Well dear friends, as some of you already know, yet another chapter in my life has come to an end. I am thinking of calling this one either "don't get your hopes up," or "all good things must come to an end." Or maybe "you'd think I would have learned these things already by now." I don't know, I will decide later. In this chapter, we met the distracting and endearing boy, had some incredible, memorable stories happen in the middle, but in the end, well, it ended. I imagine (and sometimes my imagination is not very centered in reality, but hey) that you might have a couple of questions come to mind, and here are the answers, sparing a few unimportant details and language I am sure you wouldn't imagine I would ever use.
How am I doing? Well, it's hard to say with the very small amounts of sleep I've had for several days, since everything seems so much more dramatic than it really is when sleep deprivation is involved. Let's just say that at any moment I may be feeling any one of the following emotions: sadness, failure, anger, loneliness, emptiness, numbness, or anger. Basically I think I use all but the four of those to block out the other two. Aside from those emotions, I may be experiencing any of the following sensations: heartache, heartbreak, or more accurately, like someone is squeezing their fist around my heart just as hard as they possibly can. (I admit that these feelings are compounded because I experienced it all not so long ago.) But the worst, and not new or unfamiliar, sensation of them all is what I have decided to call "the lost arm syndrome." I feel so off balance. This is where my thoughts go around in a circle, like this
"What should I do with my new found free time? Nothing I can think of sounds like fun to do by myself, so I'll just do something with my hands to distract myself."
So I do something for work, or practice, or color, and start thinking about other things. Eventually I'll come to a thought and think
"Oh, I should tell him. . . oh. . . nevermind. I should do something to distract myself from not having him to tell. Wait, I don't want to do that by myself. . ."
And it starts over and goes on.
Aside from these feelings and sensations, I may be asking myself any of the following questions (which are the sorts of thoughts that get my into the lost arm syndrome, but anyway): "What now?" "What am I doing wrong?" "Why did this even happen in the first place?" "Why didn't I learn the first time?" But the one that weights most heavily on my mind is "How will I ever find someone, something, as good as what was just taken away?" Seriously, my logic and my feelings tell me we were great together. We balanced each other well, we communicated well, and we had ridiculous amounts of fun. So. . . What happened? I will tell you.
From the beginning I was impressed by the distracting and endearing boy, and the more I got to know him, the more I grew to admire him. So naturally, I wanted to know if it was Heavenly Father's will for us to be together, so I started asking (though if I was being honest with myself, which is, after all, really the point of this post, sometimes I asked and then admitted I was afraid to know the answer). I would go between feeling unsure whether it was right or not, feeling quite good about it, and letting my fears of it not working out take over all my thoughts. So I became confused. (Oh, from what I understand, this journey is more or less the same one the distracting and endearing boy experienced, but I digress.) Sometimes I couldn't tell if what I was feeling was a fear, (from Satan) or a prompting (from God). Eventually the distracting and endearing boy and I discussed our feelings and began to search and ask together. A line from one of my very favorite songs comes to mind to describe what happened next- "Don't people hold tighter when love starts slipping away?" I don't mean to claim that we were in love like in a fairytale (which is a tender mercy), but we did care about each other's feelings, hopes, and desires. It started becoming more and more clear what was fear and what was right, but I wasn't liking the answer that was taking shape, and I guess the boy didn't either, so we kept asking and fighting the answer that was forming in our minds and hearts (for all the ways in which we are opposite, our tendency to "fight" is one thing we have in common). But since we both want to do what's right more than anything, we had to admit to ourselves that it was not right. The thing that was confusing us was that we were fighting that fact that deep down we knew. So that's how it ended- in a rough night of honesty with ourselves as individuals and as two involved people, torn up knowing the hurt doing the right thing would cause, but still knowing that doing our Father's will was more important than anything else. I, for one, don't think I will make sense of the whole thing, but I suppose that in this instance, and all others for that matter, it is faith that matters most, not sense. And though I don't see how things will ever work out at the present time, I know that as long as I'm faithful I will be happy and blessed.
