Falling Apart in One Piece by Stacy Morrison

Author:Stacy Morrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

6

You Are Not Alone, and, Yes, You Are Totally Alone

In my darkest moments of grief, my body sought low ground. The crying often started in my bedroom, after twenty endless minutes of my staring up at the ceiling, waiting for answers to how I was supposed to cope with a falling-down house and a falling-apart life. Tears slipped out of the corners of my eyes, dripping into my ears. Then a sob would break from my chest, and I would get up and head downstairs so as not to wake my son in the next room. Sitting on the couch, I wept, my elbows on my knees; then my body would list until I was lying down in the red sofa’s embrace. But the grief was heavier still, and I would roll onto the floor, arms around a pillow, holding on to it as if it were a life raft and I adrift at sea.

On the worst nights I always ended up in the kitchen, the farthest point in the house from my son’s bedroom, except for the unusable basement. I’d start out sitting on the floor leaning against the cabinets, but I always ended up lying on the floor in front of the stove, trying to keep the sound of my racking sobs from drifting upstairs and waking Zack. Despite my best efforts, I woke him more than once. I’d quickly pack up the accordion of despair that had opened inside me to run upstairs and hold him, tell him that we were safe, we were fine, everything was fine.

The kitchen floor became my touchstone, the place my body took me when I didn’t know where else to go to try to get away from the pain. The nights I ended up lying there, I’d sometimes find myself staring at the crumbs under the stove as I cried, wondering how they got there and how I should go about getting them out. Part of my brain was hurting a hurt so deep I felt like I might be swallowed up whole into the ink spot—and yet, another part of my brain was doing light housekeeping. Dust was gathering, time was passing, my life was still being lived, and some kind of healing was happening, even though I felt I was barely surviving it all when I wasn’t at work, where I could embrace the comfort of routines, of being the one in charge.

At those moments in the kitchen, I was in full submission, a circumstance I had spent my whole life furiously fighting to avoid. Action was my anodyne, whether I was trying to keep the volatile energies generated in my childhood home from igniting into a flashover or I was getting a magazine off the ground with less time, people, or money than generally assumed to be necessary. I could suppress all reasonable needs for months at a time, driving myself into the ground so that I could drive myself toward the goal.

But in the past few years,

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