Trauma

Tears stream down, pooling at the chin before dripping onto my top. My heart feels like it is an onion, peeling layer after layer until the core of me is completely open and vulnerable. My fingers seem numb, and my nose is cold. The phrase 'too late' rattles in my skull over and again. The phrase Gotterdammerung seems somehow appropriate - it reads better in German than the English translation, 'Twilight of the Gods'.

This is it. It is beyond petty justifications and recriminations, he said she thought she said he thought misunderstanding merry go rounds, this is crunch time. No matter what I am going through, she is feeling a hundred, a thousand times worse. I hear the wracking sobs and just want to hold her, to comfort her, and to show her I am worthy - difficult, nay impossible down the phone wires two thousand miles away. I feel so helpless, my heart fallen into the centre of the earth - 'words are cheap' slap me across both cheeks, reddening them like my eyes must look.

'Too late' rises to a crescendo. But yet, but yet, this cannot be the end. It just cannot be. I reach out as far as I can, to give up the problem issues for you, no, not only for you, for us. We will know shortly whether it has a hope of working or not, or whether the matter is settled and lost already. Too late, a whisper now, perhaps of what might have been.

I dread the crying I cannot hear even more so than that I can.

It was not a productive day at work.