This is not PMS, it can’t be. What IS this weird sorrow that settles on my back, just below my skull and wraps its wide warm paws around my head? It comes and goes, and no way to tell which day will be the one that feels heavy, which will be the one that lightens and brightens with joy until everything is loud and snapping rainbow. Recently it seems to me that the grump bucket runneth over. I am not by nature a grumpy person, though I surely have my moments like anyone else. Yesterday, and today, if I had been a creature drawn with pencil and colored in, I would have been a familiar stuffed donkey from, what else, a book…one that brings his own raincloud with him.
Actually, this time I know what brought on the beast. Anger about something stupid and hurtful at work compounded by disappointment in a friend. First I was mad at the friend, who basically bailed on a commitment that was apparently only in my own head. I can’t blame her, exactly, since her excuses reasons are valid ones. It was more a familiar feeling of abandonment, especially with this particular friend, whom I had been so enjoying the journey back to friendship with, in the past few weeks.
I know that friendship is a two-way street. And I know that if it’s important to me, then I shouldn’t be resentful of the time, energy or effort that I put into it, regardless of the level of same from the other side. It just makes me sad, that’s all. There are so many friendships that I don’t have the time to invest in that I’d like to have, the time I’d like to set aside for and nurture and help them grow, that when one I DO have, or at least one I THOUGHT I had, turns brown around the edges and begins drooping, one that I HAVE cared for, and tried to keep going, I find it harder and harder these days to stand back objectively and try to figure out (again) how to revive it or keep it alive. Right now, I feel more like saying, “Oh well, …Next!”