Newtown

"I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then" ~Lewis Carroll

I wore my sweatshirt yesterday.  All day long. I tried to bury myself in the folds of the hooded material that was pulled tight over my head.  Anything to protect myself from the news.  From the Internet.  From the faces of the Connecticut children, brutally gunned down in their classrooms.  I felt heavy.  So heavy I could barely move my limbs.  My stomach lurched.  My brain became sluggish.  All I wanted was sleep.  Endless and mind numbing sleep.  Yet how could I be so cowardly as to give in to the demands of my mind and body?  I did not know the victims.  The touch of their hands.  The sound of their breaths.  The cadence of their voices.  Yet here I was. Lying in bed.  Begging for something, anything, to intervene.  And so the day progressed into night.  The only thing that changed was the light outside my bedroom window.  I pulled the hood even tighter over my head and closed my eyes, a growing anxiety became the ever present partner in my bed.  I awoke to the alarm, several minutes before it sounded.  I got up and walked the dog, lumbered into the shower and stood under the hot flow of a slow moving cascade of water.  And so my day began.  I returned to work. To the gentle smiles of my office mates whose eyes revealed the same hauntings as my own. Now the day is concluding.  In the concluding, I have started a blog.  Perhaps it's my attempt to reach beyond the emptiness that wraps around me like a vice.  I breathe in.  And out.  It's all I can accomplish.