Dark, Light, Fight, Flight

Pounding head, racing heart
Anxiety, fear, continued concerns
What more will be expected of me?
Will I be able to get everything done properly?

Wracked sobs, swollen eyes
Exhaustion, sadness, depressive despair
Why is everything so damn hard?
When will something just go right for a change?

Black fog clouds my mind
The cataclysmic abyss calls
The deafening silence of the Void
Hails a ceremonious welcome

Video call, smiling faces
Happiness, joy, loving warmth
I wish I could slow time
Just to see the longer and talk some more

Hot bath, snowy bubbles
Calm, tender, relaxation
This feels like therapy
A reflective moment of me-time

Light filters into my thoughts
The awful shadows hide
The challenging heaviness lingers, clinging
But hope springs eternal

© Priscilla Anne Fick – Reflections of a Misfit

Grief is Sneaky

As many of you will know from my previous post, I am packing up The Cave after living there for almost ten years to move back to my folks because Dad is ill, although coping very well – something for which we’re all very grateful.

In the clean-up, I came across a postcard that Charlie sent me for my birthday one year, while he was sailing in Alaska. It read “Hello there, from the other side of the planet. Happy birthday. I hope you get a jam-filled cake.”  I read it, smiled, reminisced for a moment, and then placed it in a bag with other papers for recycling. After all, it’d been years since our paths split. He got married last year on October 8^th Shannon, the blonde American who swept him off his feet in just three days of meeting him. He felt bad, but ‘the heart wants what the heart wants’. When I happened upon the wedding photos on her Insta (it wasn’t difficult to track her down), I finally summoned the will to delete our entire chat history of almost two years, along with his number. I felt an inexplicable numbness, a tiny tinge of horror, and a pinch of relief. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the feelings I was having, weren’t ‘it’.

Heartbreak Autopsy

Does the hurt you caused me ever sucker punch you unexpectedly?
Do you ever feel enveloped by a storm of sadness?
Do you ever wonder if I’ve wanted to die because of it?

Your broken promises are splinters of glass in my mind
“I’ll never hurt you” – the salt in my wounds

Do you ever have to stifle screams of terror at night
As the memories choke you with their icy hands
Their bony fingers squeezing the throat your lips often caressed

Silent tears flow as panic threatens to turn to hate
“I’m sorry” – the word I damn to Hell

I try to sleep to silence the voices in my head
My rest plagued by inescapable rooms
Every door I open leads to another dungeon of heartache

My bed is cold, a sanitized, steel slab
You make the Y-incision with the diamond of her engagement ring

Did she stand beside you as you cracked my ribs
To remove my still-beating heart?
Our end: your start

Day 28: Of Life and Lucy the Lettuce

It’s all fun and games until COVID-19 touches you on a more direct level. One of my friends that works away was tested as part of a mandatory reaction plan his employers had in place. He tested positive, despite showing no symptoms. He didn’t fall ill during his isolation period either. According to the doctors, he is one of the very few lucky ones. He is now waiting for this third set of swabs and blood tests to come back negative, while plans are trying to be made to get him back to SA. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about him and his colleagues. It has me wondering though – how many of us may be infected, but are asymptomatic?

Day 6: Tears of Joy, Gratitude and Loneliness & Dog Balls

Today I realized that I’m a little freaked out by Maltese Poodles and way too many of my friends have big dogs that sleep on their backs with their junk on display for everyone to see. I’m not sure if I should be laughing or crying that my friends photograph canine testicles and post them on social media.

Frightfully Awful Friday

I was at work today, but I may as well not have been. I woke up to news from Charlie that the ship on which he works has been exposed to COVID-19. Isolation and quarantine are imminent. I am sad, anxious, and unable to concentrate. He was so close to returning home (albeit it to self-isolation here).  

I can only hope that he isn’t infected and that once the mandatory quarantine has passed, the airlines will have resumed their international and regional flights that he can get home.

More Questions than Answers

I thought a lot about death over the weekend following Mr. Doeps’s memorial service on Friday.  Even though I don’t know his wife well and his children at all, I couldn’t help but think he was a few months older than The Bean (who is 73) and she’s a few months older than The Toppie (72). My brain then fixated on Psalm 90:10: 

“The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.”

Goodbye, Mr Doeps…

I heard of the passing of a retired, former colleague this morning.  Just last night, as I was about to turn over, I said to myself I wonder how he’s doing.  He had been ill for quite a while, following a heart attack, after which a myriad of treatment-related issues followed.  It was inevitable that he would never be the jovial man he had been before the cardiac arrest, but the news has still left me feeling awfully sad.