Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Walking Wounded

There is no such thing as a good time for a break-up. I know this. But somehow right now seems like it might have been the worst possible time for me to have finally dropped the axe. Don't get me wrong - I'm way too far down this path to think about turning around to look for bread crumbs, but some days right now coming home to an empty house feels worse than coming home to the possibility of a fight.

Everything bad comes in threes, right? So maybe I should have expected all this. Okay, that sounds melodramatic and I do like to avoid melodrama when I can. But it's been a tough week or so and I'm beginning to feel worn down. The worst part is there isn't really anyone to talk to about it. That's one of the most glaring losses in the end of the relationship: the loss of PC as a constant and sympathetic ear. (The irony of this is that it actually drove me crazy that he always wanted to know everything about everything; it would feel like he was constantly grilling me and invading my privacy by asking what I did or what I talked about every minute of every day.) The problem with living across the freaking country from nearly everyone you love and hold dear is that it's impossible to keep them all up to date on daily happenings in your life.

This is the long way of saying that things have suddenly gotten harder. The job that I moved down here to take was a wonderful job when I got here. It was a good environment with entertaining coworkers and challenging professional demands. In the last 2 weeks this has all gone down the toilet. The two Fort Myers locations of my office have just merged and all the charm that existed in the other office has completely disappeared. Now, the coworker who decided to hire me and is my direct superior is actively and aggressively looking for a new job. This would leave me with the possibility of either being thrown to the administrative wolves without her here, or the possibility of having her job (and it's infinite responsibilities) shoved on me. Suddenly instead of relaxed and happy to go to work, I'm getting as close to a panic-attack as I've ever had every morning. I'm just waiting for the next explosion.

Worse, though, than any of the rest of this (worse than the break-up by far, really) is that my parents have come into town to visit. That, in and of itself, is a wonderful thing. The hard thing is that my dad's health has been getting steadily worse, no matter what he and my mom try to do about it. Almost every radical or experimental (and not covered by insurance, of course) treatment that anyone out there has ever done or heard about is being tried. They just spent 3 months with The Sister in LA trying something that was supposed to have an 80% success rate. Yet nothing has made a difference and the way things are going I'm not sure how much longer my dad is going to stay out of a wheelchair. This is what happens to me every time I haven't seem him in a little while and then I see him again - I have to realize how bad things are and re-learn how to cope with it over and over again. Every time a new treatment is started, we are all hopeful and positive, but it gets harder to do each time he continues to lose ground despite all that is tried. He weighs less than I do now and he's got more than six inches on me.

It feels like a lot. It feels like so much that I wish I had someone else to help me carry it all. PC was around for all of it. He was with me when we first figured out that my dad was really sick and my parents flew to Mayo Clinic to find out what was happening. He was there at Christmas to do things that my dad couldn't do. He was here when I started this job and here when I started having misgivings about how it was going to turn out after the two offices actually merged. He's been with me for all of it and now, he's not. Now it's me and my big, empty apartment and my silly cat.

Don't worry. Really. I'm not going to call him. I may have been pretty selfish for most of the end of the relationship, but I'm not selfish or cruel enough to think that my personal problems give me license to hurt him any more than I already have.

Lyrics of the Day

"Wide awake and he shakes in a panic, never woke up alone ever before. Had his woman long as he can remember, tries to forget but he can't, he can't." Pearl Jam Alone

1 comment:

Julie said...

Yeah, that's a lot, by any measure. It may seem like you don't have anyone to talk to, but you do.