It’s been a rough week. Lots of tears. Lots of sun falling out of my mouth, leaving shadows to choke me and change the taste of the landscape. When I feel this way, all I want is to disappear, to blend into the chipped paint, hide beneath the floor boards. I cry while looking at cooking shows. I cry sitting at the computer, washing dishes, riding in the car watching the filthy city shrink under the waves of heat that oppress and burn. I am coming unglued. I have forgotten how to breathe.

In getting ready to move, I sink into the lives of people I have loved, people who have died. I am tearing away scar tissue, leaving wounds vulnerable to the teeth of time. I am awash in memories that leave me desperate for youth, for the feeling of my mother’s arms around me, for the delight in my brother’s boyish laughter, for the scratch of my father’s beard against my cheek. The weight of missing people presses against my eyes and taints the color of the sky. I am coming unglued. I have forgotten how to breathe.

I am tying up the loose ends of my broken body, retrieving my white canes from their hiding places, spending day after day in dental torture chairs, wishing I hadn’t allowed myself to get so fat. My heart has been buried so deep beneath the flesh, I no longer recognize its rhythm against my ribs. The mirror is my punisher, the fist that reminds me I have failed again, that I will never be good enough. I am coming unglued. I have forgotten how to breathe.

My book got a mediocre review. It crushed me. It pissed me off. It left me wanting to quit writing, to burn through the lines on the page, scatter hope into the dirt. I would have preferred a scathing review to the placid temperature of the three star review. Intellectually I get that my writing isn’t for everyone, but between love and hate the color drains away. It is easy to forget that it is only my heart on the page, my stories of coming unglued, of forgetting how to breathe.

But, life is a coin. Tarnished in some places, sparkling in others. It is sadness and joy passed through fingers, dropped and forgotten, discovered and cherished, held tightly against your palm. Life is the shadow and the light, the dream come true and the longing that is shattered. I am not unscathed. I don’t want to be. I sit in the center of what hurts, because I know that is where joy also lives. Sometimes I need to come unglued, so I can remember how to breathe.