This holiday weekend finds me nursing a torrid cold with congestion. As a result of emptying my nasal passage of snot and mucus, noticed that I had rubbed my nose into a “raw” condition. Likewise, learned this week that my nose was not the only thing that I had symbolically rubbed into “rawness.”
Numbed and stricken with grief, I am also weeping uncontrollably over a treasured and trusted friendship that I probably damn “rubbed,” or more aptly, grenade into extinction, too.
Dazed by medicinal solutions and treatments, couldn’t find in either medicine cabinet a cure for a shattered heart. Dejected and depressed for days, watched salty tears slowly dripped and dropped from the crevices of my tear ducts like an onerous leaky faucet.
Heck, the flood of tears eventually battled my nose for its own box of Kleenexes!
Anyways…
Sitting here in limbo with symptoms of bronchitis enabled me to deduce that the declassification of my suppressed emotions had potently suffocated a spirited relationship and bond with my (BFF) Wesley that I had assumed would last infinitely. Unknowingly, had catapulted a two-decade acquaintance into pneumonic stratosphere.
Profoundly, regret the errors of my ways!
The deafening silence of telephone calls from my once devoted and loyal friend and the growing innumerable non-answered texts quickly made me realize that one’s “dark side can hurt the very person you love.”
In other words, my insatiable “neediness” contaminated our relationship as I had forgotten and overlooked that in his own personal and professional life cycle he was also compounded, overpowered, and overcome with familial and livelihood issues that jockeyed for his attention, as well. Wrongly concluded that my sense of inadequacy and my constant need for appreciation and attention would not be too overwhelming for him!
Erroneously calculated that his herculean shoulders, and quick brilliant mind, plus his effervescent personality was unflappable and was immune to Andrea’s relational termites! Also, deep down and within my child-like heart had sorely depended upon the security of Wesley’s presence to fulfill the void created by my father’s death and the lowliness I felt resulting from battling my husband’s on-going illness, singlehandedly.
Ugh!
Sitting here in limbo made me reminiscence about another woman who also had to summon incredible strength while being bombarded with insurmountable life events she inherited while simultaneously suffering a deficiency within the “neediness” department.
Once a raving beauty, this woman fell in love with a dashing young man who had lived up the country road. Fast forwarding the story, this couple eventually married and soon babies began to sprout like weeds.
Tragically, my grandfather was killed thus he left my widowed grandmother with four boys and one profoundly disabled girl. Undaunted, this twenty-something widow used her imagination to ilk a living as a farmer.
As any farmer will tell you, this sun-up to sun-down grunt work eventually takes its toll on anyone—man and woman, alike.
Abandoned, you can imagine my grandmother was painfully missing the daily strokes of appreciation, affection, terms of endearments, and the romantic mischievousness emanating from the lips and arms of an attentive man!
So, sitting there in limbo, my God-fearing grandmother soon succumbed to the desires of her heart!
Bet he had some irresistible eyes which twinkled similarly to my soul mate’s eyes!
(Laugh out loud)
Meanwhile, another Greek tragedy…
I am told that her “soul mate” was an unhappily married man who cared for his sickly wife. However, in spite of his undying and professed love for my grandmother, he strongly felt that his “principles” and society’s social mores would not bode well on their reputations if he would divorce his wife and then marry my grandmother who by now was pregnant with his love-child and only heir!
Anyways…
Wesley’s absence from my daily life has taught me that as I prepare to be alone, I need to be extremely careful in the “vulnerability” department and that I need to find other ways to nurture my self-worth and value. Bottom-line, I need to refrain from internalizing inadequacies, too.
Or, like my granny, I will be “sitting here in limbo!”
