I hate mornings

Today is my last day to sit at home and grieve naturally. Tomorrow I have to go to work and for nine hours, somehow pretend like nothing happened.

I start feeling more okay by the end of the day. I put off sleeping as long as possible. Because when I wake up in the morning it starts over again, that slow creeping awareness that I am alone, that the baby i want so much is leaking out of my body, that we got so close this time, so close, finally... And still failed. It's like the initial horror happens all over again.

Yesterday was almost a full day of heavy, bright bleeding. This morning it's dark brown smudges. I started spotting on New Year's Day and bleeding on 1/3, so as of today this has been going on for 11 days. I hope it stops this week. I'm tired of bleeding, I am tired of being sad. The idea that life goes on is not a comfort, it's a curse. I will never, ever use this phrase with someone who is grieving, from now on.

I cleaned the kitchen yesterday, and put our comforter in the wash, but that is as far as I got. Wasn't able to summon the energy to pack up our Christmas stuff or clean the floors or bathrooms. I already know I don't have it in me today either. At least there was some sun yesterday. It was still too cold, but the sunlight in the window made it possible to make believe that things could be a little cheerier than they were. Today it's back to grayness and clouds and cold.

I don't know how I'm going to make it through work this week. I'll have a three day weekend at the end of it, since next Monday is a holiday. But the idea of sitting at my desk, answering my staff and bosses and clients with a smile, cranking smoothly through the files and plans and emails and phone calls with the enthusiasm and positivity that's expected, makes me feel like I'm going to be sick. Somehow tomorrow I have to figure out how to bottle this pain up and shove it in the back of myself so that I can be what the taxpayers pay me to be... Which is a customer service machine.

Oddly, nothing is more inspirational for doing that than Korean drama, which I've been binge watching the last week. The characters are always going through some sort of horrible life thing that they keep to themselves. And it makes you, the viewer, (as well as the primary love interest character) fall for them even more. We love the nobility of self-sacrifice, don't we?

And the other thing Korean drama helps with is that everyone always gets their happy ending. It usually takes years... Years, which are conveniently skipped over in the last episode with one little subtitle at the bottom of the screen when the final scenes start - "Several years later..."

I want a screen cut like that in my life. Rather than having to live through the next few months, going back to work and saving my money and waiting for the bleeding to stop and HcG to drop and AF to come again, I want a fast-forward button, maybe a two minute montage that sums it all up and gets me to that moment when I'm stepping off the plane in Athens again, and then skips a little more to a couple weeks later when those two lines show up on a pregnancy test again, and then skips ahead to the day when we have a healthy baby in our arms. Basically, to not have to live through the next year of my life with this same anxiety filling every minute, and get to the part where our story actually begins.

Life doesn't work that way, of course. But the days are going by so slowly. It feels like our happy ending, and new beginning, may never come.

And that is your regularly scheduled grief dump for the day. I am going back to my bathrobe and coffee and electric blanket and mindless TV now. Have to make the most of this last day that I am free to feel crappy, since tomorrow I'll be back onstage and in the spotlight, putting on a show to reassure the people who pay my mortgage that I am worth my pay checks.