A Failure to Fly

Sometimes I can perform that magic act, walk high on that high wire, see myself for a moment as the person I want to be. And I have this illusion that I'm getting better at it.

And then something happens, and I fall… Icarus flying to close to the sun, all the wax melting and dripping, and I fall hard and fast, and I forget that I could fly.

Things have been close to good lately. Really so close that I could touch them. Michael has mostly been feeling ok, and we've been working on the weight, and I've had the energy to work on getting the house organized… it's been wonderful getting the newly-repaired living room and dining room back to something civilized. Everything seemed… all right. Pretty good. Possible.

And then yesterday… Michael was ok; he said he was feeling happy. But I was low and sad; something set me off, and I would have been ok in a while, but right at that moment… not happy. But I forgot that I'm not allowed to be sad. I forgot that I'm supposed to be the cheerleader, the happy person all the time. I let myself be sad… and I let myself have a glass of wine while I was making dinner, too, and that's always and inevitably a problem, especially if things are already tense. And it all went to hell, quick and fast and hysterically, and you could just smell the wax and burning feathers.

I blame myself, although I'm certainly not the only person at fault. But I know that I need to keep these things to myself. I just couldn't manage it yesterday.

Worse, last night and today, I'm trying to cajole him into some kind of happy, and it's not working, and it's making me feel a thousand times worse. I thought that the balance had tipped for a moment, but it didn't… or something else set him off, and like the marble, I couldn't quite get escape velocity, couldn't quite get him out of the bowl. And so here we are, back in the bottom, clinking against each other, unable to get any kind of momentum up.

I can't bear it. It's stupid and foolish, but it just makes me want to crawl into a hole and die. I need to separate myself from all this, but I don't know how. I don't know how to do anything like take care of myself without doing the things that would sever the bonds entirely, things that truly would be a betrayal. There is nothing that I can do or say that would not make this worse, and trying is ripping my heart out.

And it's two days later now, and things are better on the surface, but they are really no better in reality. I am filled with despair, which sounds melodramatic and pathetic. But I can't find other words.