It’s been raining non-stop for 5 days now.
Streets are flooded. Power is going out. Trees are down. Fire alarms are going off. I kind of like it. Californians stop for weather like this. When water falls in a somewhat copious amount from the sky, we revel in the rarity of it. Like eating dessert before dinner.
Washington won’t be like this. No one will even bat an eye.
We move in 18 days.
While work is supposed to be wrapping up, it is actually picking up with the start of a new semester, and so instead of winding down I find myself waking up at 3am remembering tasks I’ve forgotten to complete. My brain stays jammed with emails and requests, room numbers, presenter names, lab schedules…
Many here are trying to convince me to stay. While I want to spend time with the ones I love, it’s becoming increasingly harder when my heartstrings are tugged with their requests that mimic a much softer voice of my own.
Moving.
That single word can’t even begin to encompass what this really means — for all of us.
My brain is shattered into a million sparkling raindrops.
Screw those transitions I learned in English class. I can’t think of a segue.
Today I was officially and formally diagnosed with the nerve disease CRPS by a specialist at Stanford Medical Center. When all the evaluating and testing was over, the diagnosis made, I waited for the relief that I’d been expecting to feel when I got my official answer after all the suspicions, the time invested, the energy spent. But instead I found myself staring out the window all the way home, without much in my head at all. The strange feeling lasted for quite a while after returning home too..along with a strange urge to laugh uncontrollably and cry at the same time. This wasn’t a part of my plan…this wasn’t on the list. But I expected it, so why does having it in writing change a thing?
Maybe I am going batty after all.
It’s been about 14 hours now, and I still can’t fit the pieces together in a way that will let me sleep.
I feel like my plague leg – oddly desensitized, but highly sensitive at the same time. Like now – I don’t even know what I want to write, or why I’m writing this..because I really don’t have much to say. I thought I could turn my preoccupation into a blog post, but instead, I find myself freewriting in a pin-ball style that seems juvenile and scatterbrained. And I know it.
It’s not curable, but treatments are available to me, though none of them seem easy and some seem plain barbaric. All I can think of is if we have enough boxes for packing, and what I’ll find underneath my bed when I clean it out.
So much is happening. So much is falling from the sky at once, collecting in sloshing pools around my heart and sinking me into the wet soil. But then I take a moment and put my life in perspective, and I know that I have it better than probably most people on the planet. Am I so ungrateful? Am I so self-centered that I can be sad? Can I honestly not let go and trust that God’s master plan is still at work here, despite my own misgivings? I don’t know how to feel about myself…I feel uncomfortable in my own conglomerative skin. I feel like a patchwork quilt made up of the skin of a hundred different people, with a hundred different personalities. How can I get to know them all?
Why is life like that? Does it always have to be either a drought or a flood? Ask me tomorrow. Maybe I could tell you then.
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