i am one tough cookie but...

...this is what it takes to make this cookie crumble:

Imagine the love of your life, your most trusted treasure/ally, ripping off her face, Mission Impossible: 2-style, revealing a completely foreign, deceptive, malicious stranger who was actually your enemy all along. Friends have been lied to, secrets revealed, blame grossly miscast, and even your children, whose trust had run cell-deep, were slandered. As for a reason? Every option is either too painful or too infuriating to accept. The reason will never be known.

Imagine having somehow survived a couple days in this emotional holocaust, only to find out that the breadwinner of your household has lost his high-paying job. I know this has happened to many of you, and I have fully empathized, and now I sympathize. Once again, answers are scarce, we may be moving, we will most definitely be losing the insurance that keeps me in much-needed medications, and under the treatment of Salem's finest doctor. Imagine a grown man weeping, and your children offering him their wallets.

Imagine having to watch your 9 and 10 year olds cling to your 16 year old dog (see previous post), wailing, uncharacteristically unaware that they are lying on a germy clinic floor. Imagine having to rip your daughter off her dog with clumps of his fur in her tiny hands, which she has since kept in a Ziploc baggie and carried everywhere.

Imagine realizing at some point during this deluge of shit, that there may be a connection between your very nicest friends telling you you look like a ghost, your fingernails falling out, as well as your hair, and the fact that it just occurred to you you've been on your period for like four weeks. Your midwife friend, along with your GYN, confirms that you are hemorrhaging severely. Hm, that may explain some weakness.

Imagine hearing the dreaded, but oh-so-familiar words, "You need surgery immediately." And of course, it needs to be sooner than immediately, while we still have insurance.

Imagine that as a lovely little undercurrent to this torrential downpour of stress, you haven't slept more than an hour for seven weeks. As a person who doesn't require a lot of sleep, it took a long time to grow concerned. First I was just up at odd hours, then I began losing track of days, the time of day (going for cheeseburgers at 7am, which ties in later, as I hate cheeseburgers), losing my train of thought, my focus, lots of near misses on the road and ultimately, running red lights.

Imagine that all of these illuminations happened within three days of each other.

As most of you can imagine, every emotion on the spectrum has made an entrance at some point, and it has been grueling. People have been vocal in their concern for my lack of sleep, but I assure them, I don't really feel tired, just out of focus. I've shared with the readers of Moxieclean that I'm not sleeping much, and different people know a morsel or two of the other things going on. Today, the exhaustion hit me. I had a friend over for another early morning cheeseburger run, and when she left, I passed out cold. But I didn't sleep. I heard altered voices coming from the television, I could hear my kids singing, rather than talking, I kept losing them, we were late for football practice but I couldn't go outside because the aforementioned love-turned-nobody was on the porch, as was the coach, pounding on the door. I startled awake sweating to death, completely at a loss to identify my surroundings. I was so overwhelmed all I could do was go back into that dimension. This time I was awakened by my daughter handing me the phone, telling me it was my doctor. I had no idea where I was but took a chance on answering. He said that the seven vials of blood they drew yesterday that nearly killed me, revealed that I am so anemic I am not to drive nor really do anything until I can drink a silo of iron. Those who know me know that being told to do nothing is something I liken to being told to cut off my own arm. It's completely counter-intuitive, however necessary it may be. I'm a good patient but I'm terrible at recovering because I hate sitting still. Yes, even when my body is so ravaged by sleep loss and blood loss that I'm hallucinating, I'd rather be cleaning. Reilly just got the call that our dog's ashes have arrived but I can't drive her three blocks to get them. And now I know why I've been eating so many cheeseburgers.

So, unable to sleep, for fear of re-entering the Malice in Wonderland alternate universe from hell, and too weak to go anywhere, under doctor's orders, I am left to think about the one thing that makes all the rest seem like a dinner time anecdote. I'm angry. God am I angry. Make no mistake, I am no saint, but when I make a mistake it's in earnest, and you can count on an apology. To have been strung along by my heartstrings, which I'd never even shown to anyone else, let alone given, on a silver platter, forever and ever, with everyone in town knowing there was only one of us in the relationship for a pretty long time, rubs right up against the limit of what I can forgive. To be told the venomous lies about my kids, from someone they deeply trusted, is so far beyond what I can forgive the line isn't even visible. I am angry for the lies, I am angry for the deceit, and for the heart, soul, and time I invested, oblivious to the fact that it was Game Over.

Somewhere in (let's see, which circle of hell am I in?) this, a lurker from a footnote in the past we shared, emerged with enough ammunition to sever my connection to reality, and any chance I had for being okay. The brutality of this revelation is something I've chosen not to share with the person I loved, because, to do so is not the way I love, even in the past tense. I will bear it for both of us. Along with my bullet-riddled heart and stolen soul.

As I've been typing, I was handed an envelope from the woman I never knew, with my house key, and a gift I'd given her that she was thoughtful enough to return (really, I prefer to just be shot), and now I believe, short of something happening to my kids, I could not possibly feel more annihilated on every emotional plane. Friends say if I could only sleep, but my heart cares not for sleep. Nor blood loss, nor surgeries, nor, apparently saving any face at all.

I have tried to use as much discretion as possible in the past month, about everything, but so many people are wise to little pieces of information, and so many people are waiting on me to answer their emails (Mesina, Gail, Amy, Bethany, Emily), and I just don't have the energy. So this is it. This is where I've been. I don't know how I got here, and I don't know where I'm going, but I didn't want anyone to feel unduly concerned a moment longer.

The medical stuff, it ain't no thang. Please. I could care less. My heart, my sense of trust in myself or others, my willingness to confide in/believe people, that's pretty dicey right now. For four years I thought I was holding a Royal Flush. I just looked down and realized I'm holding four Jokers.

Goddamn.

All the king's horses, and all the king's men? Don't bother. There's no putting this cookie together again.

Quintuple-check your hand before you bet. But I'll never ante up again.