Today I went to the hairdresser. I am sitting there in front of a giant, well lit mirror trying to avoid looking at myself while this chatty little thing snips and tugs at my hair, telling me all about her relationship which had ended a few weeks before. They'd been together 6 years and shared a 3 year old daughter. He had cheated on her.
Tonight she's meeting a guy she's been talking to on Tinder and she gets that twinkle in her eye and smile on her lips when she talks about him.
And I wonder how she does that. It's been 6 years since I split up with my husband and yes, there's been a couple of short lived relationships but they've all been low burners.
How do you throw yourself back into that frying pan with such joyful abandon? I am jealous of her optimism. I realise I'm looking at her like I've just discovered some new, strange species of bug and pick up my phone to look at instead.
Later, I'm scrolling through Facebook and a headline I don't understand inspires me to click. It's about a man who strangles his pregnant wife in their bedroom after an argument. He's cheating on her which makes him paranoid that she's cheating on him. As he's wrapping up her body their 4 year old daughter walks in. She starts crying as he drags the body downstairs and this wakes up their 2 year old.
He takes his dead wife and his daughters in his flatbed truck to the quarry where he works. He then suffocates his children one by one with their comfort blankets and stuffs them all into oil containers.
My soul is a mess. I don't want to make it all about me but the parallels make my skin prickle.
I havnt thought too much about that morning in the past few years. In the past 2 weeks for one reason or another I've had to retell it several times and now this. How easy this could have been our story if my son had walked in 5 minutes later than he did. My little 3 year old superhero saved me, maybe saved himself and his little sister too.
I read this story and I remember my own and while there are feelings of sorrow for theirs and fear for mine the overall emotion is rage.
Rage at the arrogance of them to think it's their right to take life away. Rage at the injustice, rage at pointlessness of it, rage. Just rage.
It's the fire that's fuelled me for a while now and I need to find a way to dampen it because it burns through all the good stuff too and I want to meet someone who makes my eyes sparkle and my lips lift in a little smile when I talk about them.