Let go for just a moment, Princess.
I think somehow I felt like Ben leaving his favorite guitar here at home was collateral so that he would have to come back. I spent a lot of his time away wondering if I would see him again, feeling like I had been left behind and generally just wholly unprepared for how rocked I would be in his absence.
He has gone away before. Dozens of times over the years. In previous lives we would pick a fight, he would go on tour and I would point out repeatedly in messages and calls that I hardly noticed he wasn't present and I would see him when I saw him. In turn he would point out how peaceful and fun the chaos, noise and misery of the road was compared to my house. We both knew better, it was just fun to throw barbs and pretend they didn't hit their targets.
Of course, now everything is at stake and trips have taken on an albatross-shaped shadow that sometimes blocks the sun and sometimes it just forces shade. I can still see, but it's softened light and it isn't quite right.
The guitar goes back with him early this week and we have no return date this time, both points that leave me completely cold and freaked out and wanting to do the velcro-monkey all over Ben. I want him to brush his hand down my hair and hold my head against his chest so I can quiet to his heartbeat. So I can feel safe. Once he leaves that goes out the window like a mended bird, never to be seen again.
I want to be a raving lunatic. I've shed enough tears in the past two weeks to commission the building of an ark. I've pointed out a hundred times that this is too hard and I can't do it and I've talked and breathed my way out of five good panic attacks because that was the only choice I had. Sink or swim. Get a grip or slide right off the edge. Buck up and deal with it or risk the permanent label of catastrophizing everything, every time. Never getting better. Backsliding over what will be small potatoes someday.
Yeah, well, sometimes those small potatoes aren't so small. They block the view. They block progress.
So for one solid minute, this afternoon in the midst of the final major renovation project in the house I took my lunatic moment. I lost my mind. I stomped and screamed and yelled and took all my frustrations out on a cardboard box in the basement. I tore it to pieces and kicked it and freaked the fuck out.
Completely. You would have been surprised. I'm a quiet worrier, I cry, I get frustrated. I become silent. Paralyzed. I very rarely explode and when I do I might yell for a minute or talk back. I'm buttoned-up.
Ben just stood there. I don't think he knew what to do. He didn't know what to say so he just turned around and went back upstairs to keep working while I finished tearing up the box three floors below. Then I came upstairs, passed him the tools he needed and we carried along as before.
Later tonight after dinner, Ben said he thought I really needed that and he was glad for it. I'm still humiliated and embarrassed that I flipped like that but he assures me I've been bottling things up and should yell more and cry less, that it would be easier for everyone. Healthier too.
Maybe he was just relieved I didn't go after the guitar.
(For the record, I would never destroy his belongings. I wasn't mad at Ben. I was mad at the circumstances, and they're not his fault.)
Not sure what I'm going to do for my next trick. It will probably involve more quiet plastering though. That seems to be January's theme, and how I've kept all this rampant frustration in check for so long thus far.
