Gray

I'm trying to write and nothing comes. I've always found the bad times the hardest to capture: It's easy to get motivated to tell stories or to show what the kids were like in the hotel pool, gleaming and streaming like pale seals, hair slicked back so their bright eyes and huge grins seem bigger than life and suddenly grant fresh understanding of the word "radiant." But the blah stuff, the grinding pain, melancholy, worry, sleeplessness -- who cares about that? Or, rather, who cares to write about it?

I want to be honest, but I also have an intense desire to be liked. We are conditioned to be cheerful and optimistic, after all. Or at least to overvalue those traits. I imagine my pain making me unlikeable -- after all, I don't like it. I'm not going to break through that barrier today, and I probably lack the skills to illustrate what the last few days have been like even if I cared to. My writing palette lacks the number of shades of gray I would need to delineate the mental and physical ache of a stubborn disease.

I'm in a gray place: Thick, clammy fog or the smear of a dirty pencil eraser. I am curled up there hurting and waiting for the love of my family to bring me once again into the light.