In the Darkness

The daffodils are starting to arrive, as the shop's windows are beginning to show.  Well, hidden behind the layers and mounds of red roses for the upcoming lovers holiday the colors of spring edge through.  None-the-less, I found myself procuring my first daffs of the season as I near annually do.  As in years past, the rain and snow have poetically encapsulated the buy.  Yet, this year, I found myself buying them on a seemingly bright, sunfilled day.  In reality, it was all trickery, as the cold winter wind remained blustery and I could feel slithers of a sharpened frigid blast under the hem of my parka. 

Daffodils are fleeting, and the moment of joy of their annual arrival is a glimmer into the wispy darkness that winter brings.  This year the hope and joy eluded me.  The bright flowers, filling my air with their welcoming aroma of fresh life, act as forgotten tchotchkes on the shelves around me.  Those shelves are holding books, pictorial memories, and figurative memories of choices and decisions I've made.  Within those layers and trays, and tchotchkes of years gone by, the twenty-five-year fight I never had an opportunity on peeks through every corner, book page, and missed encounter. 

The boyfriend who crushed my heart when he fled because Lupus was more than he could bear.  There was more than one.  One is a physician now.  I wonder how that memory plays out for him now.  The husband who turned after "I do," removing his layers and leaving broken pieces of me in his wake.  The friends who were never friends and proclaim I'm just lazy and a waste.  The jobs pulled from my hand because the fear I'd fail them instead of them failing me.  The money spent on MDs, hospitals, blood work (OMG the bloodwork), the specialists, the prescription bottles multiplying and subtracting but always increasing again as gremlins never die, and the financial burden of it all nearly ending me. 

Twenty-five-years in and the drugs that tear you from the inside out make you wonder what the point in the end is.  The drugs that break you in ways the Lupus beast never could.  Waking up in the morning and feeling streams of pain through your feet that travel to the ends of your hair.  Faking laughter and a smile, as you barrel through a day, finding creative ways to sit down so no one will know.  Turning from the crowd, so that they can't see you wince.  Showing a two-minute video in class because you know that you need a moment to clutch the podium with white knuckles and pray for the latest wave to pass. 

Running your hands under hot water to ease the pain. Auto-rinse-repeat, at day's end you wonder how high your water bill will be this month as you've been at this sink no-less than twenty times today.  Wearing gloves to drink an iced beverage because you want something bone-chilling cold but your hands scream from experience. 

Being tired every moment of the day from figurative and physical exhaustion that only the mythical magic from unicorn horns can cure.  You wonder if we should divert federal research in finding the elusive unicorn instead of funding congressional haircuts, dinners, and such.  Being tired of the fight.  You wonder if it is worth it, as it has only gotten you negative returns. 

Never standing in at a friend's wedding because no one wants a puffy and rash faced bridesmaid.  Never having friends to genuinely ask as through the years the majority faded into the distance and you were always the loner who had to stay back.  The crass comments that you were a downer when you smiled and told everyone to go without you, and you would be fine.  You wake up the next morning to an "intervention" telling you that you aren't part of the group, you are selfish, and that you made everyone uncomfortable as "it's not always about you." You stand there with your mouth agape, saying you never asked for anything, and you only told everyone to have fun while you stayed back.  They just glare and brutally informs you the weekend is about being with everyone not being on our own.  You part ways days later, and your heart is never the same.

Being told twenty-five-years into the fight that it was all a myth, a lie, a fabrication.  That was the dream twenty-five-years ago, to wake up and say it's all been a mistake.  But, twenty-five-years in . . . How can it be a mistake a quarter of a century later, thousands of dollars in bills, hospital stays, medications, lost relationships, lost jobs, days of pain, pillows that looks like crime scenes at morning's light, legs that turn blue in the cold, bruises that form in the blink of an eye rarely alerting you of their cause, days and nights crumbled on your floor or bed from attacks that won't let you move let alone breathe . . . How can it all be a fallacy? Endless tears of the life of loss and losing battle continue to fall. 

Someone makes a joke.  It doesn't sit well.  Someone puts you in your place.  It doesn't sit well.  Someone diagnoses your life as a mistake, a lie, a fool's belief.  It does not sit well. 

That is the darkness.  The nothingness that is the known and unknown.  Always alone. 

I'm tired.  Tired of the fight.