Melancholic Acceptance

The hardest thoughts and deepest pain come from the thought of unattainable loss. I lay here in the same bed that my water broke, unable to let it go because I don’t want to remove the piece of her that I had left. My  ability to perform stillness on my beige linen sheets was perfect as I straightened out my back against my queen sized mattress and began the journey  addiction by scrolling through my cell phone. Like every other night for the past 347, I find pictures of her that I’ve stored in a folder hidden in my photos app. Pictures of her that remind me of what she was and how she was gone. Her brown cocoa skin, her head of hair, the clothes they wrapped her in, the stillness. This was a new form of depression I didn’t know existed. It was low.

My thoughts were becoming obsessive as I began to realize that everything is changing. I was losing my mind and it was clear to me and those close to me that I needed help. I was becoming hypersensitive, overwhelmed, stressed, tired and I honestly wanted to shut off from the world. I felt alone. I felt sad. I felt a new wave of melancholy as I delved into the madness of my brain trying to make sense of a pain, I thought I recovered from over a year ago. What hurt the most- knowing that the man I shared my life and experience with didn’t even have the respect to apologize to me for what he did. He didn’t have the courage to apologize for what he did to my body, for what he did to me. The gaslighting, the manipulation, the narcissist behavior. Thinking of him only enabled me to remove myself from the world and only focus on myself and my family. My living children. My pain. He didn’t love me. He never did.

I was starting to accept the fact that love doesn’t exist and even though I had a tiny amount of hope in the back of my mind it did, but my reality has settled on the thought that it wasn’t for me. I’m not capable of being loved outside of the children I birthed. There was so much stress on me from the world, but this took the cake. I was tired. I was done for. I was exhausted from wearing a face that did nothing but pretend all day. I hated dealing with people I couldn’t trust. Working in toxic work environments had heightened my awareness and anxiety, because nothing is a conspiracy in Washington, DC. I’ve seen it all. 

I’ve seen the strategic terminations, the public distractions, the materialized propaganda, because that is what I do for a living. I feed the world what they tell me they want it to see, and I get paid very well for it. I get paid well to build a story, to share a story and to kill a story. I not only know the people that publicly flash false narratives on the television screen, but I eat lunch with the ones who build it. The people behind closed doors, the real power. Yet, for the first time in my life, I felt like I didn’t have any. Ever since I discovered he mixed that drug in my food inducing me into labor, everything had changed. The mere fact that she gave him the idea and they were dumb enough to discuss it in text messages on a phone line that I controlled and paid for, made my blood boil.

I lay here in my master suite of my penthouse, and I grieve as the moon reflects off my windows and into my bedroom floor. I lay here and I think, I think to remember, that not everything is what it seems. I remember the call to hospital, waking up to my water breaking, scared of what was happening, scared of losing her, scared of losing it all. I remember being ignored by my doctors, being ignored by the nurses, my pain not going acknowledged, the sadness that filled my heart when the drugs faded off after my blood transfusion, after my 10 day stay in the hospital, after the essence of it all. For the first time in my life, I had no control over anything. I couldn’t build a narrative for something that I couldn’t control and had no control over. In that moment, I felt like everything was changing for the worst as I asked everyday Why me God? Why me?

Looking at my life now, I have nothing positive to show for myself. How he was smart enough to transfer the documents into his name, giving him power over my accounts, I still don’t know. Even as I make it out of this mess, he tricked me into everything I signed up for when we were at the hospital. This gave him power to change and control of the narrative of what I could do and how I could do it. I was now stuck with all his debt, all his headaches, all his lies. I had no control or say on how everything is changing. There were no more nigh outs, or family nights, no he was gone….he was with her. I couldn’t leave my place, since he used my credit to guarantee his business loans to help her with her business. My life is in total disarray, something like scope creep. Restless nights have given me a great level of insomnia, which is probably the feeding my root cause of why I felt so unhappy.  I hate that I allowed him and all men prior the opportunity to only to scar me, none to help me heal, none to apologize, help me figure it out. No-like many black women, I was always on my own in the end. 

I exited out of my phone’s photo app, only to open my news app and see his name and face plastered all over the main page.

‘Acquisition With Start Up To Begin Conversations On Black Owned Capital In America’

Ugh, even online, he’s ugly. Seeing him standing next to me at the last conference we were captured before all of this, made me sick to my stomach.

I looked at the top right corner of my cell phone to see the time had reached 11:27pm, making Wednesday only 33 minutes away. 

This was the element I was stuck in. This was my life where I had to sit and unfortunately watch as everything is changing.