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Confession
thejanechord
Diaryland
notifylist.com
2003-04-16
9:28 a.m.
With the lifting of winter, many events have blossomed through the melting of far too many inches of snow. The arrival of spring has once again brought to mind all of the wonders generally associated with this time of year. While everyone is preparing for big, religiously-toned festivities, buying pastel dresses and white suits, picking tulips and daffodils, and eating chocolate bunnies and marshmallow chicks, the weight of death again oppresses me like an entire desert of sand that’s been piled atop my shoulders, making it physically impossible for me to breathe.
This spring, as the Charles River finally melted, the newly rushing waters churned up the body of one of the professors of music who taught at the school where I studied music as an undergraduate student. My favorite professor was quoted in The Boston Globe as saying that the man could not possibly have killed himself.
But there is doubt.
As the crowds of people return to the streets after hiding in their houses for six months of winter, I am told that one of the students at the flagship institution where I work, one of the students who my coworkers describe as “a really nice guy,” one of the students who at any moment could have easily come into the office to see me about his financial situation sits in jail awaiting an indictment or conviction for a charge of murder one.
The trees are budding, the flowers are poking their heads through the warmed soil beneath the heat of an almost unseasonably hot sun, and my allergies have decided to go absolutely crazy. I’m constantly plagued by thoughts of yet another reason I’m going to have to start going to see yet another doctor. The stress at work, on top of the allergies, on top of the tension surrounding the recent murder, on top of the recent corpse washed up in the river, on top of the stress of trying to keep up in class while trying to land a better job while doing well in the one I have all piles up on top of what is actually the root of the problem.
Good Friday.
Good Friday is the anniversary of the hit-and-run “accident” that changed my life. This year, Easter Sunday falls on the anniversary of the Columbine shooting, the shooting that occupied my mind for several years of severely exhausting obsession. My older sister is having a great deal of difficulty dealing with the death of her best friend, and there’s nothing I can do to help. My grandmother is dying a slow and painful death, while draining the philanthropic energies of both my parents.
Everything is becoming jostled together in a giant jumble of shattered nerves, leaving me stumbling home each evening in hopes that something will eventually calm me down. Then, each night, I take my sedatives before staring through unseeing eyes at the hockey playoffs I wish I could enjoy, and I go to bed to lie awake for the few moments that feel like an eternity, halfheartedly wondering what can possibly make the next day any worse.
Then it all comes back to me: every day is going to be slightly worse until the end of the week because every day is one day closer to Good Friday, my most absolutely abhorred and indefatigably despised day of the entire year.
I fucking hate Easter.
