Broken Doll

Monday I hosted a Full Moon ritual, a small part of which was a meditation where we called to Diana and asked her to sit with us a spell, and give us a few words of wisdom if any were especially appropriate. She said to me, “You can weather this storm” — not too thrilled but not too surprised to hear of a storm coming. I made jokes — nice to know that I can weather the storm, but really I’d rather there not be a storm to weather in the first place…

I assumed I knew what storm she spoke of. After last weekend, it being so intense, I figured on needing some major debriefing with David which may get too intense to be comfortable. But days pass and he’s not returning my calls, and this conversation in my head morphed into a it-hurts-me-when-you-cut-me-off kind of conversation. And I couldn’t really figure out how to fit both of these things into the same conversation without having it completely blow up in my face. Either one of them alone was capable of doing that.

And it was a week full of petty frustrations — the cold, the ice on the sidewalk making it virtually impossible to walk to the train without getting hurt, corporate stupidity at work. Add in a major case of sub-drop early in the week and most days there was at least one point where I was very close to tears.

But then Friday comes and I am handed a storm of an entirely different sort. Late in the afternoon my co-worker pokes his head in my cube and asks “Did you hear about the shooting?” And I think in that sort of abstract way, how horrible, what makes people do that?

The address didn’t register. It wasn’t until the corporate admin department sent a company-wide email warning that train service at the Ogilvy Transportation Center was shut down due to the shooting that I realized what it meant.

It’s the building where David works.

I can’t really describe what that kind of panic feels like. All those stupid clichés — blood running cold, heart dropping — are true and more. And worse. For a moment there was no ground under me to hold me up.

I jump to my phone and he answers and I breathe again. He’s okay, he says, eighteen floors away from the shooting, and the ground is back under my feet. He makes a joke about really needing to go to the bathroom, since they’ve been in lockdown for over an hour and no one can enter or leave their suite. I worry, not knowing if the gunman was still wandering around looking for someone to hurt.  I tell him to take care of himself and that I’d call back in a little while.

He’s fine and he handled the whole thing with near-perfect aplomb. He went home that night and worked. I went home that night and tried to chase away all the “what ifs” running through my head with a run.

My early-week complaints now seem ridiculously petty — almost selfish. I thought I would have one or both of those conversations with him when next I saw him, but all I said, all I wanted to say, was that he’s not allowed, ever, to get shot.

And at the same time it leaves me wondering if I shouldn’t be saying the things I’ve been keeping to myself. I’ve been telling myself that I shouldn’t push him, that we have time to get to it later, and now that feels a lot less certain.