Sanatorium

So, I have gone away for a while.
Just after New Year’s.

I am here now. Alone.
With myself. With my thoughts, my fears, my life.

A month on my own, far away from everyone who loves me, needs me, and who grieves me a little all the time, even though I am still here. I have stepped out of their lives for a moment, or what may feel like an eternity, to find myself. Not again, but anew.

I am in Karlovy Vary, in the Czech Republic.
A place built for rest, for treatment, for slow days and long walks. I am here because my body has been carrying too much for too long. Because my nervous system is exhausted. Because living in constant alert, constant uncertainty, constant adaptation has finally caught up with me.

And because I needed distance.
Not from love, but from the quiet pressure of being witnessed while unraveling.

For a long time now, I have felt stuck in a kind of no man’s land.
A waiting room.

Sometimes I picture, in my mind’s eye, a line outside my door. Beautiful people who so badly want to make it in time to see me.
Before I die.

But I do not know when I will die. Who does.
And the line stresses me out, even though it does not really exist.

At times it feels like I am bad at dying.
It is taking me a little too long to fade away. People do not know how to relate. Neither do I.

At other times it feels like I am bad at living.
No one quite recognizes me anymore, and I do not have the energy for them.
Even though my heart wants to.

“Sit with your feelings,” they say.
But how do you sit with something that moves at the speed of light.

“Embrace the grief,” they say.
But how do you embrace something that is infinite.

“Accept death,” they say.
“We are all going to die, but you are alive today.”

But how do I explain that death walks beside all of us.
That death is my friend.
It is life that does not want to play.

And this waiting room has far too little air.

The truth is, I have never been good at in between states.

I have always had a direction, even without a destination. I have swerved, accelerated, ducked, changed runways, even with the fuel gauge deep in the red. And somehow, it has always worked out.

When I finally crash landed, my tank empty, I stood still for the first time in my life. Directionless. In a foggy, numb existence without a goal.

How do you navigate when the compass is broken and visibility is zero?
I do not know. Not at all.

So I am here now.
Away for a while.

With only myself and my existential crisis for company, I am trying to sort a few things out. Learning how to navigate this strange, unfamiliar thing that is the life I have now.

I drink mineral water from the hot springs in the city. I walk slowly through a town built for convalescence and submit my body to treatments meant to calm rather than fix.
I rest.
I listen.
I let the days be quiet.

I allow myself to travel inward.

And then, eventually, I will return home.
And truly be there.