After a hiatus, you’d love to come back with a bang. You’d love to hit one out of the park, write the most breathtaking treatise anyone has ever read. Unfortunately, tonight I can barely string these words together, and I hope you’ll forgive me for it. I just needed a place, I just needed a brief second, to catch my breath. To spit some of this poison out where its less damaging to my innards.

I’m overcome by fatigue, by sadness. I’m shuffling through my disappointments like tattered confetti on the floor, like his ashes, spread from an airplane flown low over our town on Friday night. I can’t escape the haunting and sorrow and bitterness in the air all around me. Worse, I’m trapped in the bell jar with all of this, stuck suffocating in some kind of sick snow globe.

I don’t understand people who live in small towns and think their actions are not witnessed, their lies not recorded. I don’t understand how so many people can snap their marriages apart with the effortless ease of stepping on twigs. I don’t understand why I’m feeling so used. I don’t understand incessant racial slurs in front of children. I don’t understand drunken name-calling over the phone. I only understand this: Given enough time, nearly everyone will disappoint you.

Most of the time I appreciate it all so very much, this world in all its painful, breathtaking glory. I swear I do. But sometimes I’m paralyzed, wounded, petty. Sometimes I can’t stop feeling sorry for myself, can’t stop ranting in my head at those I feel have wronged me. And those who haven’t, those who never do — these three beautiful creatures I’m incredibly blessed to share a home with — can’t do a thing to make it better. Not for all the sticky kisses, the breathy mother’s day wishes, the grubby fisted dandelion bouquets in the world — and that is what hurts the most.

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