Safe From Harm

It's another dull, cloudy day and I feel like the weather is doing this on purpose, or ,,schválně", as they say here, just to dull my mind.  (As if the hormones and period pain were not doing that perfectly well already.)  No, I will not be sedated.  I will push through the threateningly tedious work that awaits me, still the anxiety that is bubbling within due to the date and fact that ex-partner decided today was a good day to get in touch, and listen to more Liz Phair if that's what it takes to get me through the day.  

I want to scream a pain-derived and gut-wrenching "f*** you!" to the forces that keep pushing me, through physical and emotional pain time and time again to the brink of my own demise and the edge of what is tolerable.  I don't understand why everything always has to be this much of a struggle.  But I'm so used to it, I almost forget that it isn't necessarily normal.  

I must try and remember the sentiment from L-Star, reminding me that in Finland this is a day for friendship.  ,,Přátelství", as we say here.  And I am grateful to those who are still out there, though distant and sometimes unavailable.  Thank you to the Faerie Godmother trainee for such delicious-looking chocolates (I haven't eaten one yet, but I know they'll be excellent) and to those who've remembered me lately.  I don't know where Madame C has got to, but I'm thinking of her.  And so too, the tea and cake friend who sent me such a lovely birthday card.  I'm missing all of them so much now.

But more mind-numbing slavery awaits today and I will have to brace myself.  Perhaps armed with a few songs to get me through.  The best one for today, in the state that I'm in, would probably have to be an old Massive Attack classic.  Just as I'm battling and thinking to myself, 'whatever happened to 'fun?', Massive Attack can sing to me, 'what happened to the niceties of my childhood days? Well I can't do nothing about that, no, no.  But if you hurt what's mine...I'll sure as hell retaliate."

God bless those people.  That was a damned good song.

La Solitude de Nos Jours

There's a quote at the beginning of a Marc Levy book, which sums up the question I keep pondering today:

"Seuls l' amour et l' amitié comblent la solitude de nos jours.  Le bonheur n'est pas le droit de chacun, c' est un combat de tous les jours.  Je crois qu' il faut savoir le vivre lorsqu' il se présente à nous."  [Orson Welles]

Roughly translated, this means: 'Only love and friendship make up for the isolation of our times.  Happiness isn't everyone's right, it's something we have to fight for every day.  I think that we have to know how to live it when it presents itself to us.'

Perhaps this refers to the need to accept that most people don't achieve happiness and if they do, it's rather fleeting.  Maybe it doesn't come on its own, but tags alongside sadness, side by side most of the time.  Afterall, don't people cry tears of joy?  Surely those tears are really the reflection of the loss that went before.  The pain that you had to endure until someone did something so kind that it was overwhelming to see how easily someone can take away that pain, that neglect, that deprivation.

Can there really be one side without the other?  I don't know if it's possible to know a true, deep sense of happiness unless it's in contrast with having known profound sorrow.  Maybe it is a result of loss and hardship that brought me to feeling both emotions simultaneously at certain moments yesterday.  Even after moments of sadness, I was amazed to find that there was some joy left over.  I was shocked that once I'd felt a tinge of sorrow, I could still be permitted to feel happy, warm, contented and safe.  

But it cannot be hung onto.  It must always live under threat of being lost or eroded or denied in the future, and that is a precarious path to have to walk.  But that's the only path there is.  Or at least, that's the only path I see ahead of me.