Sometimes I think that while I sleep, night seeps in around my edges, looking for a crack, any flaw or opening, a way inside. When I wake up I am filled with dark, with black, and I cannot see and I can't feel anything good and it hurts like hell and it takes forever to get rid of. I even tried to let a little of it out with a dull knife on a scarred thigh and I set myself back a good twenty months progress-wise but I was at the end of my wits, if I ever had any left at all, and I didn't dare call anyone for help nor would I let on that anything was wrong while Ben was still home this morning.
It wasn't until Loch phoned to tell me he had made a new template for this page and I just asked him to leave it like it was before and he asked what was wrong and I didn't know. I never know, I never have words that come out loud to tell anyone what it is. I just know that it was a black homesickness, a feeling I wish would stay away. I'd like to get better but then it comes to remind me I never will and then the hopelessness gives the black more weight and Bridget suffocates underneath it.
Loch was adamant that I share this feeling and get some help and he's pretty much been after me all day now as I flutter around the house with no words coming, the silence taunting me like a ghost.
Of course it's a ghost. It is two.
I could rest in the cold snow at the foot of the bench all afternoon, sitting on my knees, legs long asleep in the freezing wind, clutching the tiny copper box with the enamel bluebird painted on the lid in my frozen bleeding fingers wondering how they fit a man as big as Jacob into something so small but eventually someone that Loch called makes me come home and then they sit and stare at me and wonder how one little human could go so left of center and how in the hell do we bring her back and keep her here? Gosh, she doesn't weigh much, she's pretty complacent when it comes to direction, why in the hell is this happening?
It's the dark. It covers everything and I can't hide from it.
I can keep it from finding Ben, that's pretty much all I can do some days. He has his own things to deal with, I have always kept him from this.
It took forty-three minutes to pry that precious little box out of my frostbitten hands. Whoever said I wasn't strong should have really been here this afternoon.
