Parallel

It's Thanksgiving.  I am full, still digesting the news from two months ago.  I can't get pregnant.  I am absorbing the alone time silently wishing for a fast forward button to January.  My boyfriend has left for the day to spend the holiday with his family.  Our worlds have become parallel.  He is living and I am just existing in my own silent path next to him.  Exhausted, I barely can keep up.  We our worlds apart.  He has moved forward as if the last few years had never happened.  And I am still grieving.

I told him last night I had wished for 2 more months before the holidays began.  I needed time to mend my broken heart.  He is silent.  He has moved on and we no longer are walking on the same path together.  Craving the touch of his hand in mine just as he does when we cross the street.  Maybe it was the security I needed that he wasn't abandoning me, at least not this time.  He forgot to be my friend in the beginning of all this.  At times I felt like I was Sisyphus carrying the weight of our work and him up the hill only to have everything crash down on me month after month.  And now I am left with this giant stone.

I used to relish in my alone time, especially during the holidays.  Truth is, I have spent many Thanksgiving's alone.  My family of birth shattered years ago.  I had hoped to have a family to call my own.  It was the dream.  And now I feel uncomfortable in my skin trying to find a sense of gratitude for all that I have, desperately wanting to stop dwelling in all that I don't.  The picture around me is peaceful with the fur family gathered around prepared to catch my tears.  And me, I tap away on the keyboard as if to create a peaceful lullaby that will comfort me. 


And while I continue to search for words and thoughts to keep my mind from wandering to those dark places, I keep reminding myself that it can't rain forever, even though at the moment I am wishing for an ark.

20 Diseases

One of my fondest memories of childhood is playing 20 diseases in the car with my dad. It’s this game he made up for when we were on road trips. You know those god-awful trips with the entire family in which you are forced to go to a rock quarry somewhere in the middle of Oregon to look for geodes. Anyway, we had one of those super cool station wagons with the wood panels, except ours were just the doors painted to look like wood panels. It would be my two brothers and I crammed in the backseat with my folks upfront and the dog in the way back.

So the game went something like this… My dad would say I am thinking of a disease and then we would ask questions just like the game 20 questions. The person who got to 20 diseases won. So our questions would range from, “is one of the symptoms a rash?” Or “does it give you diarrhea?” Or “is it fatal?” Now this might seem like an easy game if my dad would have thought of diseases such as influenza or the common cold. But my dad is kind of a rare disease expert. So our questions would also include, “is it a kind of hemorrhagic disease?” Or “what type of contact does it spread through?” Or “is it hereditary?” We learned about all kinds of diseases; Hantavirus, Ebola, Creutzfeldt - Jakob disease. And the best part of this game, as far as he was concerned, was that no one ever got to 20. I don’t even think my brothers and I would have even known where to look to learn about diseases. We were young kids.

Typically he’d give us a few easy ones like Elephantitis or Lyme disease. Then we would spend the next few hours on the more difficult ones. My brothers and I would begin all these trips determined to win and then inevitably hate the game after losing round after round; My Dad taking bizarre pleasure in keeping us engaged and frustrated at the same time. I actually became pretty decent at this game predicting his pattern of going from dermatological disorders to diseases of the gastro-intestinal variety.

As an adult, I find that very few of my friends are interested in playing the game 20 diseases. I don’t have to miss the game though, since the game has morphed into something else. It has taken on a new premise and is usually it’s based on conversations that begin with, “I had unprotected sex with him 2 weeks ago and now I have a strange itch.” Or “there was a hard bump with a white pustule on his scrotum, what do you think it was.” Unfortunately with the adult version the only thing you typically win is a trip to Planned Parenthood and a prescription for antibiotics.