How Do I Tell Them?

Sleep is slow in coming all week and when it does, it lasts but a few hours. Today at work, three people asked me what was wrong, indicating my eyes – which have grown so pink across the whites and grey beneath the sockets the surely, I look as if I’ve been beaten.

How to tell them that sometimes at night I wake from a deep sleep to remember ten thousand little things I have done wrong? How when this happens, that I try to find my breath, then my sense of humor, saying No, go, it is only the ego. How petty! How foolish! How ultimately self-involved!

How to tell them that upon finding someone who feels really right for the first time in a good while, I still have an endless stream of doubts that scroll across my mind during the wee hours of dawn? That sometimes I think most certainly DD (as we will call Match #6) is busy with other women, not his proclaimed building project I hear so much about. And then how to tell them that when we’re on the phone sometimes I can hear the hammers pounding, how I know he isn’t lying, but that I’m finding now I must be bitter and patterned and damn if I screw this one up for lack of patience or faith.

How to tell them that it’s hard for me to not know when I’ll see him next? How to tell them that when I do know the time of our next date, I’m nervous with energy and passion for life and all the good things I envision in the future? Then how to tell them that yes, yes, all of this can and does fade when I’m with someone I trust, and that I’m starting to trust DD but it’s always two steps forward and one step back.

How do I tell them that most of all I wish I could turn it all off, just live breath to breath, write miraculous words in between, find a love that is lasting and real, and solve all the world’s problems while I’m at it?