There is no Great Depression. They all suck.

I am in the process of recovering from a day-long depression which erupted into a forty-five minute meltdown that is just wrapping up now.

The movie White Oleander was just on television. I caught the last hour of the film while I did housework and as the credits rolled, I felt an ambush of anguish wash over me. I read the book in Los Angeles and watched the movie when I lived with Chris in Brighton. The Santa Ana winds are an important theme in the book’s plot. I remember the winds from when I lived in L.A. They were strange and eerie in nature, warm, dry, powerful.

Chris went to a class one night, right up the street from our apartment. He was supposed to be home by 11:00pm so I drifted off to sleep at around 10:30 that night, figuring I’d wake up when he walked through the door. I awoke with a start at midnight and he still wasn’t home. I panicked, got dressed, left the apartment and ran up Fuller Ave to Santa Monica Boulevard looking for him. The winds were blowing and tree branches were strewn along the sidewalk. I developed an asthma attack along the way, due to the dry nature of the wind. I ran all the way to the studio where his class was being held but nobody was there. Chris was nowhere to be found. I ran back home, not really knowing what I would do when I got there. Ten minutes later, Chris came through the door. Class ran over an hour late and he didn’t call to tell me. We fought a bit, well not really, we bickered. I began coughing uncontrollably and didn’t stop until the next day when the doctor gave me an inhaler.

The incident horrified me. I thought Chris was dead. There had been several shootings on the very corner where his class was taking place and when he didn’t arrive home, my imagination ran wild.

Tonight, the mere mention of the Santa Ana winds squeezed a trigger in my mind and sent me on a trip into grief and anger. Hell, I was already on the edge of grief and anger since I woke up this morning. The trigger just helped me release the tension.

I miss him so much. I tried to look at pictures of him tonight but I felt no connection to his flattened likeness. I cried about his diagnosis, his cancer, the chemo, my anguish, his hair loss, his loss of control, my loneliness, my fear of unknown things to come and so many other things.

I’m happy that I am a healthy eater because I experienced a complete emotional eating binge this afternoon that consisted of beef stir-fry, a bunch of grapes and some unbuttered popcorn. A grieving widow could eat a lot worse than that. I’m still going to eat a weight watchers chocolate ice cream sandwich.

If only I hadn’t pulled that muscle, I would have gone to the boxing gym yesterday and worked all of this out of my system before it had a chance to work me over.

I’m going to return to the gym Tuesday night with a vengeance.

Watch out, muscles.

Shneed