A Brief Essay on Zombie Love

I’m in a bad place right now. 

 Not literally, I’m actually sitting outside.  It’s a beautiful evening and I have a glass of wine, a cigarette burning beside me and the luxury of allowing myself to momentarily have a bad attitude.  The past few weeks have been so crazy and I feel a little traumatized.  But I have a pen and a notebook.  I might not be able to write the story I want to write right now, but I can write something.  

So I’m going to try.

In moments like this, I am acutely aware how very full my emotional basket is and I worry that one more thing will make it too heavy to carry, that it will start to drag me down.  Unlike my little worry basket, I can never hide this one away.

One of the amazing friends I’ve been blessed with in life gave me the phrase ‘emotional basket’, many years ago, and I’ve often thought about it.  I’ve come to realize that every time life scars you, that scar takes up a little room in your basket.  Like actual scars, they fade as time heals them (unless you keep picking at them) but they never really go away.

But some of us…well, we get a lot of scars. Deep scars, that take up a lot of room in our baskets and don’t heal without massive keloids that will never fully go away.  Scars from battles we didn’t chose to wage, like watching someone you love in a hospital bed getting a chemotherapy drip even though they know they are losing the fight.  Like knowing someone you love has a serious problem that you can’t help them fix. Like losing a parent, or a friend, or a child. Like having a kid with special needs.*

There are people in the world who have experienced horrors I can’t even imagine.  There are people starving, there are people who have no homes, no jobs, in countries ravaged by war.  There are people out there who have no way to take care of themselves or the people who depend on them.  These people don’t have the luxury of sitting outside with a wine and an attitude problem.  I know this, I know ever moment of ever day exactly how lucky I am.  But tonight, the weight of my basket is disproportionate to the amount of strength I have left.  And there is very little in this world that I hate more than feeling weak.

So what do I do?  How do I get my strength back?

Aside from trying to find peace in the bottom of a bottle (it’s never there - but I valiantly keep checking) and paying exorbitant amounts of money to needlessly blacken my lungs I retreat into the Zombie Genre.  As I write this a particularly gruesome episode of The Walking Dead is mutely playing on a loop in front of me and very few people can understand why I find such peace in watching savage disembowelment, so I’ll tell you.

It’s simple, really.  Life is beautiful in Black and White.

There is something so elegantly satisfying about having an absolute villain.  The Zombies are bad but they can be fought and their motives are absolutely clear.  They don’t play head games, they don’t sneak around their main objective, they want to eat human flesh. Period.  If you can prevent them from eating you, then you win. Period.  No shades of grey.

It’s not like real life.  

Where a teacher, who is probably a decent human being, screams at her class and terrifies your blind kid to the point that he never wants to go to school.  Where you have to question your own judgement about even having him in a school with sighted kids, who might be nice kids - but are quite mean to him because he can’t see.   Where another surgery is looming, and you just don’t know if you can go through it again.  Where you are so tired of hearing how strong you are because in your heart you know that you’re just one scar away from being able to carry your own basket.

So I watch people getting their faces ripped off by Zombies.  I admire the special effects.  I plan how I would keep myself and mine alive.  I let myself drift away on a river of blood and gore.  For a little while, I can pretend like a world I can control exists.  When I come back to this world, and look at my son, my family, my accomplishments - my basket is somehow lighter or maybe I feel stronger.

So, tomorrow, I’ll be able to get up, drag my kid to school, go to work, run my errands, do the laundry, cook dinner, get the homework done, get through another day, grateful that no one is trying to bite my face off.  And maybe I’ll even have time to get on with the story that I really want to write.  

But for now, please excuse me.  I have an apocalypse to get back to.

* Ok, so I decided not to replace the term ‘special needs’ with ‘fucked-up’.  However, I am trying to come up with an alternative though, because anytime someone says ‘special needs’ I kinda wanna go Zombie on them.