Living in the Glass House

Living with this loss is very strange.  Some people don't know how to treat you.  They aren't sure if they should talk to you. They're afraid to say the wrong thing, so they turn their eyes down and avoid your gaze. 

Sometimes I feel like I have a disease that nobody wants to catch.  Can't blame them, I sure as hell wouldn't want this either, but here I am with it an I don't know what to do myself.

Photo by Kelci Gibbons

I also feel like maybe I am wearing a scarlet letter, what letter that is I don't know.  D for death seems really harsh.  We don't like that word, and rarely use it.  K for Kelci.  Yes, that might be it.  I walk around with my Scarlet K that I'm not used to wearing yet.  Everyone knows why I wear it, but a lot of people don't want to talk about it.  They don't want to look at it. They are afraid of it.  They know it's very bad that we have it and they feel sorry for us.  They pity us.  They have no idea what to do with us. 

So here's what I imagine they do with us:  they put us up on a hill in a glass house and let us live there.

We are all part of the same community.  We can all see each other, but we stay where we are, and they stay where they are. Everyone knows what's wrong with us, of course, but no one knows how to help us.  They feel very bad for us, and they want to help us very badly.  They just dont know what to do.  We can see them looking at us, and we want to ask for help, we want to let them in, but we don't know what to ask them for or what we need either. We go about our life the best we can, and they just watch us, to make sure we are OK.

We're OK.  Well, we seem OK anyway.  I say I'm OK all the time.  This must mean I'm OK, right?  Acutally, I'd like to scream sometimes, "Do you want to know what OK really means?  It means that I have no idea how I am. It means I go through the motions and through the day, and it's much too hard to tell you anything other than 'I'm OK'." 

This glass home of ours is very uncomfortable.  There is nothing I like about living here.  There is nothing I can do to get out, so I try to be as positive as possible, becasue I know everyone is watching. I wonder what they'll all do when everything just cracks and the glass just shatters around us?