The Cookie Crumbles

Random.  Out of no where.  I know.  Just flow with it.  It’s just one of a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle that is hard for me to piece together right now.  But as I sit back and think, randomly I’m reminded of tidbits of conversations we had,  snap shots of memories both good and bad come into focus and the only therapy is to write it out as I make my come back to the Boo-Less Life.

He told me he spoke to his mother.  About me.  He said she said I seem lost.  But what else would I be?  I didn’t have a Plan B.  I didn’t have a back up.  No alternate plan laid out.  He was it.  Or at least that was the hope.  You don’t pack your things up and walk away from people who have been there for you your whole life with the intent of going back permanently.  You don’t ignore the warnings of those closest to you about someone not being good for you, to have to come back and say they were right.  You do it because you believe in the future of what you’re leaving for and who you’re leaving with.  You do it because you believe in love- your love.  But then it all turns to dust in your hands.  And then what?

Sure we talked about  there not being an “us” some day, in moments of frustration.   People say things they don’t mean then, right?  But up until now that’s all it  was- talk.  The reality is that the talks manifested.  And I want to say that after almost an entire month I’m not still so lost, but I am.  The sense of feeling lost results when you build a life together with someone.  Create memories with them.  Share moments and watch in irony as the things you created together while laughing are the same things that leave you crying in their absence.  When something happens that your boo would normally be the first person you call and share it with and you realize you no longer can, wouldn’t you feel lost too?  Wouldn’t you feel lost if the place you called home, you can no longer?  Some say that is just the way the cookie crumbles.  You live, you love, you lose.  But maybe I was wrong because I made him my world.  And it feels like my world- just crumbled.  Forgive me if I feel lost but I feel I lost a part of me.   It’s like my heart and humpty dumpty traded places.  If your heart was shattered in a million pieces, I’m sure you would have a hard time being put back together again too.

Of Love & Boomerangs

Honestly, I don’t really even know why those things were invented.  Like seriously what purpose do boomerangs serve.  I mean sure they can certainly keep a child occupied; pass hours of a child’s life away, tossing that bent piece of plastic or wood back and forth but even that is a detriment.  Aside from the injuries that may have been incurred as a result of them, how many children can attest to countless hours of wasted childhood on playing with a boomerang that didn’t even come back to you on its own.  How many a child was left disappointed when they learned that boomerangs only come back to you on their own in cartoons.  Oh wait, I just learned that there are boomerangs that did come back to you on their own, I must have only been exposed to the cheaper models.  So yeah, boomerangs, didn’t expect that intro of them to take me off on such a tangent but nonetheless, if boomerangs aren’t good for anything else, they are a great visual concept for this entry.  Boomerangs get their time to shine in the boo-less-life and unfortunately or fortunately so, depending on where you are standing when a boomerang of love is thrown. 

So there is a mechanism at work in boomerangs that make them come back to you.  Let’s just say that for arguments sake, no matter where you are standing when you throw one, that thing is going to come back to you.  And I am reminded of this only because isn’t that what they say in life:  that whatever you do comes back to you.  Some call it karma, others the law of reciprocity; whatever you term it, I think it’s safe to say that the universal principle is:  what goes around comes around.  And usually when it comes back around, it comes back twice as hard.

I can’t help but think that this mechanism is at work in relationships as well.  I only wonder how many people in relationships throw boomerangs of love without factoring in that it’s on its way back to them.  And by boomerangs I mean certain actions that inflict hurt upon the other individual knowingly or unknowingly.  They throw these things out to accomplish their own ends, turn around and go on about their business.  But it’s those of us who have been thrown off course by this boomerang that watch and wait for it to make its return back to the sender and hopefully knock them upside their unsuspecting heads.  It’s sometimes ones only solace; that is the notion that the estranged boo will feel what you felt when they hurt you.  Of course I expressed my challenges with this concept in Tight Roping the Thinning Line.  But there is something I did wonder and that is would it even be enough?  If you and I were to ever learn that our boo from years ago was in extreme emotional pain, the equivalent of the pain we ourselves experienced at that same boos hands, would it comfort us to know it?  Even though that pain was not felt as a result of us?  Is just the thought that your ex boo would think about the pain he/she may have caused you when their love boomerang catches up to them enough for us?  If nothing more, would it help us tread more lightly and be more delicate with the emotions and hearts of those we come to be in relationships with if we were conscious that a boomerang effect were at work?

 

Broken Hearted Deaths

I was in a meeting at work last week and someone made reference to a famous actor [whose name I would have been able to insert here had I been paying attention] dying as a result of what this woman believed to be a broken heart. Obviously the meeting had taken an unexpected turn and veered off to some unrelated tangent for her to have said that. After all I work with middle school students at present. However, after the statement was made, I completely tuned out all subsequent discussion because I knew a new blog entry had been born, namely: Can people really die of a broken heart? I have heard of people suspecting it to be the case, especially when the elderly die. Be it as a result of a loss of a child, parent or a spouse, despite what the medical research and autopsy’s offer as possible causes of death, countless people are convinced of death due to broken hearts. I have never heard of this being the case with young people though, for obvious reasons I suppose, with all the vitality and resilience young people possess, it’d be hard to imagine that one could experience so much pain in 20 years of existence that would result in a death due to broken-hearted-ness. Or could it? I understand that that same pain expounded upon after 40 and 60 years, eventually takes a toll on one heart and I could see it leading to physical death. And while there are articles out there to support this, you will never find one that references the many people who have died from a broken heart and are still alive. And that’s because they have died in a different sense of the word.

