In the beginning

"Then she looked up at me. Her voice as much peace chose resonance is her own pain she has moved through and beyond. It's in Jeremiah, she said. The potter is making a pot and it cracks. So he smashes it, and makes a new vessel. You can't make a new vessel out of a broken one. It's time to find the real you." ~ Andre Dubus, "Broken Vessels"

I was not laying on the floor as I cried, the way I'd done for days at a time in Paris. I was not on the floor as I'd been on July 20th - my baby sister's birthday & 3 days before I found out she gotten back in that same predicament, a 2nd time - when I realized, perhaps for the 1st time, that there was a life, a life that was(is) mine that could exist without him in it ... and that I'd, I'd have to live it.

No, this time, I was in my office curled up in my papasan, back in my apartment for the first time on a Monday since I'd gotten back to the States 13 days ago. I was reading Dubus' Broken Vessels, perhaps for the 4th or so time and I was crying ... for me. It was the first time, since we'd last spoken months before, that I'd cried not out of pity, or shame or confusion or anger or deep, deep mourning but because I was alive and I *knew* life would continue. I knew as well that I, too, would have to find the real me because all my attempts to make a new, better vessel out of a raggedly broken me had, now, proven to be absolute failures. And if life was to go on, as it surely would, there was nothing else to be done but start again.

So in the middle of my tears, jagged gasps for breath and sobs there were so loud that I was scared of hearing myself (just as I had been 2 weeks ago) - I picked up my pen.