Just Can't Stop

I can’t stop the tears. They just flow out of my eyes and stream down my cheeks and drip off my chin. I’m not sobbing. I just can’t stop the tears. The same way I just can't stop my heart.

I know it sounds silly. I mean, 6 years have gone by with no answers so it’s not really shocking when the doctor says, “There’s really not much else we can do.” But somehow it crushes my spirit anyway. It’s like I’m a balloon and all the air inside me has just been let out. I’m left wrinkly and deflated. Because I get up and I go to appointment after appointment and test after test and I hope and I hope. Maybe this time they will find evidence. Maybe this time will be different.

All that hope, wasted. Again.

I choked it all back as I sat there under his watchful gaze, willing myself not to let my eyes fill more than they already had, willing the tears not to spill over the edge of my lids. I stared at the pink poster on the wall across from me and blinked, trying to get the tears to retreat back into my eyes and I swallowed and I waited until I had control of my voice before opening my mouth to say “thank you.”

And then I made a joke and laughed like I was fine, like it didn’t matter to me when really I just wanted to cry and ask What am I supposed to do? But I already know the answer because the answer is to do what I’ve already been doing all these years.

You just go on.

Somehow you wake up every morning and you get up and just go on. You take your half-life and try to make something out of it and even though all the disappointments have weakened the walls of your hope, you blow that stupid hope-balloon back up with more hope, only you do it more carefully now. You want to hope that this time you won’t fail at living this half-life or that you will be braver or that you will start to feel better or that one of the other doctors will help, but instead you will hope these things with a little less conviction. A lot less conviction. Or maybe not at all. But no matter how weak or nonexistent your hope is, you will just keep living, the same way you just keep breathing even when it doesn’t feel like it is worth it. You will just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Because what other choice is there, really?