Nothing Yet

The realtor called earlier this week. As expected, there are little to no homes to look at. In short: nothing yet. Apparently, houses should be on the market in the next few weeks. Nothing yet.

The mind is compassionate. It must be. Mine allows me to feel nothing when I picture happy places. Sometimes I will sit still and force myself to imagine last summer, in the backyard that week after school started. We bought a 500 water balloon pack; blue and green to represent the Sounders and the Seahawks. The weather was 90+ degrees and I can see Ed going into some Zen state while he filled 20, 30, 40 balloons, tossing them into the kiddie pool for Reese and Jack who would destroy them in five minutes.

I can see the scene. But, I don’t feel it. I feel nothing. It’s why I don’t feel much when I’m in the most pitiful places, the places that I used to avoid at all costs, even picked careers around. Like being the last person at school on a Friday. Since I was in middle school nothing brought on instant depression more quickly than still being on school grounds when no one else was. Same was true for high school, for college, and then for my teaching career. So, I hardly noticed that I was one of the last people in the building Friday afternoon. They shut the big front doors of the building so I had to go out the back. I didn’t pass a single person on the way to the parking lot.

Here’s the thing, I know I’m still processing. I know that the worst of the reality check will come in a few months and then maybe again next year. I know my mind has me on the slowest of I.V. drips of emotion so I can survive. It’s why I question those hopeful feelings – because I know they are based in something else—something not fully truthful—something that isn’t this new life. I know my mind hasn’t let me feel the fullness of the nothingness left behind when Ed died.

But I know hope resides in this fact: the flipside of nothing is a blank slate. I think that’s why I’m okay moving forward with the home hunt. While finding a home represents so much of what our family was and who I was, it also represents a new life, a blank slate, a richness of life waiting to be fully realized.