It’s been since October 30 since I wrote here.

I went to bed that night on the eve of Halloween thinking that my life would contnue on as it always had, that nothing would change.

By noon on October 31, I was barely upright. I recall walking the streets of Center City. I recall weeping openly. I recall being so disturbing to the jaded citizens of my city that about a dozen or so people stopped to try to assist me. I recall not being able to talk.

I looked at my phone and fought to dial numbers known to me. I struggled to reach out to the people I thought I could trust.

In all honesty, I lost my ability to trust in anything that morning. The world as I’d known it for 41 years was some alien place that no longer existed for me. As person after person failed to pick up the phone I thought of Bonnie. I thought of my mother and how I had to get home to her.
I walked more, in circles it seemed. As I got closer to the subway entrances, so close I could hear the trains in the distance I knew I would die if I descended those steps.

I didn’t fear death though because I was living through something far worse.

The specific details of the events of October 31, I will not share tonight. Tonight is about muscle memory and returning to form.

Tonight is about reclaiming this one more part of me, from the world and the people who took my family, my faith, my balance, my sanity, and my hope from me.
Tonight is about being me.

By Saturday afternoon, November 1 the facade was gone and the mask I wore for Bonnie no longer held. I just barely managed to set her off to safety. Barely.

I did get her to safetey though. That means something.

By Saturday night I was in the hospital in 4 point restraints vomiting the countless pills I’d swallowed and cursing myself for not having either a gun or a stronger front door.

I attempted suicide.

By Sunday morning I was in an inpatient mental health facility. By Sunday night I was trying to calculate the hours I’d been in knowing the law would prevent them from keeping me longer than 72 hours. They would be forced to let me go and I could finish what I started.

Monday night in a dream my Clyde spoke to me. Tuesday morning I was willing to stay, because it was the one place that it felt I could be with my child who had for the second time now saved the life of his mother.

It is quiet in this house tonight. It’s never quiet here. In the deafening silence I type, understanding how far a road this is to travel.
I have to navigate it alone,that is not at all unusual. What is unusual is that I’ve yet to find a way to bring those I love with me.

I’ve been gifted with love.

I find these days it is hard to accept that gift.

2014 gave me just about everything that was ‘missing’ from my life and then kicked me out of that life and forced me to watch it from the outside.

I look at emails I cannot figure out how to form a response.
I get text messages that might as well be written in Aramaic their language is so foreign.
I woke up November 1 to something that was beyond my heart’s ability to understand and it stopped beating. It pumped blood through my veins, delivered oxygen to my lungs, yet like me it was just going through the motions ….. muscle memory.

I don’t know who I am today.

I thought that I knew. I thought I was living out a designed path that would lead me to happiness.

There is no asphalt in front of me now on this road…. just darkness. Every minute I don’t return to that place of November 1 is a victory but there is no celebration in my molecules. There is grief. There is pain. Those familiar emotions returning front and center mocking me for daring to dream.

Dragging me back to a period BC – before Clyde – and all that came with who this girl was then.

The truth is that this will end. What does not kill us makes us stronger the saying goes. I am Adamantium.

I am also as fragile and unprotected and ill prepared as that 7lb 14oz curly haired human being they placed into my arms 14 years ago and said he is yours.

I have the vizionz expansions on hold. I have so little energy these days that life support gets it all. The Enterprise cant even manage a ercentage of impulse power most days.

BUT

the fact that I can type this means the warp core will be restored…..eventually. One day.

In the meantime

this is where I insert some thoughtful phrase or inspirational quote but I got nothing right now

Aphrodite Brown