On My Own

Grocery Store Blues

/ Gardy Loo Pismire / Leave a comment

Almost every morning I arise and recite some positive affirmations which I find brings positive thinking to the forefront and negative thinking into the further recesses of my mind. Unfortunately, I have neglected to do so for the past several days and it all caught up to me today in the grocery store.

Since I left my home and family I find that the hardest thing is for me to do is to go to the food store. Frankly, it is the loneliest place on the planet and I find this is where these life changes that I am facing knock me flat and kick the shit out of me.

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I used to like to go shopping. When you have a family as big as mine and cook just about every night; the grocery store is a place of endless ideas. It is a positive place that you can go to show your appreciation to your spouse and your love for everyone in the house by getting foods they enjoy and then cooking them and preparing them with love in your heart.

Since I have been single I have found the grocery store to be my own personal nightmare. Sure I get to pick what I ALONE WANT TO EAT but there is a true emptiness in doing so. I really have no desire to cook a fancy meal for me, myself, and I; so my shopping cart looks barren and desolate like the basket of someone getting over the flu.  Few things in it and none of them very exciting or wholesome. Lots of healthy frozen dinners, milk, yogurt, lettuce, carrots and that is about it.

Which is why I became shaken while walking the aisles today. I found that I had a very strong impulse to leave the cart sitting in the meat section and run out the doors. I have never had this happen to me before and it felt disconcerting. At took everything within me to stay and continue what I had come in for. It wasn’t a panic I was feeling. Just an all encompassing sadness. All I could think of as I cruised around was the laughter around the dinner table that I so desperately miss along with the appreciation I felt for a job well done. And all of this exists no more in this life that I am creating. It took everything I had in me not to break down in tears in aisle 13 (coffee) aisle 8 (school lunch snacks) and the produce aisle where golden apples once beckoned like the sun. My eyes were so thick with water that when I opened the freezer door I misjudged and slammed it hard into my forehead almost knocking myself out. WHAP!!!!! Just like something out of an I LOVE LUCY episode.

Some sweet teenage boy looked at me and said, “Hey, lady are you okay?”

“NO, NO IAM NOT.  I AM NOT OKAY. I AM NOT OKAY WITH HOW THIS ALL TURNED OUT. DAMN IT!!!

I am feeling:

Sad

Scared

Weary

Lonely

Vulnerable

Excited at times

And pretty much feeling worthless and unsure of myself…like walking the plank over an ocean full of thrashing sharks waiting to nibble at my bones.

I know it will get better. I know that someday I will be creating new memories of dinners with new friends and neighbors which will make perusing the aisles fun again. But for now the grocery store is the loneliest place on the planet and it is a place I just don’t want to visit anymore. It holds too many good memories and its shelves are stocked with expired items that are not mine to put into my cart. I can no longer taste the flavors of life at the dinner table anymore only the cardboard wrapping that protects what is inside.

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Down To The Wire

/ Gardy Loo Pismire / 5 Comments

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Since my marriage is coming to an end it is odd how everything seems magnified. Often it feels like I am looking at life through a kaleidoscope no longer filled with vibrant and colorful pieces of glass but rather with carbon…cold, dark and black, which, under the right conditions could turn into diamonds but in reality are just lumps of coal.

Everything now seems to be on a time warp…minutes moving quicker towards the end of this relationship and my family as I know it. Because of this what I seem to be consumed with what will be seen as the LASTS. The movie we just took the kids too which will be our LAST seen together as a family. The dinner we went to last Friday the number of which that will take place in the future quickly dwindling down to nothing. The countdown to Christmas which will be the LAST holiday that we spend together as an intact unit.

Last night Gracie had her Christmas Concert at school. I had saved a seat for B who was running late but reluctantly gave it up to an old lady who there to watch her granddaughter play the cello. I thought that I might as well because soon B would not be sitting beside me sharing our lives together in these soft and lovely sorts of ways. I might just as well get used to it now I reckoned. And so I sat alone, my eyes squeezed tightly shut so that the tears could not dance down my face to strains of the Nutcracker led by a slightly off-key bass cello .

I took off my wedding ring the other day for it has become too painful to look at throughout the day. For instead of the brilliant glow it once cast out into the world now it seems as if only failure shimmers bright when the light hits the stone. It sits on my dresser in a dull brassy Chairman Mao box that I bought while in Jinan at a flea market. I wanted to buy it then, not because it was beautiful, but because it represented a time where individuality and beauty were eliminated and voices of those with “strong personalities” were buried in graves deep within the earth. Personalities like mine that were considered forceful and threatening by people like the “Great Leaders” and “My Husband” who did not want truth, authenticity and questioning authority to prevail.

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Perhaps someday I will take that ring and combine it with another to create something that is truly reflective of who I am today. Something tarnished and slightly jaded but also sassy, beautiful, and oh-so unique. A ring whose light shines true within a circle of knowledge about myself that is pure and unbroken and who has once again become a woman secure in the belief that her light should be celebrated not wasted on those who do not see her true value. For I know without a doubt that someday in the near future that a new creation will be sitting on the finger of this woman, who has survived all the pressure needed to create something and someone who is ever-lasting, strong and priceless out of something that once felt just a lump of coal. I look forward to that day.

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