It’s winter and I can feel the vibration of the darkness welling up inside me. Every raw nerve is sitting so close to the surface I think I can see each and every one. This feeling is a pretty good indicator that I am feeling the hurt that the cold causes. It feels like a like a wet blanket of heavy feeling that is so strong, everything gets to me. This is how I can measure my emotional state. Sounds ridiculous when I run this through my head in the silence of this room and the monologue of my mind. Instead I hear this… “Elizabeth, pull yourself up by your GD bootstraps and move along!!” “Who’s there?”, I ask. “You know who! Your entire lineage is here moving your ass along, everyday. Now move it!!”

I went to Walgreen’s this morning. I needed to get my picture taken for my expired passport to get it updated. The guy was nice enough but I loathe having what feels like my second grade picture taken. I am told to take off my black cape thing and sit up straight and don’t smile. The back drop is pure white and I am not tan and I have wild hair today, and I am just not feeling it. I get the picture and I want to bawl. UGH!! I look at my passport pic from 10 years ago and I freak out for a second. Ten Years is all of the sudden an entire lifetime. In ten years mountains have formed, people have died, kids have graduated and moved on, babies have been born, kids moved out, more people died, disease and grossness moved in. Life moved on so fast that I didn’t even notice eye bags and big WTF wrinkle between my eyes. I earned each one. I don’t know why I felt so vulnerable in front of the white screen. My mind wandered off like usual and I could picture the Heavenly inquisition. “So, Elizabeth, What did you do on October 12, 1987 for the good of your fellow man?”

I am older than I was. I am more skeptical of people. I am more reclusive than I have ever been. I am struggling because as I walked from the check out at Walgreen’s to the car I dropped the little envelope with the picture. I got to work and searched my car, searched the sacks and I got so upset because it wasn’t there. I drove back to Walgreen’s and Reggie hadn’t seen a thing……I walked out the front door and looked in the trash can and there sat the reminder of my 10 years of life laying discarded on the heap of old pop bottles, cigarette butts and chip bags. I thought about the irony of that….trash. 10 years of life to me was but another’s trash. Isn’t that what life is in part? Really. It’s OK! One man’s junk is another man’s treasure. One man’s memories are another’s trash. What matters to me is truly nothing to someone else. Would they look at that picture and think, “I wonder who is missing this picture?” no, because they couldn’t walk the three steps in the door to report it. Or maybe they might look and think “Holy cow, look how rough that old gal looks in her school picture!” Nope. They had ripped it open, glanced at it and tossed it in the trash. The darkness of this time of year is weighing on me. This stupid picture and some trash made me cry like a little girl. I feel so stupid even writing about it, but you notice that it didn’t stop me!

I think where I am going with this is I would like people to be more compassionate. How hard is it to return something someone dropped to the customer service desk. That would have been so much more painless than digging in the trash can. Maybe I am just so raw right now that everything might make me react like this? Maybe I just need to go to bed early, turn on the bed heater and remember that 10 years ago I didn’t have one of those amazing warm makers!!

Whatever it is….I am going to hang on to the 10 years of life I reminisced about and if I find something of someone’s I will walk it back inside. That’s were I am going….back inside.

Until then…thanks for listening. This is dumb.

e