Okay, it was clearly my fault.

Today started out poorly, following a week without one solid night’s sleep. Perhaps it was because I stayed up too late watching a forgettable movie with loathsome characters and a predictable outcome, but last night was the worst, tossing around with some unspecified, vague anxiety lingering beneath the edges of insomnia, which went off into multiple directions of angst and obsession.

What have I done with my life? What can I do right now to change my life? My friends are dying off. Am I next? How are my kids going to deal with all my stuff? I have too much stuff. What is going to happen to me? I should do _____. I should do _____. I should have done _____. I need to finish _____. I want to do ______. How am I going to afford _____?  Why did I ever ____? This room is too hot. The fan is blowing on my neck. Maybe the flu shot I got is keeping me awake. There’s nothing good on TV.  Am I depressed? I don’t want to be depressed. I refuse to be depressed. I feel something like depressed. What did they find on that CT scan? I don’t want to know. I don’t want to do this. I’m sick of this. There’s nothing to worry about on the CT scan. You shouldn’t turn on the TV or look at the phone when you have insomnia because the light will keep you awake. Don’t look at the phone. Why are you looking at the phone? Stop it! How come the S.O. can fall asleep with the TV on but I can’t?  I’m hungry but if I get up I’ll never go back to sleep. Maybe the tea I had is keeping me up. Maybe the chocolate I had is keeping me up. For a little dog, he sure takes up a lot of space in the bed.  It’s 12:30 am, I should fall asleep soon. It’s 2 am. It’s 3:14 am.  It’s 4:05 am.  And on. And on……

It’s been a summer of highs and lows – people in my general age group have been dying. My friends and I are in that demographic zone now where this is how it is going to be, where Mick Jagger is on the cover of AARP, where we stare down the tunnel of our own mortality. It’s been a bit sobering, affecting people in my direct social sphere. A very old, very close friend and co-adventurer, essentially a brother that didn’t share my DNA, unexpectedly passed away eight weeks ago, just a couple of days after we saw each other. We used to joke about a whole group of us retiring to his mother’s (long ago sold) condo in Florida when we someday got old, because of course that day would never come since we were young and immortal. We were going to go to Italy next year and eat lots of good food. We were going to California soon to visit his sister. Just that week we were going to drive up to my daughter’s home to see her before her new baby arrived. He was going to make the special glazed orange cake he always makes for an occasion to take to her. We were going to collect the free dessert we earned with our points at the lunch place we met at every few weeks next time we went. We were gonna. We were gonna. We were……..

For a while I was able to pretend as if we just hadn’t had the chance to get together for a while. I was able to immerse myself in a wave of “recently-departed-oriented-tasks” which was enough of a distraction to keep from looking at what was now gone. Those diversion tactics have long since served their purpose.

So I got out of bed this morning in a sleep-deprived funk. I realized I was depressed, not just about losing my friend, but with other good causes. The “D-word” is not a place I wanted to be heading, so I tearfully tried calling a few friends who would understand. Chatted with one for a little bit. Unfortunately, the other one who is also deeply mourning the same loss didn’t answer. Maybe that’s just as well…..

Feeling isolated, useless and really not liking myself very much, I stupidly went onto Facebook, a place I have been seriously disliking lately, figuring it would divert my attention. Don’t ever go onto Facebook when you are feeling poorly about yourself or life. While there are many interesting and fun things to see there, when in A State of Mind all you notice is the superficiality and ego, which prompted me to methodically start removing some of my photo albums, with a plan to perhaps take a break from the platform altogether.

Upon getting dressed, I discovered – as I have discovered every morning for the past few months – that all my clothes were uncomfortably and unattractively too big, especially my pants. For a while this was cause for personal celebration, as I have deliberately worked hard to drop a number of pounds, motivated by health reasons, and had triumphantly reached that goal. But then my friend died and the weight kept dropping beyond my intentions. Maybe it is The Grief Diet, usually seen surrounding divorce and death. Not a healthy way to lose. Getting back to a balance will be necessary, but in the meantime, I’ve been belting my pants overly tight to keep them up, giving the impression of a scarecrow with a cord holding up bunched, baggy, lumpy, straw-filled jeans. I figured perhaps a little retail therapy for a pair of pants might be a good thing to do today to help snap out of it. The other errand while out was to stop by the medical center and pick up the copy of my recent CT scan and radiology report they had waiting for me – just another nagging and sobering thing at the back of my mind I have been trying not to think about too much, but adds to the the weight of the day.

