After Happily Ever After

I often think of the future with fear, rarely with hope.

Well, there's an intro for you. Good job, Lainey. Way to set the mood. 

No, I'm not sad. In fact, it's the exact opposite. I'm happy. No, really. I've never been this happy before. (Remember that as you continue to read the rest of this.)

I wake up every morning and my mind automatically thinks, I could die today. I don't know how, maybe it's a car accident, or some crazy gunman, or plain stupidity on my part, but there exists a possibility of death.

Then I pause and tell myself, Even more reason to enjoy today. To stop and look around and say "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is." 

So that's what I try do. I notice things I probably would have taken for granted: How Abby climbs into bed every morning for her morning pat. The way Max, giddy with excitement, leaps into the air every time I come home, before contorting into a head-down-butt-up position that could tear his spine's disc one day. That quick text message reply from kind friends who seem to think I'm interesting. And of course, Paul. 

I try not to gush, but I fail spectacularly. Even just saying his name, I perk right up. 

I'm a fool to have allowed myself to do it, but it is what it is.  The man is the center to my life's compass. The past fifteen years, I keep thinking it can't better and it does. I'm deeply loved by a good man who can somehow keep up with my manic, inexhaustible mind.

And me?

Well, that's the problem. I'm the idiot that stabbed herself with cupid's arrow. It's beyond love, really. Love, the word itself, seems unable to fit all of what I feel for the man. The four letters seem too puny. I don't trust its architecture to competently hold this precious cargo. 

And that's why I'm scared.  Scared spit-less of what it's going to feel like when he's ripped from my life. I'm so, so high from joy that the fall to despair is going to take a very,very long time. 

It's better to have loved and lost, than not to have loved at all.

I used to think those who never loved meant they were protected from pain. But I guess, there is pain in regret. Maybe that's the worst pain of all. But then, again, maybe not. If a curtain was pulled back from your life, and behind it was bright happiness, the kind you could never have imagined possible, would it hurt more to have the curtain suddenly close on you? Or would it have been better not to know that it existed at all?

The pain is relative, I suppose. We seem to think pain only has one currency, but who said that? Of course there's some kind of emotional exchange rate to suffering. Grief for a parent would be different from grief of a love lost, I would think.  

I know how fragile life is. There are no guarantees we will have another twenty years together. The world's violence, like zits on a teenager's face, keep bursting and suppurating hate without warning. And the bloody aftermaths after, all of those lost lives: the young, the old, the blameless- further mars the face of a planet already scarred with war. 

How we're not all on Prozac, I don't know.  

I see their pictures, the victims now gone. I can see myself in some of these women. I think of that wife who had no idea she would never have the twenty years she thought to celebrate with her husband. She probably was on her way home, maybe she thought to get one more errand done before she called it a day. She had no idea that it would forever stay undone on her to-do list for eternity. 

I prepare myself for a future of pain because I know I am not strong enough to endure it right now. I have the option of being weak. There will come a time where I have no other option but to stand and keep standing. To wake up at dawn, and still think,  If this isn't nice then I don't know what is.