Don't Cry For Me, Argentina

It's funny how when you're grieving, your friends all start to cluck at you.
Cluck cluck cluck they say, and all you can do is shrug your shoulders, because you don't speak chicken.
And come to think of it, you weren't even aware that your friends were fluent.
Some of them are blowing the bull's balls, and some are dispensing the sagest advice you'll ever receive, but you hear none of it.

Suppressed sadness is like a head full of bubble wrap. You'll do anything to keep those bubbles from popping. You hold yourself really still. You spend whole days just trying not to blink.
Kind friends will try to help you in the cause.
One friend looked at her bookshelves and carefully edited her selection for me - the Daniel Pearl story was left on her shelf, judged unfit for a broken heart.
Another friend gently pried my copy of Love Story from my hands and put in The Waterboy instead.
Another, miles away, wrote an email that ended with Come home to your friends. And I wanted to, badly. I wanted to be where I last felt really loved.
And that's when I realized my friends were carefully wrapping my heart up in the bubble wrap as well.

They're keeping it safe for me. They're protecting it from the bumps and bruises that I subjected it to.
I am an unfit keeper for my own heart.

So when I plug myself into Liz Phair, I wonder, is this safe? And when I attempt to reread The Hotel New Hampshire, I think to myself, is this approved? And as I popped in Evita, I thought, surely this will be okay?

But I don't know. I don't know how to help myself.

All I know is that in this life, we choose our attitudes. We make that choice every day.
So if I walk around in a daze for 23 hours of the day, I don't dwell on it. Instead, I think about those 10 seconds that lifted me out of it - the billboard on the way home that said Feeling droopy? Try our soupy!, or the little old man who had a walker decorated in Beauty and the Beast decals.

If I have a choice, then I choose happiness.
I'm working overtime to pump some positive energy back into my life.
I'm too numb for anything else. My heart is wrapped up so tightly that even I can't get to it anymore.
So if you think I owe you an explanation, I don't.
If you think I haven't bared my soul today, maybe it's true. But if you came to Kill the Goat looking for group hugs and sniffles, you came to the wrong place.
A strong woman lives here.
And if a tear or two slip out, they won't be for me.
They'll be for Argentina.