The Tunnel Season

Job 6:11 “What is my strength, that I should hope? and what is mine end, that I should prolong my life?”

The Tunnel Season

I’m calling this the tunnel season because this is the season of my life I trek through a long dark tunnel. I don’t know if any of you have ever been in an underwater tunnel that gets you from one side of the city to the other side but back home, we had TWO. The Harbor tunnel was a long stretch, dimly lit four-lane tunnel, two lanes in and two out. I remember when I was a kid my mother always dreaded driving through that tunnel as fear and claustrophobia gripped her. She would often choose the route through the congested city to get to my aunt’s house instead of putting herself through the trauma. The tunnel runs 1.45 miles under the Inner Harbor.

When I began this journey of a lifetime back in January, I thought the walk through the tunnel would be difficult but definitely doable. I’m about two or three city blocks into the tunnel and the end is not in sight yet and I’m feeling my own claustrophobia rattle my brain. I chose to walk through the tunnel and not go through the city streets to reach my destination; I chose to take the hard, isolated, lonely way.

You see, to me, the chemo slice and dice method is taking the route through the city. There are benches placed at bus stops for you to rest, there are blinking crosswalk signs to get you safely across the street, there are even garbage cans along the route for you to dump any extra baggage you might be carrying. Me, in the tunnel of solitude, I don’t have those luxuries. I have gas emissions from the cars (toxins) to inhale; I have dim lighting (people for me and against my choice); I’ve chosen to walk the walk as opposed to driving, and thus far, it feels as if I’m walking on my hands.

My life has been turned upside down and there is no dispute about it, this is the challenging route. I’m a quarter of a mile in the tunnel and it seems one of the cars broke down up ahead. It started out an empty tunnel, a car here, a car there but now as I look ahead, I see the backed up cars. This journey isn’t getting any easier or lighter to bear, no this is getting more difficult and heavier than expected. I expected ups and downs, stops and starts, but I wasn’t expecting a traffic jam where everything comes to halt and looks as if the jam is not a jam it’s a crash that emergency crew help is having trouble getting to the scene. They’re not here for me anyway.

I’ve been a little depressed lately as my three illnesses battle each other with each one individually wanting to take front and center. With my arthritis, I have a swelled typing finger and a right knee that is pained feeling what little weight I have left bearing down. My psoriasis gets inflamed with sun exposure and this other crud I’m carrying NEEDS the sun as a vitamin D natural source. Then my neck started in with its seething pain. I believe it to be from sleeping wrong but the pain won’t let up and I’m not willing to take pain medication.

Then the eclipse happened and things took a weird turn. Just weird things started happening and I want to attribute it to the eclipse but the reality is, crud happens. Besides the spectacular orbs in the sky shadowing each other, then there's the echoing posts on Facebook and the other day my trusty laptop stopped connecting to the modem. It’s been fine for eight months but suddenly just stopped working and my tech savvy man is finding it difficult to fix. Then there’s the concern that in January when my vitamin supplements run out, the funds are depleted, I will battle on empty handed. That’s just the way my life is, drag me behind a fast moving car and let’s see if I live. Never a dull moment. This is it. I hope I can climb out of this funk because as it looks right now…it’s gonna be awhile.

Then I feel SO petty with my mundane complaints when thousands are out there struggling through the Storm of the Century, Hurricane Harvey hitting Houston! I pray, I meditate and I cry, all stress that is not doing me any good. 

Everyone pretending to be happy shakes my faith in society as a whole. Now some people are finally starting to see what I’ve been seeing for months now how we are basically under a governing regime. From food, water, to medical needs the government turning a blind eye except where their money is concerned. I am left to wonder…

Thank you to all who stood stoically by my side. And to the ones who don’t give a flying fig but pretend you do…. I got nothing.

Job 7:6 “My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope.”

They'll Never Know

Gen. 18:21 “I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know.”

They’ll Never Know

They’ll never know the loneliness I felt, the emptiness that resided in me. They did nothing and could have done everything. They left me, isolated and alone, out in the pastures of life.

They’ll never know the hours I spent staring out the window, chasing birds with my mind wanting to fly away from the very sedentary life I live. I wanted to live but no one, nothing gave me options, they left me alone.

I am the plague that they fear catching. The disease that they’d rather keep away from their life; the very fear that festers inside of them that they’ll one day have to face alone. It’s no fun this solitude that haunts my mind. It saddens me to think I will die and they’ll never know of my life, my real life.

They’ll see the pictures I painted for them, the fragments as breadcrumbs dropped on the ground for them to follow. They’ll never find the real source of my pain because it is dwelling in them, they’ll never know. They’ll never know that the picture is false; the painter is never the painting it is just an expression of what they see. I am the artist creating an illusion of a world you’ll believe. I am the game endlessly played never to be won. I am your addiction, the one thing you need to be real.

