Scorpion in a Box

I’ve been holding off on this post. In fact, I would have rather ignored it all together, but sometimes words have a life of their own and sometimes they demand to be written. Have you ever had something inside of you that was pressing so hard to get out that you finally had to cave and write about it??

Christmas morning was pretty hard because it marked the anniversary of when Minute Man proposed to me two years ago. He had stayed up after I went to bed Christmas Eve and gone outside and started carving out letters in the snow outside our window. When I woke up I looked out the window and saw the following message written in the snow: Marry Me?

I dreaded looking out the window this past Christmas morning, half expecting to see another message. Maybe something like: I’m an Idiot, or Please Forgive Me? Or maybe just I’m Sorry. But there were no letters in the snow (probably due in large part that there was no snow) and the only words that touched my heart Christmas Day were the unspoken ones circling in frenzy deep within me.

I’ve been trying not to blog about Minute Man or Girl Child. I miss them both in a way that I never could have imagined. I get angry at myself for missing Minute Man. He sometimes often didn’t treat me very nice and he doesn’t deserve to be missed, but I miss him just the same. Or maybe I just miss the guy I thought he was, and maybe I just fell in love with an illusion. Maybe that guy I fell in love with never existed at all. Maybe I was wrong about everything.

I’ve been trying to remind myself of how unhappy I was and how forgotten, lonely and unloved I felt some most of the time. It hasn’t been working. My mind keeps reverting back to the better times we spent together and some of the truly awesome things he did, like the Zen garden he made for me. That garden now resembles The Secret Garden overgrown with dead vegetation and corrupted with weeds, forgotten and broken just like our marriage.  

I guess that’s how it is when you love somebody. You only think about the good times, and the bad times that made life so unbearable are somehow forgotten. I keep thinking maybe I’ll write down some of the things he did that hurt me. I could keep them in a book, so every time I start to miss him I can remind myself of… no, I guess that doesn’t really sound like a healthy idea now does it? That’s like keeping a scorpion in a box after healing from its sting, so next time you think about playing with scorpions you can get stung again. Right?

 

As masochistic as that may seem, that very method got me through a previous heartache.  I once dated a guy that told me he hoped I whored around until I caught aids and died. Let me tell you, when somebody wishes you a slow and painful death it makes it a whole lot easier to get over them. Every time I started to miss him, I just reminded myself that he wished me dead. Minute Man never wished me dead. He just made me feel that way.

New Beginnings

For the past few weeks, the sky, like my emotions, has been muted out by deep shades of gray, threatening to fall but refusing the release. There seemed to be a heightening climax in both the weather and my mood building up to Christmas Day. Each day the gloom gathered and seemed to strengthen as it hovered closer and closer to the horizon.

Finally, late last night as the fading moments of Christmas left the atmosphere, the tension broke and the sky released. When I stepped out of the busy pub, I was greeted by a worldly stillness. I turned my face up to the sky, and a shiver of delight passed through me as I felt the first snowflakes of winter fall and melt on my skin.

A blanket of pure white quickly replaced the colors of dulling decay that autumn had left behind, and with it my inner gloom was replaced by crisp fresh winter air. I realized that I had survived Christmas Day without Minute Man and Girl Child, and waiting right around the corner, was a new year and a new beginning. Just for a moment, everything felt fresh and new and untainted in almost every way. And had I been able to see through the clouds, I would have noticed it was a new moon.