Abigail M. Schilling

I had a really shitty week. The kind of week you look back at and wonder how you ever made it out alive and also the kind that results in your needing to call the pharmacy to refill your prescription of sleep drugs. That kind of week.

I love fiercely. I give all and then some and then I get hurt. It happens. And sometimes I start to wonder if I love too much. If I give too much or expect too much or what.

But then I look at what happens when I have shitty weeks. I have the most amazing friends. They rally around me in a way that I can only describe as some sort of protective force field, like the way the gravity keeps the clouds near the earth or the tides except they don't change.

They never say, "I told you so." Instead, they cry with me in the morning at the breakfast table when I realize that another day is here and my life is still the same. They call two, three, and four times a day, checking in on me. Have I eaten today? How's the shaking?

The shaking sucked. It reminded me of the asthma-med drug overdoses where even when I was laying still my whole body was alive and I couldn't relax it and I couldn't quiet it and being alive was suddenly the worse thing in the world.

There were the mental exercises. Trying to prove positive thinking. The self-talk, the internal monologue, and worse, the internal dialogue. There was the dying to self and the just plain dying.

And there are the friends who don't know what to do but be angry for me because I don't have it in me to be angry myself. And they say, "I wish the fact that I am so pissed off would actually protect you," and in some strange way, it does. Because knowing you're not alone and knowing you'll never be alone is worth something. When you're too tired from fighting, they'll fight for you.

I spent the nights on a couch too short for my long legs and in a room too small for my big thoughts and I spent the moments in between in this world too small for my big heart and stuck between a million different decisions and no clear answer.

The week is shrouded in mystery to me. There are few explanations for why things happen or how or how they find me. But I stand strong, and I stand strong because I'm surrounded by people who say I can leave work early if I need to, and say that I can always crash at their place, and strangers who email me because they know what I know.

Ah well, love and lose, forgive and forget, and of course, time wounds all heels. I mean, time heals all wounds.