my shoes

if you've never had your future snatched out of your hands and lost the person you loved 6 weeks before your wedding date, lost the children you already considered your stepchildren, had to comfort your own two confused and distraught children all while trying to keep it together and go to work and take care of yourself and run a household every day like it or not....you haven't walked even a step in my shoes.

it's cold.  it's empty and it's painful.  it's like a death has occurred, and you're still here with all the memories and the hopes and dreams you had for the future.  the one person you can count on to comfort you is the source of your pain, and while you are trying to make peace with it all and seek closure, you can't stop yourself from wanting to scream at them, from wanting to hit the rewind button and have your life back, because, frankly, you were quite happy with it.  you keep thinking this is a bad dream, but each day you wake up alone in bed and realize it's not a dream at all.  you have to make all sorts of embarrassing phone calls to cancel your special day, to try to get whatever scraps of money you can get in return and salvage at least part of the financial loss.  you call the jeweler each day to see if your wedding band is in, the one you put your grandmother's precious diamonds in, not because you're in a rush to get it, but because it is one more loose end you need to tie up and gain some control over.

you see the looks of pity, you see their eyes roaming to your left ring finger.  you see the looks of avoidance, of discomfort because they just don't know what to say to you and therefore they pretend everything is fine.  or they point out how much weight you've lost, how dark the circles are under your eyes, and you know it because you see it in the mirror each morning and barely recognize it.

you have all kinds of armchair quarterbacks telling you what to think, say, feel, do...and the worst thing is you can't even figure out what you feel because it changes by the hour and you're so vulnerable and impressionable you can easily be swayed from one side of the pendulum to the other.

you just want everything to be okay.  but it's not.  you want to feel peace and comfort, but everything is in turmoil and nothing makes sense and comfort is beyond your grasp right now.  you move on with life in an effort to be normal, in an effort to be distracted, but life isn't really moving on at all.  you've stalled out and can't get it back in gear.  so you idle.