Tears are Pain.

My only goal this week was to make it through a day of work without crying.  It took until Friday, but I made it through Friday's work hours without having to lock myself in the bathroom, unravel all of the work toilet paper, and whisper to myself to keep breathing.  I made it through without running into my office and closing the door when the wrong song came on the piped-in radio.  I managed stifling the lip quiver when one of my clients asked me if I was all settled into the area now, after almost four years, and wasn't I married yet?  Oh well, lots of nice young men out there. 

I made it.

So, I've got work down.  That's about 35 hours of the week.  The other 133 hours are another story.

And I wish they weren't.  Because crying hurts.  Physically.  I spent the weekend with my parents and joked that the reason for my rosy cheeks is that I've been bathing them in warm salt water for the past week.  You know, from my eyes.  And they're burning.  My eyes burn too.  And I have a headache most of the time.  My back aches from those moments when you just can't catch your breath and you start to hyperventilate.  My eyelids are almost purple from being rubbed dry.

Unfortunately, I'm really effing sad.  And I think that's going to be the predominant feeling in my emotional repertoire for some time to come.  Everything makes me cry.

• Remembering - Our relationship had been long distance for the past year and a half.  It's normal to wake up alone.  I forget and think that I might call him later.  And then I remember.
• Showering - Maybe it's about the time of the morning that I start to remember that things are not normal anymore.  Or maybe the privacy of the shower makes me feel comfortable to start sobbing, but I have yet to take a shower without some kind of emotional response.
• Listening to Music - I don't think this is a surprise to anyone.  Between Friday and today I've spent nine hours in the car with my mp3 player.  I've learned that there are many songs I can't listen to right now.  There's the obvious choices - REM's "Everybody Hurts" is a song basically giving you permission to cry it out and sometimes made me tear up anyway.  Neil Young's "Helpless" coming down the hill in North Bay was like someone kicking me in the heart with a steel-toed boot.
• Feeling the Love  - I just need to know that I'm going to be ok.  To be honest, the number of people who have offered kind words, open arms and the space to be really effing sad has been a little bit overwhelming.  At a time when it would be so easy to feel so very lonely, I have never felt so surrounded.  I will still need the reminder (probably quite often), but it's much easier now to believe that I'm going to get through this with more or less all the pieces I started with.
• Silence - Sometimes nothing's happened and I find myself in tears.

Things that don't make me cry include: making a rickety bed with my father at 2 a.m. on a Friday night after a long drive, playing complicated piano music, and sleeping.

The sadness I feel and the accompanying tears are a normal part of the grieving process, I'm told.  I know I can't carry a torch forever, lest I set myself on fire.  Maybe the tears are a safety feature - a built-in fire extinguisher.  But I can't cry forever, no matter how sad I feel.  I'm hoping instead to convert much of my sad energy into handcrafted items for friends, family, and self, feats of athleticism and devastatingly emotionally on point musical performances.  We'll see how this goes. 

When I was driving to my parents' this weekend, there was a tiny section of rainbow over the horizon.  When I was driving back, there was a sliver of new moon smiling at me.  Though I'm currently not particularly devout, I am a Sunday School veteran.  The rainbow was a promise from God that He would never flood the earth again. 

I'm not so naïve as to believe that I'm never going to feel heartbroken again, but I'm going to take it and the smiling moon as a sign from the ether that things are going get better.  Just like everyone keeps saying.