Precarious

I thought I was actually doing pretty good today, earlier.  I got up, I got dressed early, made breakfast; I needed to go to Costco so I decided to have lunch at "our" sushi place in town again while I was out and about.  The first time, a couple of weeks ago, I wasn't ready yet and it was just painful to be there without her, not to mention the owners asking about her and I had to let them know she was gone.  But this time was nice; it felt good and there were memories there--it's where I proposed to her, and we were 'regulars' while she was working.  I even ate one of her favorites and told Jo "this one is for you."

Then a string of frustrating stuff all happened more or less at once--at Costco I couldn't find the furnace filters and got bad directions from the first employee I asked before the manager finally showed me where they were, then as I was finishing up there, the fire alarm goes off, and while the fire alarm is going off, my financial advisor's office calls wanting some IRS number nobody has ever mentioned yet, and then I get home and there's an upsetting email...

And suddenly, I'm right back to going on little crying jags and pacing the house and feeling sick to my stomach and yelling at the puppy too much.

It's like I'm in this deep pit, and there's a narrow winding path that looks like it leads up out of it, so I try to walk up the path, but with every little distraction, every little misstep, every little nudge in the wrong direction, suddenly I am picking myself back up off the bottom and starting over again.

"...how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, 'I never realized my loss till this moment'? The same leg is cut off time after time." ― C.S. Lewis