Melancholia

It is an apt definition; I feel as though a black bile is indeed residing in my stomach and throat.

I read a book over the weekend. I didn't really intend to but it was so hot outside and I had nothing to do. The book was recommended by a friend who works in the field of gender and sexuality. It was novel about loss, love and postmodern sexuality. It wasn't a great book. It was perhaps above tolerable. The story was written in the first person perspectives of the two main characters and the swerves between the narrations were abrupt. The plot involving the love story of a widowed man and a scarred woman was absurd. And the scars were literal, not figurative. And the widowed man was previously married to another man. Then there was the ending which was wrapped up too suddenly and neatly with a little bow of happily ever after that caused me to huff in disgust.

Despite all of these problems I got caught up and now I have been depressed for days. While writing about scarface, a stalker, a bigoted minister, and a twin, the author managed to capture the male character's grief and loss in a few meaningful sentences. The endearments that were once used. The emptiness and unexpectedness of the emptiness. The strangeness of another body, in this case another gender to boot. I have been laying wide awake with horror thinking of this fictional man's all too real grief as if it were my own. I am still so sad about Jon's death but instead I am picturing the character's dead husband and mourning him. I'm sure that a psychologist would be able to explain displacement of grief to me so that I don't feel so stupid about why I have been crying off and on for days. I don't need the degree to know that some of this is the grief that I have been unable to express over the past year.

I talk to SB as much as I can but sometimes it is hard to put into words and sometimes I am too confused to even express it. I am not rational. I sometimes don't think that SB can understand how much I loved Jon because I haven't been able to explain it without guilt that I loved Jon the most of anyone in the family. And I have irrational anger that SB went out of town when Jon came to visit and meet him but who was to know that the cowardly retreat/timely visit to his sister was the only chance he had to meet him? I certainly wasn't upset at the time, all of us thinking there would be time in the future.

Even now I feel a rush of panic like I felt when I knew just how long forever really is. Gone forever. Nonexistent. Forgotten. I tried to talk about Jon but I don't think that I made any sense with all of the blubbering and continuous changes of subject. Much like that damn book. Maybe I am going through early menopause.  Or maybe I have finally gone from "touched" to outright nutty. Maybe like than damn book I have lost the plot.

Comments

Jennifer W said…
Too much of what you wrote hit too close to home. I'm sorry you're in a funk. It's a place I tend to live part time. Poop.