Break

She sat on my lap and pinched my nose ring deep into my nose. My eyes watered and immediately I felt my right nostril fill with blood. Quickly I placed her on the floor and ran for the nearest box of tissues. "It's going to be one of those days," my friend told me.

I had gotten maybe a total of six hours of sleep over the previous three days. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Every part of me ached with exhaustion, my mind, my body, my patience. I lay in bed at night praying for sleep, or at the very least, some answer as to why I was not sleeping, some problem I could solve. I needed to be able to define my insomnia. I needed to be able to put a stop to it.

I was not the only one to shed blood yesterday. Over the course of the next two hours I tended to two deep bites, three scratches and a scraped knee. It was not the blood that bothered me so much as the fighting, as the maliciousness behind those two year old actions. It was watching the people I love tear each other to shreds. It was the feeling that perhaps we are, by nature, these angry animals. It was the feeling of my faith in goodness wavering.

I was relieved to discover that we were out of paper towels as it gave me an excuse to leave the room. I went into the bathroom, clutched the sides of the sink, and allowed myself, for a moment, to cry. For a moment, I let my frustration and anger and sadness wash over me. For a moment, I allowed myself to break. And when the moment was over, I splashed water on my face, composed myself, grabbed some paper towels and walked back into the classroom.

I cannot begin to articulate what it felt like to open the door and find one coworker gone and the other with her back turned to the children. I cannot begin to give a name to the emotional battle that has been my work life these past few weeks. I cannot begin to explain how the yells and cries and chaos of that jungle of a room yesterday broke my spirit in two, but I can say that even I didn't recognize the sound of my own bellowing shout. My voice was deeper and louder than I knew it was capable of becoming. My children stopped dead in their tracks, their eyes wide and alarmed, deer in the headlights right before their lives are cut short. They have heard me yell before, but had never heard such anger and sadness in my words. I'm not sure I have either. I told them to sit and immediately they submitted out of the fearful shock of unfamiliarity. I have never felt so awful.

At lunch I went into the office and asked for the day off. My boss said she thought she could cover for me. "Thanks" I said, "I just really need a break." My eyes unexpectedly filled with tears. I swallowed hard, hoping to subdue the rising lump in my throat. She started to say "I'm always here if you need to talk" but I was already halfway down the hall, wiping tears off my cheeks, beginning the descent into a complete and utter breakdown.

Two hours later, I left work and went to the gym to try and outrun myself, my tears, my day. An hour later, I gave up and came home. I couldn't seem to switch my mind off, to allow my anger to slip from me, to transform my breakdown into a break through of some kind. I couldn't seem to find my way back to happiness, a characteristic as unfamiliar to me as my own enraged voice. I couldn't seem to let go.

I slept for a solid seven hours last night. I awoke this morning and went for a two hour walk towards the rising sun. If my life were a movie, it would end here, a kind of hope for the future lingering on my face as the camera panned away. But my life is not a movie, and so despite my best efforts and momentary sensations of happiness and hope, I returned home to discover all of my feelings about yesterday still waiting for me.

And I'm not sure what it is they want from me, what it is I'm supposed to do, how I am meant to transform them into a break through of some kind. I'm not sure of how to let them go, or if I'm even supposed to. Perhaps they are the beginning of something important. Perhaps they exist to be written here, immortalized upon the page, a piece of my story. Perhaps I am to take from them an awareness of my own fragility. Perhaps I need to break completely in order to become fixed.

And as I write that, one of the people I love most in this world, the one who has helped to fix me so many times before, the one who renews my faith in goodness daily, texts to say he hopes that I'm well, and I break completely. And I allow myself to cry for more than a moment, for in fact, as long as I need to. For in fact, exactly as long as it takes to let go.