Deep down I am the smear, the painting went wrong, the mistakes you’ll never see. I am the routine never to be broken. I am the vase sitting on the shelf with no flowers. I am the desert, dry and never to be rained upon. The hour never to be changed, the life day in and day out staring into a windowed world sharing a love for people I’ll never meet, a spiritual family that deeply cared from afar.

They’ll never know the turmoil I faced. They’ll think I was strong because I never allowed the shards of glass to cut them open. I only allowed the brokenness to shut me down to leave me vulnerable to what it is that surrounds me in my physical world. Alone, I am alone and pained by my surroundings. 

They’ll live thinking they did everything and knowing they did absolutely nothing. They’ll never know I was used, abused and diffused; a live wire with no connection to sustain the energy that thrives within me. I loved too hard, I shined too bright, and I was everything they were not nor ever could be.

There can be no healing as long as I’m demeaned, pushed down into the box and smothered. I spring forward like a jack-in-the-box daily with my polka-dot suit and painted smile I show everyone what they want to see. I make them smile waxing nostalgic over the times of their youth when they cranked the music and watched as the toy came bouncing into life. They never saw the real me, they’ll never know.

The blood, they claimed to love but they’ll never know that it was only I who loved and they shed me like dry skin to be swept away from the scene. I became the disease that they dreaded to see; they dared not look at. They went on in their fantasy playing charades and showing the world their imagined perfect life. They lived while I died, but they’ll never know.

To sum it all up, I was flourishing in the warmth of the sun, growing and turning towards the sunlight as the orb drifted overhead and I carried the rays like a candle into the night to show me the way. Then one day in all my splendor I was mowed over, severed and left in mere rubble, kicked about and wiped off the bottom of the shoe, I was done. To them I am nothing, to me I am all, to Him I am worthy. I am everything. In their obscured selfish bliss, they’ll never know.

Who are they? They are the ones who sat in their passive state and said they cared. They are the ones who did nothing as my body slowly withered and decayed. They are the ones who afterward wondered what they didn’t do carrying guilt like a different handbag of the week. They are the ones who went on, to live, to breathe. They know who they are but then again, they’ll never really know.

Ezek. 39:8 “Behold, it is come, and it is done, saith the Lord GOD; this is the day whereof I have spoken.”

A Blogger No More

Job 13: 13 Hold your peace, let me alone, that I may speak, and let come on me what will.

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I know I’ve whined and moaned about this before, but something is telling me to just give it up. Why?

1) I find no joy in blogging anymore – as you can tell probably from my non-posting?

2) I don’t care to write for myself anymore – tired of pretending there’s an audience out there that likes reading me.

3) I used to find joy in blogging, sharing, comments and meeting friends: I have it no more – all has become silent like the caverns in my mind.

4) Writing has dwindled to a grocery list—and what I do write is probably taken as malicious and misguided.

5) When I find joy in writing, or have something the emptiness might enjoy, I’ll be sure to share.

I don’t like summer by any means whatsoever. I love winter, I enjoy spring and fall is a pleasant season. But summer is just a season where everybody wears next to nothing, prances around for all the voyeurs to see. It is a season of nothingness and shows people for their true colors for sure.

When I go shopping or out in public—even in the summer, my body is covered. Why? Because it is my sacred temple and it is not for people to gawk at, look down upon, or to lust after, it is my temple! Sacred!

I can’t go out and enjoy my garden because the flies think I’m the next best thing to a dead carcass, I’m there to eat. I slather my body in vanilla – which I read was good to deter flies, but when you forget to put it on, you realize that vanilla REALLY works! But then there’s the heat, the long drawn out days of heat. Lounging in the heat is no fun! The flies find the one spot you missed and gnaw at you like an over-ripe peach.

My work in the yard is not enjoyable because I need someone to start the old mower for me and with my beau working and Adam in the healing stages of a surgical procedure, it is all falling on my hands which takes a toll on my mind, body and soul. Mowing is my meditative release from this ugly world I live in.

Sure I see the beauty in each day. Wake up with a renewed love of this world as I watch the birds drink from my homemade birdbath, land on a branch and specifically tweet to me a big thank you!

But I think my long summer is drawn out by being homebound, seeing the outside world once or twice a month and when I do see it, I want to run back home and curl up on the sofa. While my man may enjoy the heat, working on Saturdays and Sundays, missing church, finding pleasure in being out and around people, and being able to shop at his leisure; I find myself in a sheltered world of no movement, shades drawn (so the sun don’t heat the house) and no AC because it costs too much.

I’m alone to do what; clean, wash clothes, my every day mundane chores? Maybe then I could write? No, writing has been sucked out of me like everything else, so I’ll just dwindle until something pulls me back into the realm of the living. For now…I’ll be a  ‘nilla zombie.

Be well people.

Pss. 102: 7 I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.