So anyway, with the above background and distractions in mind, this is probably the reason it was my fault.

There were two lanes of left-turning traffic into the shopping center. I didn’t see the big black SUV when I moved over one lane. It was either there all along, or might have zoomed up suddenly to get ahead of me, which is what I suspect is probably what happened. Either way, I should have seen it but didn’t notice it until it rode right up on my rear bumper and leaned hard and long on the horn – a very large, shiny black SUV with one of those menacing looking grills, with tinted windows hiding whoever was inside. Sorry and a little embarrassed at my faux pas, because yes, I must have cut the person off in my distraction, I mouthed “I’m sorry” and made the apologetic face and gestures that you give other drivers when you do something stupid like that. But the person couldn’t let it go and pulled up right next to me (while we are all still in motion up the road), letting down their passenger side window and extending “The F-U Finger” towards me while leaning on the horn some more.

Well, most of us have been there. As a toddler, one of my kids suddenly started saying the word “Ath-ole”. When asked where she learned that word, she said it was “In the car, Mommy says it when she’s driving”. So I get it. Since I was apparently the “ath-ole” of the day, I mouthed “I’m sorry” again and continued to turn into the store parking lot.

The SUV changed lanes and came right after me, close on my tail. Great, I had a road-rager following me.

Pulling into a parking space between two cars, I tried to get close enough to the store where other people coming in and out might witness what was going on, just in case. Then I sat in my car for a while and waited to see if the person was going to give it up and just go park. The car seemed to have disappeared and I hoped it was over and hopefully we would not recognize each other in the store, or if we did, I would apologize again and move on. I was just about to get out of my car when the white car parked to my left pulled out of the space and suddenly, like a shark on the hunt, that black SUV slipped in neatly next to me and rolled down their window. And I thought “Oh boy, here we go“.

I don’t know why I was surprised to see it was a woman, maybe in her thirties or early forties, hard to tell. She had tattooed sleeves on both arms, was wearing a bandanna scarf on her head and was yelling. I rolled down my window and I said to her “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you. I’m truly sorry” and put up my window again. But she wouldn’t let it go, she kept yelling and shaking her fist at me. Finally I let down my window again and said to her “I don’t know what else you want me to say. I didn’t see you. I am truly sorry I cut you off. It isn’t necessary for you to be so aggressive and get all road rage-y on me, give me the finger, tail gate me and follow me into the parking lot. It’s done. I’ve apologized. Why don’t we continue on our ways and just go shopping?”

But she still couldn’t let it go! And at that point I couldn’t totally understand what she was saying (because I’m kind of deaf) but it was something about “I’m not being aggressive” and “What if I had had kids in the car?” and “You need to know what you did” or “I want to make sure you know what you did” or something like that. Yes, I cut her off. It was my fault (I think). Nobody got hurt, there was no accident. I just kept saying “I said I’m sorry, I don’t know what else to tell you.” It occurred to me that she was overreacting so much that she could have even pulled out a gun. Maybe another time I would have come back at her with a different response, a more confrontational response. But I couldn’t get angry or even worry about it, I was that disassociated and in my own stuff. Clearly she was having a much worse day than I was.

Finally she stopped. I expected her to get out of her car and follow me into the store. But she pulled out of the parking lot and zoomed out to the road heading in an entirely different direction. She wasn’t even going to go shopping there, she had just followed me in from the street in her rage.

After that I spent a ridiculously lengthy and unproductive amount of time in the store attempting to find a decent fitting pair of jeans and trying on a number of other things that just weren’t going to work. Going into a dressing room when you’re not feeling that great about yourself is about as bad as going on Facebook. Yet another something I hadn’t thought out before embarking this morning.

I’m home now, eating chocolate. That’s about the best I can do today.

~*~