thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds

{10:15am submission for the day}

today was a dark day.
i've never been in a state like this before where i was completely incapacitated by anxiety. i have always been able to ride out the storm. plant my feet. take faith. but the resilience was gone somehow and i was left to my ineffectual attempts to cry away the heaviness of spirit.

it took me two hours to make it out of bed, three before i could gather up any motivation to find food for myself and a little over four hours before i could deal with anything resembling productivity without melting down into tears.

9am - sitting on the toilet, peeing and i start crying.
9:02 am - i go back to bed and cry some more.
10am - trying to wrap up some little things for a care package for a good friend and suddenly i'm holding my tub of colored tissue paper and ribbon and crying again.
10:30am - talking on the phone to a friend and crying.

let me repeat, i am not like this.
ever.
even in the midst of the breakup of the relationship that to this day had held the most {yet false} promise, i never was like this.
it felt like someone had died, except that no one had.

11:30am
the turning point was an unexpected call from my father. he lives in rural austria. i haven't seen him since winter of 2003. this is too long, even given the tumultuous {read: worst two weeks of my life. no joke} nature of my last visit. we've had conversations here or there throughout the last five and a half years, but nothing major. my mother is the conduit through which most of our relationship passes and that has maintained the peace.

but today he calls. and he calls to talk to me. his friend searched me on facebook and he had seen me there earlier in the day. immediately i thought of my status update: today is a dark day and somehow understood he had seen that and was checking in with me, but he had just seen my headshots and wanted to say how elegant i looked in them.

something about his honesty about the photos and my inability to hold myself together at all lead to the clearest thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds of communication between us that our phone call ended up lasting. the words that came to mind throughout the call were: he is caring for me. finally. without any fanfare. without any request or anything. he even used those same words when we were saying goodbye. it's nice to care for you. it was cut short as he offered to call one of his friends in seattle to see if i could go over and be cared for in person, which i definitely needed.

it was an effortless exchange and it was the nudge i needed to start my way to feeling better. i could then get up, do some laundry, take out the trash and recycling and feed myself and pay bills. i don't think i cried any more until i walked in to the house of my father's friends {i consider family, actually}.

i entered and found them calmly waiting for me to leave my house when i should have been arriving at theirs, get stuck in traffic, walk in twenty-five minutes late, which, at this point meant i was teary eyed, frazzled and trailing a black cloud behind me on a leash of piano wire. he hugged me for a long time. it was perfect and in place of my dad who couldn't do so himself, though i know he would have today, and probably a lot of other days in the past five and a half years.

it ended a much better day, and when i was leaving their house, i got the news that we're just waiting on one more call to go through to confirm the below as the view from our next apartment. breathe, nathania, breathe.