I guess this post serves as a written apology to my family and my friends. The people who's calls I sometimes don't return. The people who, when they do contact me, find themselves talking to someone who is either chronically disconnected, or irritable and short tempered.
It's just...difficult, being a functioning member of society right now. It's difficult, trying to be a social person. I feel like I'm in a different place to most people. Most people are where I used to be- the frothy top of the cappuccino of life, I guess. While right now, I'm sitting in the bit at the bottom, cold and sticky with too much sugar.
And it hurts, because I used to be so social. I used to love small talk. I used to love chatting, waffling, babbling, talking about nothing in particular. Getting to know people.
I watch other people, people I know and love, life their lives, and I wish mine still had that much depth, where little things mattered and it wasn't day to day survival.
I'm sure I'll get there, eventually. For now, I'll live in the numb bubble of grief and guilt, and watch other people sparkle by with their normal lives, and hope they understand.
Small talk, for me, it just doesn't happen. I have an inkling that may sound arrogant, and deliberately ignorant, and i guess that's OK, because it's just how I feel at the moment. Small talk, discussions of holidays and the weather and how old are my children?, I just find them irritating and excessively difficult to follow. They always seem to thread back to my husband being dead, that I've run away to Paradise, and then occasionally I flood these unsuspecting souls with too much information, too many sad details and I want to stop talking and I can't.
Or my irritation, my anger and edginess,it shows through, and taints the conversation to the point where it is uncomfortable.
So, gradually, I find myself withdrawing from everyone I love, and those who love me. I still feel for them, all of them, even more deeply than before... but conversations with me are difficult, for all involved. It's either too much, a bright light of ugly emotion that makes me people squint at me as if i am the sun, or it's my bristly anger and sadness as I try to restrain everything I'm feeling.
Even with my children, my babies, a lot of the time I am on auto pilot.I answer questions, I change nappies, I smile and I play, but I do it all on auto pilot, no passion in my voice, with a smile that doesn't quite reach my eyes. And in between the times when my attention belongs to them, I stare off into space, and I see a man in a blue shirt, with an orange rope cutting into the flesh of his neck, hes eyes half closed and bulged and rolled back, and I try to process how the hell this happened to me, try to remember that this is not a dream, this is real, this is my life.
So.. an apology, to those who I can't small talk with, as much as I wish I could.
Please believe me when I say I love you, and I hope, one day soon... I'll be back.