watch the ripples in the water. The dogs walk their owners, bike their owners, run their owners. Families run through the grass on crunchy leaves; kids yell and scream diving into piles of brown while parents hold their breath praying they don’t land on a pile of shit underneath. My MP3 player is in my brown leather purse but I don’t play anything; I just put the buds in my ear so that I can ignore the uninvited comments from hung-over Puerto Ricans on the way there. I take them out once I reach the park and just look out onto the water.
It’s bright and the sun shines so that I can see the flecks of dust, pollen, pollution floating above the water dancing in the wind, never landing. The pigeons fly through quickly like they’re afraid a duck might just take off and bump into them on the way up. I still look. Stopped telling myself to control my thoughts. I follow them from what I feel now. I don’t run away from the feelings. No matter how many times my eyes fill up I just let the liquids run out of them. After, pick up my book Saddhartha I’m reading now–lots of interest and a collection of essays by Richard Rodriguez.
I read some more. Throwing the crusty parts of the empanadas and the crackers at the heads of my hungry friends. I wonder how it all looks to them. Couples walk, jog, bike by me happy the cold hasn’t arrived yet. Thoughts race through my head still over and over like a broken record ‘I didn’t come here to do this alone.’ And I’m angry but mostly just so sad and a pure kind of sad not a pitiful type of sadness. The night before I asked a question about him knowing I would never get the kind of answer I was looking for. The hours, days, weeks–the months role by and I find myself topless on my crunchy carpet pajama pants on no underwear the tears falling out my eyes, spread eagle waiting for it to pass. It always passes. But I can never predict when it will come I don’t know if a rain drop might start it up again or just looking around at the aparment with all that extra room now, sleeping in the middle of my bed taking up more space, looking at the nails in the walls closing my eyes or mostly how it haunts me every night in my dreams; and I can’t control it when it comes. Stupid memories, stupid fucking memories that lie to me. Sometimes I run to the bathroom at work trying to get there before the tears reach my lashes. And my little heart breaks into a million tiny little pieces until I’m able to crazy glue it back together again.