Dedicated to Lindsay Lohan (kind of)

 

A person can stretch out their legs and arms do a back flip, they can even roll over onto their left side and sleep a deep and unencumbered sleep that is free from both day and night time dreams of terror. The bottom is a weigh station for pondering next steps. There are vending machines and a sparse knoll with a gravel pathway down the center that leads to nowhere that some use for long walks and contemplation.  The bottom isn't a five star dwelling, more like a youth hostel. It’s purposely bleak to encourage thoughtful consideration, and drafting time critical action plans for next steps. Former visitors have whispered the bottom it is where hope springs eternal dwells.   It makes sense if you think about it. After the bottom, there are two choices left for a life in peril and disarray.

 

 1) A person can give up, don a permanent scowl, ride the bitter bus their remaining days of life, and drink endless cups of pity me or why me, or oh woe is me.      

 2)     Alternatively, a person can get back up take a long walk down the gravel road, forget regret and climb out of the pit for another spin on the red brick floor and find a different dream, revise an old one, love again, or in my case, lose a few pounds,  wish for a lover, and write a new screen play for my own life. 

 

My journey to the bottom resulted from an annual well-woman exam and weigh, a throw away comment from my gyno suggesting I had an eating disorder and should consider a gastric bi-pass.  I never considered the first option. It was much too late to give up on life.  I had drunk enough cups of pity me while recovering from being told I might have an eating disorder, crying myself to sleep at night because I wasn't in love with my husband and feeling guilty because he was sick. To add a dash of melodrama I was struggling to cope with my father's cancer and all that darkness that this disease brings to a family.      

 

Looking back now, seven years after the pivotal moment of awareness, and forcing myself to open the box of memories stored in darkest recesses of my mind, where the big spiders hide, that's labeled NEVER OPEN THIS BOX OF MEMORIES – TOO BLEAK. What stands tall and is the most vivid is the feeling of clarity once I hit the bottom. It was like waking up in unfamiliar bed on the first day of an annual vacation. Your eyes open, close, and only open again after the mind registers your location, the strange hotel bed, the ocean breeze, the rippling window sheers, the radiant blue heavens and sparkling rays of sun lighting up more that the room. For a split-second, you think coma or heaven, and then the gears in your head recall the late arrival and check in, and in a breath, an eerie peace settles over your body because you know that the day waiting for you, once you pull your body from the sheets of Egyptian cotton, only holds promise. The first day of vacation is the precise feeling of what it feels like having reached the bottom because if you chose option two, there are only possibilities.

 

 

 p.s. this is not a dedication to the actress, more a metaphor for a state of mind