Down the Rabbit Hole

Slippage

I've been sick for days. I've been afraid to write, afraid of what ugly truth might come out that I'm ready to face yet. Its been a disasterous week, mostly emotionally. That always creates both necessary and dangerous conditions for me to write under. Despite the stack of makeup work in front of me, my head feels cloudy and fuzzy and my heart is heavy. Until I unburden myself even a little bit, I won't be able to focus. I'm trying to keep my head above water but less than three months before my wedding, everything feels like its unraveling.
The company I work for has just lost a major vendor. That loss has created a vaccuum which threatens to drive our numbers to the ground and cripple us with liabilities. We are facing layoffs and severe cutbacks just to stay alive in a time when we should have been recovering and growing. I'm doing all I can to make my deals stick and continue to bring in revenue that flows right back out the door. I don't know how much longer it can sustain itself, the latest crop of incoming news brings with it more challenges. My sister's little dog is dying. She's a wreck. She loves that animal like a child and I don't know how to being to console her if York dies. My brother is making a last ditch effort to join the military and fix his life. I have a feeling he will not be accepted and I fear what that final rejection will do to him. He sounds desparate and empty on the phone...and all I have in my heart is fear. My friend just got laid off from her new job and it seems mostly everyone is struggling in some way. Its becoming harder and harder to have faith and hope deserts me when I need it most. I feel as hopeless as I've ever felt, as alone as I have ever been. All I do is fight with him too, nothing that comes out of me is right and attempts to make things better, to feel something like comfort just come up empty. He says that my stressing out about things will be what drives us apart. I try so hard to keep my worries inside and not talk about them, not stress about them but I feel alone, like an island. Yesterday I went into the biggest store I could find and just wandered, craving the vastness of it...getting lost for even a few moments among strangers. Last night I just watched him sleeping and though back to the times before, when we were first dating, who I was, who he was back then. Sometimes, I think we are two completely different people. There seems sometimes no way to reach him, that we don't reach for each other anymore. The morning comes and the fight has dissipated but the void is still there. Faith is the thing that you follow through doorways only to discover that the rooms are empty. I'm so tired of empty rooms of feeling those familiar swells of hopelessness on the wake of good weeks of sunshine and happiness. Love only even counts when it carries you through those low times. I'm so terrified his love will abandon me when I need it most.
I'm not afraid of being alone. I know how to leave someone I'm in love with. I know how to look at rooms and cover one eye so you don't see his chair or his framed picture in that view. I know how to give up on dreams and cancel your expectations. I know how to survive that loss. Slippage. It happens little by little, a spot of pain here and one there, a hard word you carry with you, falling asleep before you've made each other's hearts healed again...before you know it, and if you are not careful, its gone. The face you see in front of you is just the one you hold in your memory.