for good.

As I walked to the bus coming home from work, six o’clock chimed from some distant building. I imagined that it would transport me to another time, like they do in the movies. I closed my eyes and prayed. When I opened them, there I was, standing on the sidewalk on the way to the bus.

For one of the first time, I am openly saying it: I am sad. I am stuck. There is no reason for this sadness, but here it is. I am pushing through, forcing myself to do things like eat and work and write. I’m trying not to be rude or closed off. I’m not sure how I’m doing.

Everyone tells me to trust Jesus. Rest in Jesus. I’m certainly trying, but it’s hard to see the big picture when there is a tightness in my chest that makes breathing and moving feel like great efforts.

Clear your mind then. But meditation, I find, is particularly difficult for a writer. I am constantly writing in my head, even when a lot of it never sees paper.

I recently watched an episode of Boy Meets World where Cory and Eric are arguing and questioning their relationship as brothers. Their mother tells them that everything works out for good. “Do you really believe that?” Cory asks. “Yes, I do.”

I don’t want to be a statistic, but statistics say that the holidays are when people can be the most depressed. Honestly, I haven’t even thought about the holidays because they seem a bit unreal this year. The past two years, I’ve spent the holidays mourning—wondering why they didn’t look the same as they had the rest of my life, wondering why Derek wasn’t there. This year, I look back to last, my first in Washington, my first away from family, yet spent with really good friends. The forecast this year calls for the same. Only I feel like I should grieve less being another year removed form Derek.

I’ve been looking at pictures of him. It just doesn’t seem real. I am questioning everything I ever knew. Or though I knew. How does my life keep going yet his does not?

I’m not sure yet if my personality is a blessing or a curse. It sure seems to be a bit of both because I don’t think I could ever truly be depressed like the people on the Zoloft commercials. I have that type-A personality that says you must get shit done no matter how shitty you feel. So I do. (Hence the eating and working and writing.) So my personality is a blessing because I still have my job and my health, but it is a curse because maintaining those things feels like I am Atlas only without about as much muscle strength as a praying mantis. I don’t know if you know this, but bugs squash pretty easily.

Right after Derek died, I didn’t quit all of the things I wanted to. Of course, I can’t credit any of that semester to myself—a select few really strong people carried me along. Looking back now, I can hardly remember a lot of the details; all I know is that I somehow made it through, as if there was a wall of Saran Wrap somewhere between then and now, and I’ve broken that barrier. I think sometimes, the pieces still stick to my skin and my face and try to suffocate me, but I know I can break them again. It’s just that when it’s covering your eyes and your nose and your mouth and you can’t breathe, and you can’t think straight, it feels like it must go on forever, and there’s no way to get rid of it.

I wonder if I’ll look back on this span and forget the details but just be glad to have made it through. I wonder if I tend to imagine my whole life like that—one big box of Saran Wrap unfolding.

I think about that when I see really happy people. How are they so happy? Why aren’t I so happy? I take happiness for granted because, let’s be honest, I am happy a lot; I just think too much and trip myself, thinking that I only deserve some thin version of cellophane.

The other day, I wrote about seeing Mount Rainier at sunrise. The next day, Pickle and I were out even earlier. I looked out to where the mountain usually is and saw only darkness. But a few moments later, I looked to that same spot and saw the silhouette of a mountain with a soft glow behind it, barely discerning its wavy peaks from the disintegrating dark. I thought about how soon that soft glow would be a full day’s light. I thought about how it hadn’t reached us yet, but to my folks back in PA, the morning was mature: how maybe it was cloudy there, and they couldn’t even see the sun, how maybe people in the Midwest were still enjoying a bright colorful sky that was coming my way. I was suddenly reminded of the curve of the earth and fell into a short period of what I can only call an existential crisis.

I tried to move on with the day. A normal Sunday: go to band, go to church, go to lunch. I couldn’t do it. As I showered, I just kept thinking about that curve—how did I get so small? This big chunk of ground is spinning so slow that I can’t tell and that it takes twenty-four hours to turn around once, yet so fast that I can’t tell and that my feet stay fully grounded. But I barely stand an awkward five feet, nine inches tall against the great heights and depths here. I couldn’t even be seen from an airplane.

I sat down in the shower. I turned the water on extra hot and sat down, letting my skin turn pink in the spots that hit. Pickle stuck her head past the shower curtain and licked my hand. She flinched as the water hit the curtain, thinking it was getting her. Ears back and sad eyes on, she understood—it’s all too big to grasp.

This is actually really embarrassing to write about because I mean, how often do you think about the curve of the earth? How small you are? How temporary this all is?

So here I am, trying just to fathom the fact that I exist somehow and for some reason and that God has some plan to make my atoms click into a smiling young woman and actually mean that smile and recognize that our hope lies, not in this spinning ball.

I imagine the globe is a basketball. When you learn to spin a basketball on one finger, you drop it a lot. You learn to control it, though—how to balance just right to keep it spinning until it loses momentum. I picture God spinning it on one finger. A quick flick of his wrist and it’s off, going going, but when it falls because the ball has stopped, that’s the end. Your life is the length of one balance of a spinning basketball on God’s fingertip.

What hope is there in that? The uncertainty of the length of time; the nauseous churn around and around. No, the hope is that someone has got it in control. And us? We’re just little mites holding on with all we’ve got and trusting that someone knows when it will stop and how it will stop and what it will feel like and who we’ll see when we’re no longer surrounded by everything we thought we knew.

Maybe the six o’clock chime didn’t take me somewhere else but right back to some sanity—the realization that I can’t fool time or place, and that no matter how hard I hope, there are some things I can’t change. And I think that’s a good thing. That dizzy feels you get when you spin around too quickly happens for a reason: to make you slow down.

I rush a lot. Like now, I want to rush out of this sadness, mostly because I want to think I have no reason to be sad. Of course there is reason to be sad, to mourn, to grieve. But there is also plenty of reason to be happy, to sing with joy, to smile. I just wish I could tell that to the tightness in my chest or to the empty feeling in my bones.

There is a line in one of my top ten favorite books, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, that I think describes this feeling perfectly, “So this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad, and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.”