By all rights, it should have been a good weekend. We both had July 4th off, and spent the day messing around with various flow toys in the backyard. There were fireworks, and burgers, and sunshine. We had easy shifts on Friday; he worked a half-day on Saturday, and I did a half-day on Sunday.
However, I couldn’t hide the fact I was having a really bad time of things. He can tell, and he’s gotten very good at noticing when the things in my head are getting the best of me. In most cases, I can’t put my finger on exactly what’s going on. Between Saturday’s heat and humidity and the never-ending inner monologue poking me in all the most painful places, I felt like I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I finally admitted how bad I was on Sunday evening, but still couldn’t come up with a concrete reason for the way I felt.
This morning, it hit me.
I think the thing that set it off was last week, at work, when I asked a patient for their birthday and it was the same as our anniversary. From there, I thought about how it’s coming up next month… Do we forget about it? Should we even acknowledge it? How can we celebrate something that was supposed to be so good that ended up in this place? Sometimes I feel like I put in so much effort, through everything, to make things work. There were so many times when things were bad, I did whatever I could to help him when I felt like he needed my support, just to feel like I fucked up by doing so.
Like the lines in that Halsey song,
And then I got you off your knees,
Halsey, Without Me
Put you right back on your feet,
Just so you can take advantage of me
I told him what was happening, inside, this morning.. I didn’t ask for an explanation; I honestly don’t know if he has one, nor do I know if my theories would come close to the truth if he did have an explanation to give me. He did the only thing he can, and apologized. That’s all I can ever expect.
