Sometimes the beauty is in the spaces, isn’t it?

The pause between when you tell him you love him for the very first time, and you wait, one beat, another, and there is that delicious-scary anticipation, before you hear what he will say back.

The gap between the notes in your favourite song. You know precisely how long to hold the silence. You take your breath, before the lyric unfurls the next layer of story.

The very first moment when you become aware of yourself in the morning, when for a second or two you are no-one and nowhere, your brain is furry and unfocussed, and there is no cancer or death or pain that cannot be taken away.

The beauty of the space.

This week two more of my people died.

I know this is inevitable. That with every moment that passes, every beautiful space that passes me by, I draw closer to another death. A bigger space. Another one that can never be filled.

Those deaths take my breath away, every single time.

This week two more of my people died, and there is a space in my heart that can’t be filled, and nor would I want it to be.

What do you say when someone dies? Do you say: passed away, passed over, left this earth, deceased? I don’t like any of those. I say they have left a space.

And so I mark it.

In my appointment book, which is the thing that runs my days, I write their name, where the time for their check up would normally be. My Dad comes in most Saturday afternoons. Hayley comes in every second Tuesday night. Geoff comes in once a month on a Saturday morning, and Bob has 9.15am on a Tuesday, every fourth week. Don’t worry about my tenuous grip on reality, I know they aren’t actually coming in, but I can’t bear to erase them, to take away the space they held in my life.

In the beginning, the space is almost unbearable. The allotted time stretches out from my toes to eternity, and I think I will never endure the tock-tock-tocking of the moments passing. After the passing of months, that if joined together would wrap around the equator eleventy-million times, the space takes on a new form. The time morphs and passes faster, or perhaps it just has less barbs to be ripped out of the gentle skin of my forearms. The space holds itself, it never de-ceases, but I find that I have a fortitude, a fort, that I never knew I’d built, and I can sit in the space, and put the jigsaw pieces of my heart back together.

Some of the pieces are missing.

There are spaces where there once was a picture.

But there is beauty in the parts that are now missing. They are the memories of my very own. Invisible to another, but clear to me.

And they are wondrous.

…From The Ashers

How do you handle setbacks in your life?

I had a little setback yesterday, nothing major, it just seems that some things that might have been going to happen quite quickly might take a little longer.  No big deal, and if I’m to be honest, it is probably better anyway, as I was moderately stressed about putting my toe in the water with these two new, and quite different ventures.

It has been interesting to observe myself though, to see how it is that I ‘do’ disappointment.

1.  Act as if it’s all cool.  You know, the drill: fake it a bit, until the new information can be assimilated, but in the meantime, pretend that, yeah, no worries, she’ll be right, it’s all good, no probs, and on and on until my brain is going to explode from all the bullshit.  I might also go further than to pretend I didn’t really want that thing, into making up a shit-hot story as to why, even though all of the available facts show otherwise, someone has made a mistake, and I’ll soon get to do or have what I thought I was getting.  So I guess stage one is basically just denial.

2.  Get a bit pissed off.  Here I’ll usually be a bit cross that I didn’t get/have/do the thing I wanted.  I’ll probably sulk a bit, because that my friends, is something that I’m pretty bloody adept at.  Might as well play to my strengths.  So this could pretty much be the anger stage.

3.  This is a good stage (it’s not really, I’m really bullshitting you again now), this is where ‘if only’ is on high revolution.  If only I’d…. If only things were…. etc until everyone around me is about to spontaneously implode from all the whinging.

4.  Attack of the sads.  I’m ridiculously bad at crying, unless there is a chocolate emergency, but I can do a good old sook if required.  If I need to actually shed tears, because you know sometimes only actually salt-drips will do, then it’s time to dust off the old copy of Bridges of Madison County or E.T. and get the ducts a’flowing.

5.  There really is no five.  I just go back to 1. and pop this list on repeat until I end up getting so sick of myself that I either ‘shit or get off the pot’.  Usually I shit.  Because if anything is important enough to get past stage one, then it is probably worth it.  Or at least worth having a dip.

Interestingly, my setback stages are pretty much the Kubler-Ross Model of Grief, (although step five by her reckoning is acceptance- you can guess what I think of that as an idea) and that makes me wonder, do other people also run through this little schematic when things don’t go to plan, or when they just feel like being a big baby?  Or is it just me?  I guess I really am a psychologist’s dream…

Do you run through the stages?  Do you get stuck on one of them?

P.S.  Talking of Big Big Babies, check out this.  No, I don’t know what the hell is going on with it either, but I do know the Evil Geniuses like to  say “There’s a chicken in a box do you like my socks? Boom. They’re elasticated” more than is humanly necessary.  So there’s that.

You’re welcome.  (Warning: it can’t be unseen)

…From The Ashers xx