I am still alive. It has been a long, lonely, upsetting weekend.

If you’ve ever had a car accident, you’re familiar with that feeling you get when you see the other car, or telephone pole, or deer, or big truck looming large in your windshield, and you KNOW the collision is coming. You’re so close that you know it’s inevitable, and you know it’s really going to hurt, and all you can do is sit, and say the four-letter word everyone says in that moment, and brace yourself, and wait for the crunch.

I wake up with that feeling every morning, and I go to sleep with it every night, at least on nights when I sleep. It’s a moment in time stretched out into an eternity. I have time to reminisce about times when the road was clear ahead, and I was driving along smoothly without a care, knowing where I was going, confident, secure. I have time to analyze the coming crash, considering all the individual details of the disaster, weighing their impact and dreading the pain and upheaval and sorrow.

The metaphor breaks down after a bit, because when a car crashes, the pieces get picked up, the broken glass is swept away, and a nice friendly insurance adjuster writes a big check to make everything all right again. When a relationship crashes, one that took ten years to build and nurture and grow, the damage is immeasurable, and irreparable. The pieces embed themselves in the souls of those involved, and they’re there to stay. I literally don’t know how to be alone anymore, how to live outside the context of that bond. I never thought I’d have to again.

I do appreciate all the comments on my last blog, it’s nice to have friends, but please know I’m not writing this because I want pity or to have anyone feel sorry for me. Rather, I’m writing it to externalize these thoughts and feelings so that I will better understand myself, and also to give vent to some of the pressure that comes from keeping these things bottled up. I always intended this blog to be that sort of an outlet, the one place where I can be honest with myself and write what’s in my heart.

And now, I will go and try to do an honest day’s work … which will be interesting since my ability to concentrate on anything is highly in question. We’ll see how it goes.