Into the Maelstrom

[my grandmother died this morning.]

In an email a friend mentioned striving to become an "emotional jedi", and, though my Star Wars theory is weak at best, I assume he was alluding to one's ability to slide through the wreckage of daily life without losing a sense of purpose and the all important zen.

I am not sliding right now. Sliding implies the pull of gravity and the potential for loss of control. I glide. Like an astronaut looking out the shuttle window and gently drifting head first into the sink. I think there never was any control, therefore the loss of it is a non-event.

I glide through my days the way I used to effortlessly consume
choose your own adventure stories: read for a while, come to the page where I had to choose to one of two or three options, choose one arbitrarily, continue, come to the end of the story, read another. My day to day choices seem unimportant; I will feel exactly the same if I go out for beer with a friend as if I lay on the couch and watched reality television programs. Zero emotional range.

Emotional Jedi. Teflon girl. Ice princess.

Everything is gray, and not in the nuanced, between-black-and-white sort of way. Gray in the whispery-November-stalks-of-shasta-daisies way.

But shasta daisies are perennials. And below the gray something simmers. Nothing else explains my fascination with Grey's Anatomy, the hospital drama that I've been watching on DVD. I am pretty sure that my mum and brother think I am deranged: having spent the better part of a month in the ICU of various hospitals, and having watched my father die in one, we were part of that drama, albeit with worse lighting. I think I watch to make sure that parts of me still hurt. To make sure that I haven't lost myself completely. To remind myself that it wasn't all a dream. Twisting the knives so I can bleed again.

I wonder: how long will this numbness last?
How bad will it be when I start to feel again?