I woke up at 4 am, angry.
I lay in the semi darkness, staring at the ceiling, wondering what it was that caused me to suddenly come out of a deep, seemingly restful sleep. A dream? The only clue to what was kicking around in my subconscious was the loop of a Brooks Young song I hear on a regular basis on the radio.
I don’t even like that song.
I checked on the dog to see if maybe she’d gotten up and had another accident in the living room. The steroid shot she’d received three days earlier to help with her scratching and allergies had had the unpleasant side effect of making her wildly thirsty and then having to go outside to pee more often. She hadn’t been waking me up to go out at night, and in the mornings, I had been faced with the slightly fishy-smelling stain on the already ravaged carpet. In the evenings I came home from work to a similar sight. But no, she was still asleep, slightly snoring, oblivious to my being awake. I got up and padded to the bathroom to pee myself. A drink of water, and back to bed, where I tried to relax. The song tag line continued… ask me how I know…
I took deep breaths, attempting to slow my brain and ease the tension that had now become a knot in my stomach. The anger roiled and coursed and finally manifested itself in a conscious thought. How could I have been so f**king stupid?
Of course. The upcoming trip to Illinois and the confrontation I anticipated with my ex-husband. I couldn’t think of this now. I had two ½ hours before the alarm went off and I needed to rest. Again, I attempted to relax. That worked for about five minutes—maybe less—before I became aware of my feet rubbing against each other, over and over. One foot on top, the other below, rub, change places, repeat. My classic response to anxiety. While at work, I tended to rub my arms. Alone, I tended to rub my legs, and in a more sinister manifestation, to pick at spots on my legs until they bled.
I tried to replace the song in my head with something
less enigmatic. Something sad and weepy, perhaps? No, the anger stayed. It had
moved in and demanded to be acknowledged. Imagined conversations began then,
adding to my agitation. My stomach joined in the physical fray then, a small
burning sensation beginning in the center, and threatening to become a
full-blown display of stress. I sighed, and got out of bed once more, checking
to make sure the dog didn’t decide she wanted to go outside so long as I was
up. Still snoring. I padded to the kitchen and took a cup out of the drainboard
and grabbed the ½ gallon of milk out of the fridge. These days, I should be
buying milk by the gallon, as often as I needed to guzzle it down to settle the
pain in my stomach. I gulped it down in three swallows and headed back to the
bathroom for aspirin. Another mainstay these days. God, I was a mess.
Flopping back into bed, this time on my stomach, I attempted once again to sleep.
It had been four weeks since our last conversation—one ending unexpectedly with me saying something inane like, “Nope, I get it. It was never serious. See you later,” and then hanging up. Four weeks since I learned that the hope I’d allowed myself to have weren’t going to amount to anything, and that the relationship I’d imagined had been restored wasn’t reciprocated. “I’ve met someone,” he’d told me, and that was that. Four weeks of crying that seemed unending, of praying for a text or a phone call that didn’t come, and anger that hit me so quickly and furiously that it was frightening, and now I was going back to visit my daughter. I need to find a way to forgive him. I need to find a way to forgive myself. I need to find a way to recover. But, at this moment, it was killing me.
