Whatever the reason, here I am. My mind soon spinning in a million different directions, unable to settle and allow me to resume sleep. A drink, a bathroom run, back to bed -- only to have the spinning continue at such a velocity, I am whirled out of bed and find myself in front of the computer.
What is playing in my head at this dark, shadow-filled hour is this place that I am in. Not physically, but mentally and emotionally.
I think back to how easily, when I first discovered that my marriage was dissolving right in front of me, my world spun out of control. It was as if I could see the two trains speeding clackity clack at each other, and I knew they were going to collide with heavy screeches of metal and debris and just pieces flung everywhere, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. And collide they did.
The fallout was awful. Crumpled and smashed with great gaping holes they were left derailed but still facing each other, as if there was some secret war that only they had been privy to, or at least one of them. But the other was devastated -- and all aboard both trains were tossed and shaken, some to the very core, while others sustained lesser injuries.
Confusion and blame by those on the periphery while the two hulking trains just sat there in their mire. Unable to move forward or back -- just stuck in their wreckage. That is how I felt. The only thing I could see is that there was so much damage, and I couldn't handle it. I just wanted out -- to have a bit of peace that I knew would never be there due to the gaping wounds caused by the collision. Death, with it's peacefulness seemed the only way out. So I plotted and planned and hoarded drugs. I tried, my perfect plan to have Mark find me dead and cold on our marital bed. I don't know what caused me to get up after ingesting enough meds to more than do the deed -- why I came into the living room on that fateful night and shared with my boys what I had done. Perhaps it was the hand of God or an angel, my mother -- perhaps. Perhaps it was my own mother's instinct, somehow stronger than my muddled thinking that realized those two boys needed their mom.
It took weeks before I was able to cope. Sometimes even the sight of my husband, his smug self so full of another woman's temptation, would be enough to send me to the edge -- back to the time when the only thing that was certain was my sense that nothing would ever be the same, and my inability to process that along with my fear that I couldn't.
My sisters gave me courage and strength then. When I didn't have any or found myself on a cliff's edge, it was their voices and reason that I turned to. After years of turning them away, it was their love the ultimately saved me. Filling me with a sense of hope where there was none to be found, and reason when despair was all I could feel.
So here I am, at 4 am. My life is still pretty much a mess. But I am not the same despair filled person who can't see beyond her own pain. Instead of drowning, I am able to breathe through it, using the love so freely given by my sisters to shine as a beacon of hope that some day I might be able to get back on a track, with nothing blocking the way, and chug full steam ahead into my future.
