Better

It's all a little lighter. A little brighter. Calmer. And just less jagged, somehow. There are some smiles, too.

Kind of like when the sun makes a surprise appearance. You might be sitting on a stone wall. Watching your feet dangling off it. Annoyingly petitioning you to jump back down and continue walking. But just before you oblige them, the sun comes out. She strokes your cheek. Ever so gently. You had forgotten how nice that felt. And you close your eyes. But it's bright now. So you see all this light through your eyelids. And you can't help smiling. Smiling in the sun with your eyes closed is one of this life's real treats. No question.

You know you are still in the middle of it when you look back without being able to discern a beginning, a cause, an end. I know I had not gotten over this people validating the attack on Iraq, when the next tragedy struck. All those lost lives. All this misery. This darkness.

The pitfall is in trying your all, when you should know that you are in over your head. You reach out as far as you can. You put yourself on the line, even. You shout off the top of your lungs. All in the naïve belief that you can make a difference. That it has to matter. And when you run out of breath, when your voice has become hoarse, when you look around, and a few people smile politely, some shrug their shoulders, and most all of them just continue their lemming-like plodding along their route through life, that's when the horror of it dawns on you.

Life goes on. No, not as in "Oh, thankfully life does not end, but goes on", but as in "life just goes on more or less as if nothing, ever, happened." That kind of "Life goes on".

So I went numb. I became profoundly sad. Deeply, utterly, helplessly, sad.

Self-preservation reflexes kicked in. I worked a lot. Tended to my women. Read. Slept. Alot. Became sick for days at a time. Twice.

So you see, feeling like the sun just made a modest appearance to warm my cheek is really, really welcome. I do not know what prompted it. Maybe it's something basic. I finally went back to the gym today. Excercised. Stretched for the longest time. Floated around in a hot tub. Sweated in the sauna. Treating my body well has always had its way of paying me back. Or maybe it was Amelié, which I finally saw. Or perhaps it was how gentle and tender my little girl was tonight. Patting me on the head. Calling me "papa". Kissing me on the cheek. Cuddling under my arm. Or maybe this is just the amount of time that my mind needs to wind me back down. To level me before I get all bent out of shape over The Next Impossible Thing that I take on. Who knows?

Tonight, at least, I am better. Look, I'm even blogging again!