A weekly recurring loss. For twenty years. A vacancy repeated without respite. Now, and for the last five years, every seven days the feeling returns. It occurs in such a way that I am inclined to want to go to that space whenever I have a moment to myself. The alternative is submersion into work of fun. Some kind of absent therapy design to disguise my loss as some kind of ghost. A ghost that can’t exist because ghosts aren’t real. Yet every week I go back to the same place. Mentally I know there is an answer, but physically I cannot manifest it. No amount of self-knowledge can break the routine. Awareness is only good for preventing the unthinkable and it does a fine job of that. It’s like the record is scratched, always jumping back to the point from which it began. Sunday into Monday. Find some music. Feel it. Go there. Come back.
Moreover, my want to return to this place has to be rooted in the common thought process that is, feeling the loss is grieving the loss and through grief comes closure. The problem here is that because the loss is recurring, there is no time to grieve it and therefore no time to move through it and beyond it. It has persistently stood in the way of me getting anything done outside of employment and that is only true because I have for twenty years equated employment to success in dealing with this absence. It’s a cycle. A circular cycle that feels like a tornado at times and a toilet bowl at others. The speed of the cyclone is irrelevant to the damage. Onward. Forward. Smile. Everything is fine.