In which our heroine carries a metaphor much too far.

I have cried every day for more than a week. My near and dears are rolling their eyes, because this is hardly stop-the-presses stuff, but I have to say that even I am tired of it. In Peter Pan, Peter explains to Wendy that the reason Tinkerbell is so mercurial is that her body is simply too small for more than one feeling at a time. That is how I feel about my own self right now; my emotions seem so big that they overwhelm me, and they have go somewhere - in this case being right out my tearducts. I have wept from sorrow and grief, from frustration and anger, from exhaustion, from loneliness, from jealousy, from longing, from happiness, from fear and self-doubt, from the desire to not cry, and last night, along with so many, from relief and euphoria. I wish I could say that I was done with crying, that I have gotten all the crying out of my system, and we can return now to your regularly scheduled piss and vinegar, but lately the loneliness and longing have been particularly acute. Tonight I have to say goodbye - yet again - and I am already misty. I am so very, very tired of goodbyes.

I feel sometimes that there are fragments of my heart in pockets and purses all across the world. Every time I have to say goodbye, another little splinter chips off and falls into the corners of somebody's metaphorical messenger bag. Some people I know have a whole handful of the glittering flakes of me. There are even a couple of larger pieces out there, prisms, really, that refract rainbows when you hold them to the sun. Occasionally when I think of all the pieces of me that have been passed into other hands over the years, I start to wonder if there's anything left. Certainly it feels like there is an emptiness in my chest.




The thing I need to remember is that I have my own collection of trinkets and sparkles that have been handed to me. I should keep them in my chest instead of in my head, and the hollow won't feel so big.