So my daughter left and it was the hardest day of my life.  Like the hardest day so far and there have been many many hard days, but saying goodbye to your daughter when she isn’t going off to a vacation or college is not easy.  I was a failure.  I was lower than I thought I could ever get.  I felt helpless and needed something anything to grasp onto to make me feel normal again.  That same weekend I had the wedding with dreads.  We got all dressed up and headed out to a gala event that was beautiful.  I always love weddings.  The hope the faith the beauty of it all.  The promises made, the undying love that is expressed.  It is always a joyous occasion.  I felt down, but sucked it up enough to try to enjoy myself.  Dreads was fun that night, light and for the first time I saw him in a different light, but that was a fleeting moment.  As the night came to a close in came the assault of how I was and wasn’t doing things the way in which he wanted.  I got an entire lecture on the way home about my coldness, my icy exterior, Jesus what the hell do you want from me?  I was doing the best I could.  I wasn’t thinking and the next thing I knew we were having sex….in my garage.  How we ended up in my garage I’m not exactly sure, but that’s as far from the car as we got before he was throwing me up against the door and pushing himself on me.  It was hard and rough and void of feeling and I didn’t care.  It was a release of all the things I’d been going through.  When we were done there were not too many words, there was no holding or caressing, There was no you look beautiful and I can’t take my hands off you or I want to be with you forever.  There was nothing from me either.  Maybe I was heartless and unfeeling.  Maybe I was as cold as he’d been telling me.  Or maybe I was just numb.  Numb from my children and from the heartache and from the heartbreak.  Maybe I no longer could find those words inside me to say or feel.  All I knew was that I could not see dreads again.  Ever.  I didn’t care if I never spoke to him again.  I didn’t care if he thought I sucked.  I didn’t care about much.  I went into the house and when I said goodbye to him that night I knew it was goodbye forever.  I am not sure he knew it was, but he knew something was very different.  I could see it in the way he looked at me that he knew I was done.  I was gone and so was a big piece of me I could probably never get back.  I walked into my house, took off my dress got into my bed and cried.  Cried like someone had just died.  Cried that awful ugly cry you do when your shoulders shake and no sound comes out.  I cried for everything that ever went wrong in my life that night.  I cried for what felt like hours, going through everything from the minute gingham left me to the minute I said goodbye to my child.  I just cried.  And when there were no more tears that’s when I knew I could try again tomorrow.  Isn’t it strange?  When life has you at rock bottom and you know it’s rock bottom, but then something in you says, keep going.  Because there was no other choice.  Giving up on myself was never an option although at that moment I felt like I could.  Like I could fade away into nothing and no one would really notice.  As I laid there crying I got a text from jolly guy….”You’re turn”  and with that I smiled and text back “So what’s your favorite color”