I know which side my bread is buttered on. I may be afraid of the dark, but I know that there is only one sort of place to go when I am falling apart, whether it’s dark there or not. Many of my nourishing spaces (I tend to have a collection wherever I live) are natural, but some are architectural too. The nearest one at the time of my need today was a forest trail, and so I brought myself there, and gave myself over to it.
I’m having a difficult couple days, lots of panicky implosion feelings and insane self-beratement and no daisies. There has been a real dearth of daisies, and kittens.
Some things (setting/space sensory info) are calling forth a (recent) bad patch in the recent past (a marriage crisis life falling apart kind of thing about a year ago), and that bad patch had reopened/opened for the first time a lot of much older bad patchiness.
A cascading effect, effectively cascading me right down onto the floor, laying me low. And then today–and I feel so pathetic and ridiculous about this but today someone I rely on (and this is a rare and terrifying thing for me to have done in the first place) told me that for a while she’ll be a lot less able to be there for me in the way that she has been. It’s for a perfectly good and believable reason but do I believe it? And do I believe that this isn’t just the beginning of being totally ejected/rejected altogether? Not all of me does–not those parts of me that expect everyone to want me to: go away, die, disappear, be quiet, be less, be someone else, at least have the decency to pretend to be like someone else. . .but especially the “go away.” I find it hard to open up and depend on people, and don’t particularly trust that they’ll be there for me (for everyone else maybe, but not me, because–well I don’t know what it is but I tend to feel that I am wrongness incarnate). So it’s hard not to get freaked out. And freaked out I have gotten. It’s the two possible rejection scenes right after the other, and not sleeping much lately, and being overworked and nonetheless woefully behind (or so I feel–it may not be at all true really). It’s being in a weakened state, and it’s being startled and having something that looks like one of my worst fears come true, and it’s just me having a hair-trigger panic-button for things that sound like potential ejection from someone’s life, rejection by someone that matters to me.
I did what might sound unsafe but I think was the safest place for me comparitively speaking at the time, which isn’t really saying much, I admit. I went for a long run in the forest, long and late enough in the day that it was seriously dark by the end. I didn’t feel able to handle my mood/emotional state anywhere else besides on the move through the trees. I cried (including sobbing) some, which would probably have been quite a sight, but there it is. And I do have to say that darkness and trail running are a bit tricky to combine. Sometimes though I can hear owls in the night forest. And I felt the earth’s shape through my feet, and I remembered what has always been there to hold me and be a home for me as I moved across its surface.
Sparks in the Night 