Hoping not to get off to too much of a tangent myself, I think what was said in The Secret Life of Bees, can add some clarity to the above statement. I’ll spare you the movie review but will suffice it to say that it was awesome, and there was one line in particular from the movie that really stood out to me; and it was that in life people can start out one way but after life gets through with them they come out completely different. If I could rephrase that for the purposes of this entry it would be that people [for all intents and purposes] do start out one way in life: perhaps vibrant, loving, pure, trusting, honest. Let’s just say for arguments sake their approach toward love is sincere, open hearted and genuine but after having ones heart broken, their is some type of death, and there is some type of loss of these previously existent attributes. We know this. How many people have we known who were one way before “love got through with them” and then they have been stripped of everything that made them who they were, they are unrecognizable even. Maybe not in a physical sense but in personality and character. And while this may sound extreme, in our own lives I am sure there have been accounts of even us dying as a result of a broken heart. Dying to the notion of true love maybe, deaths of trust and sincerity.

Whatever the case, If we could record it, there are more deaths from broken hearts than we know. People die everyday, yet they live on. People who are dead emotionally, walking around entering new relationships with other dead people, or even worse, those who have yet to experience death from a broken heart. Walking wounded, most completely unaware of when they even died to begin with. Heart transplant anyone?

Small Stuff, Big Sweat

Okay, so you all know that classic book Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff?   Well, clearly they eliminated an entire segment of the human population from their target audience with that one.  That segment of course being: those living the boo-less life.  When you are boo-less, nothing is small!  EVERYTHING IS BIG.  What would have otherwise been small when you were booed up, has left making mountains out of molehills your permanent dwelling place.  Guys, I almost cried because I missed the bus this morning!  Small stuff, yet I sweat it, big time.  I couldn’t figure out why though.  But something began to gel for me when I remembered that I actually put my head down and cried one day this week when I couldn’t get this macaroni salad I really wanted.  Wait, wait, wait, let me explain.  I never tried macaroni salad like this in my entire life.  This thing was amazing.  I made sure I even brought a doggy bag full of it home.  I was able to get through work that day because I just knew that when I got home, I’d eat this out of this world macaroni salad.  But of course when I get home the temperature in my refrigerator had been set too high and it was frozen!  No biggie.  I set it out on the counter so it could thaw out.  I went to check on it, a couple of minutes later only to find my sister thought it was garbage and tossed it.  BIGGIE!  I cried, and then found the culprit…..boo-less-ness.  Boo-less-ness can leave some as sensitive as a pregnant woman–everything brings you to tears.  You feel as if the world is on this mission to snatch everything you think will contribute to your happiness away from you, including a boo.  Nothing appears to be going your way. In reality when you were booed up things were probably not going the way you wanted them too either (that’s life) but your boo distracted you from that reality.  With thoughts and occurrences of this sort, it’s no wonder why the waterworks are brought on.  Boo-less-ness breeds sweating the small stuff, big time. 

But it’s beginning to dawn on me that it has nothing to do with the small stuff (missed buses, discarded meals), it has to do with the fact that your intense desire for the stuff [however big or however small it may be] was not met.  You want something but you can’t have it.  You may want a boo but don’t have one.  How frustrating.  You fix your heart and mind on something and then, you don’t get it, you can’t have it.  That’s where the big sweating comes in.  As kids it was acceptable to yell, kick, scream, cry, when you couldn’t get what you wanted.  As adults that behavior is completely unacceptable [although I know my share of adults who have not let go of juvenile expressions of feelings, neither here nor there though].  So what do we do?  We allow those “temper tantrums” to assume different forms.  Fragile emotional states mixed with stuff, yes even the small stuff, can lead to big outbursts.  Unfortunately small stuff is not so small when you’ve allowed boo-less-ness to be your magnifying glass.  Now of course this is an exaggerated portrayal of the boo-less life but, if nothing more I hope that it was an entertaining read.

Boo Bashing Binges

Today, being boo-less stunk. Just when you thought you’ve finally reached a point of contentment, something happens that makes you feel as if your heart is being dragged through your boo-less-ness tied to the back of a pickup truck doing 100 miles per hour on a road covered with daggers. Can you say…ouch?! And what could this delightful event be? None other than what I call boo bashing binges. Simply put, round table discussions with other ladies who are living the boo-less life; conversing about their boos, in particularly, how their boos did them wrong. It feels great while you’re in the midst of it. While you are sharing, reminiscing, co-signing, head-nodding, high-fiving, chatting with others about the uselessness of a boo, you think to yourself: I should do this more! why hadn’t I done this sooner? And you sit there smiling from ear to ear, laughing so hard your stomach hurts because you’re thinking boo-less-ness support groups are the best thing next to sliced bread. Reason being things tend to feel a whole lot better when you discover you aren’t out there all on your own. You have a host of other ladies living the boo-less life right along with you. But when you get home, and there is no one around, somehow you are purged from that empowered boo-less state of mind you acquired at your boo bashing binging spree. And you’re left with the stark realization that maybe you did not even intend on being boo-less. It then begins to dawn on you that maybe that boo bashing binging spree was not as good as you initially believed it to be. In fact while you hadn’t cried in a couple of days, you find yourself wiping unexpected tears from your eyes. All you did was have an innocent talk with the girls. Sure there may have been some name calling and insults along the way, but innocent nonetheless. And while they can serve as a form of honest expression, you release pent up frustration, confusion, and anger; it can also be like ripping the band-aid off of a wound and picking the scab off. You’ve left that setting, no one is around, boo-less-ness is even more apparent at this point. Thoughts of good times you had while booed up flood your mind, disappointments that boo didn’t live up to your expectations create dams to prevent the flooding. And just to think that had you been booed up and on cloud nine, you would not have even been an active participant at this session, because you would have been with your boo, gains boo bashing binges a slot in the top ten downs of being boo less.