Oh, it’s fall now in Seattle. Gray and fickle and full of volcanic activity, Seattle in the fall. I wear a sweater to work every day now, even if I have to take it off on the way home so I don’t melt on the bus. I wear socks every day and it’s dark by seven now, and soon it will be dark by six. I usually spend October settling in to the idea that summer is truly over: putting more blankets on my bed, wondering where all my hats have got to, thinking about soup a lot. In three or so weeks it’ll be time for the long weird season that is sort of fall and sort of winter that will eventually slush its way to sort of spring, round about March or so. Living in the Pacific Northwest is similar to living in South Florida only in that there are really only two seasons: Summer and Everything Else.
I’m off balance this fall. I can’t concentrate and I keep making extravagant plans to do various interesting things that can’t hold my attention for some reason. I can’t wake up in the morning, and I can’t seem to keep my room neat for more than half an hour or so. The cat keeps biting me. I’m freaking out, on pretty much an daily basis, about the elections. I’m going to New York this weekend and I don’t much care. I went shopping for SIX HOURS, six horrifying hours at the SuperMall, and while it was lovely to run into an old friend from college (from my Teen Evangelist days, no less) and have coffee with her in the food court, it didn’t really balance out the mind-numbing yuckiness of trying on eighty-five bajillion ill-fitting “outfits” that did nothing for me and were overpriced and that I convinced myself to buy anyway and which I will now have to go return next weekend, back at the SuperMall. As it gets colder and darker I will need to join the gym again: my choices are Expensive Yuppie Gym near my house or Cheap Inconvenient Gym near my work, and I don’t want to do either. All I want to do is read children’s books and listen to music and watch British television series on Netflix and eat crisp green apples and wear fuzzy socks. I have a list of things to do that I’m supposed to be accomplishing and every now and again I’ll knock one of them off (“Buy hummus. Sweep floor. Find orange-and-pink scarf in basement somewhere.”) but my heart’s not really in it. I keep looking over my shoulder, checking the time.
As I think about the events of the summer…you know, where I went to Europe and came back and broke my heart and moved to a new place and cried and screamed for a while…it seems that a lot of what I was doing was just trying to survive the immediate emotional fallout. I took it for granted that I would deal with the underlying issues inherent to my separating from my partner once I’d moved out, once the my room was set up and I felt like I really lived in my house, once I’d decided not to contact him anymore. I’m trying to do that dealing-with-it now, I guess, still going over the evidence and positing theories and analyzing the wrack and ruin…but every time I do this, in therapy or with friends or just in the few minutes before I fall asleep every night on my glorious poppy sheets, I come up with a dead end. It goes like this:
I. I broke up with someone I loved deeply about four months ago now. Man, that hurts.
II. Here are all the reasons it hurts.
III. Here are some reasons why it was a good thing to leave.
IV. And here are some reasons why it still hurts.
i. And some second-guessing.
ii. And some unmitigated rage..
iii. And some just plain old regret
V. Aaaaaannnd..?
That’s where I get stuck. I can describe what I did and what I said and how I reacted and what I should have maybe ought to have done and how I felt about it all but I can’t synthesize it. It doesn’t mean anything, there’s no punchline or happy ending or moral lesson to be learned. It’s just there, making me twitchy and sleepy and fuzzy in the head.
I’m trying so hard to be good, to be healthy, to be considerate and thoughtful and forward-thinking. I’m trying to Get Over It. A friend of mine asked me gently a couple of weeks ago if I’d considered a short bout of antidepressants, to help me get over this hump, or whatever it is. So you can start feeling like yourself a little more, she said, with love and compassion in her eyes. At the time I demurred and said I’d think about it, but what I thought about yesterday (when I wasn’t flinching as I watched the vice-presidential debates) was that there is no secondary-serotonin uptake inhibitor for grief, for loss, for loneliness. I think the way to stop feeling those things is just to put one foot in front of the other, as Anne Lamott and Eliza say, and I am doing that, I’m putting one foot in front of the other, every day. This isn’t a dire situation at all, it’s just…nothing. It’s just every day. It’s normal and unremarkable and just fine, except in that little part of my head that thinks, wait, so this is it? The camera isn’t going to swoop and he’s not going to be outside my window in the rain holding up a boom box playing “In Your Eyes”? I’m not going to run off to Italy and meet the Love Of My Life For Real when I buy a crumbling Tuscan villa drizzled in estate-grown extra virgin? I’m just going to keep going on about my business? But why? Why this fall?