Between

I woke up this morning at 6:30 with a 6 year old nestled against me and an 8 year old standing over me, telling me that my alarm had already gone off twice. Blurry eyed and without emotion I climbed out of bed and, with both of them velcroed to my sides, trudged downstairs. Made them breakfast. Found them socks. Snuggled a little. Put them on the bus at 7:50.

It's almost 10:30. I couldn't tell you what I've done since then.

So much of my life feels like a failure lately.

I remember being good at things. I remember being funny. I remember being a good teacher, a good student, the person people looked to for advice.

I remember being the person who sat with kids at lunch when they were all by themselves.

I don't know if anyone else remembers that me.

I looked through old pictures yesterday, trying to piece myself back together, trying to put together the story of who I was. There were no pictures from before I was about fifteen, and the ones from then paint a complicated picture. They show the person I know I was, the girl with the heart who created her own circle of comfort. But they don't show the person she was running away from, the person that was hiding inside her, the one who knew that nothing she ever did could be enough. I need to look back further to see that, and I don't have anywhere to look.

I signed up for an online memoir class yesterday. I wrote in my journal more than I've written in it in the past year. I also spent way too much time on facebook, searching for ghosts, for names of people who I only remember, who I tried not to remember for years, who almost certainly don't remember me.

And I don't even know what I was spending too much of this morning doing.

I feel like right now I'm in between. I feel like nothing in the world is going to make sense right now and it's painful. I don't know where I'm going and I'm not even sure where I am. But for now, I want to keep writing. I think that's where all the answers are.