la vie en rose

Today I listened to “La vie en rose” on repeat for about 35 minutes.  Yep.  That’s where I am these days.  Something about the music, the way it sounds both melancholy and happy at the same time, appeals to me on the deepest level. That’s what I feel all the time.  Melancholy.  AND happy.  How is that possible?  Can hope and despair coexist?  For me I think they do.  Of course they can.  If we can feel both terrified and excited at the same time, then hope and despair can occupy the same realm, right?  

Though I live in what feels like a constant state of disappointment and frustration, the compulsion to hope persists.  I have no control over it.  Even when my brain says, "hope is futile.  and it's exhausting.  and makes you die a little each month," it's there, lingering in the back of my consciousness.  Kind of like when you are in a SUPER awful mood, I mean the WORST mood and you have some dopey, happy song with a killer beat stuck in your head and that makes you even more mad because it kinda makes you feel a teensy bit happier when you REALLY don't want to.  I’m hard-wired to GO GO GO, keep trying, and I NEVER, EVER quit.  EVER.  I literally don’t know how.  So what that I got word from the doctor that I have a “large” cyst on my left ovary.  And not even a year after a most invasive and traumatizing surgery my body is just as broken as ever.  And the pain is back, the bloating, nausea, and all the other fun things that come along with cysts are back.  And that I expected the surgery to fix me.  I mean, it wasn’t even hope back then, it was certainty.  I was going to be a success story, a testament to the wonders of NaPro Technology- I knew it must be the reason we were called to suffer this.  

Slowly my brazen assuredness dissolved into hope- I hope… 

Now, after the years of tests, invasions of my personal space, medications, shots, waiting, hoping, frustration, tears, and disappointment I don’t feel hope anymore...  I don’t really feel anything...  

But the hope is still there somehow, I can sense it despite not feeling it- an undercurrent to the rocky waves propelling me somewhat aimlessly through this reality.  

Like the song it gives clarity to the melancholic gray in which I currently exist.