Limbo Land

Limbo land is no place to put down roots.  Nothing much here, nothing to interest me anyway.  Which is what makes it limbo.  But limbo is a choice as are most real estate choices.  Not all by a longshot.  But limbo?  Like suffering, it’s a choice.  In fact, it brings suffering to a whole new level of boo hoo.

As I have written many times, pain is something your body does when it wants to warn you that something may be wrong.  And sometimes it just takes off on its own little orbit and never shuts up about what’s wrong.  Even when I scream “There’s nothing I can do about it so shut up!” it doesn’t.  Shut up.  So when it happens for too many days in a row, when the weight I can’t afford to lose keeps dropping off regardless of how much fat I consume (avocados, meat, peanut butter, high fat chocolate), when I start freaking out over it making everything far worse, I see a “Welcome to Limbo” sign and regardless of what direction I go, I always wind up back at that damn sign: Welcome to Limbo.  Land of the lost.  Land of the “I really, truly, don’t know where to turn.”   Boring.  Deadly boring.

When I’m having a “good” handful of hours (not days anymore; ½ days sometimes, but mostly, five or six hours) I feel emotionally more grounded, hungrier (for food and life) and even, dare I write it, hopeful?  Not for a cure or anything as crazy as being free of pain…but hopeful that I will be able to withstand this and make it to the end without lighting the dynamite myself. 

I don’t know why that piece has me by the throat so much.  Cognitively, I see nothing wrong with someone in my situation taking the plunge.  I mean, the pain is uncontrollable, I am in tears much of the time, I drive so rarely my car battery died, I have no appetite, I can do very little without help from Pam or someone else, my eyes are going as well as my hearing so the few things that got me through the day, reading, writing, movies, is vanishing….I must have been a real badass in my former life to withstand this kind of torture (on the torturous days) or a real idiot to believe there is a beforelife, an afterlife, or anything else that isn’t actual life and can’t be proven.  Like the tooth fairy. Or “Second Life,” that online game where you become someone else.  Sigh.

And Saturday is Yom Kippur.  As I wrote in my earlier post, whether or not I make it into the Book of Life for another year will be sealed on Saturday.  It’s already been written.  But there’s time to make a plea to G-d.   I pray everyone I know and love; my nephew and nieces who are now young adults, my brother, sister, their spouses and extended families and every one of my friends have many happy, healthy years ahead.  And Oliver, of course.  Well, he’s got  nine of them but who knows which one he’s on now.

Life’s a kicker, ain’t it?  I do have happy moments…just too much time to think about questions without answers.