I just finished reading this exceptionally moving novel. The author is gifted in creating characters and the art of story telling. But for me this novel reached deep in my gut and wrenched and extracted a huge emotional land mine. Kabooom! I cried so hard and so long that after I went through all the Kleenex, I gave up and got a hand towel. Poor Roy, who had to start a road trip to Utah at 5 a.m. the following morning, was woken up by my wails and spent a few hours holding me, trying to grasp WHY I was in this condition. He left still not knowing. I got two hours of sleep that night. And spent the next day mostly in bed, recovering and wondering what had just happened to me. Occasionally for me, and I suspect others, stress and unresolved feelings get stuffed down somewhere slightly below the conscience level. This time I kept stuffing and stuffing knowing that sometime I would need to pull this all out and get rid of it or deal with it. But sometimes all that careful planning goes haywire when we get hit with an undetected road side bomb. My bomb was..."A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini. As I started weeping for the beautiful story and the endearing characters, the tears just wouldn't stop and at some point I realized the tears were no longer about the book, and they just kept coming and coming. Resolution to all this: 1-It ended my writers block. Everytime I tried to blog in the last few weeks - there was nothing. Just nothing. 2- It ended the nothing. The feeling of feeling absent from everything and everybody and somehow just moving through life as a vague automaton. I feel today, mostly tired, but I FEEL. 3- No matter how many times I tell myself I'm fine, I've dealt with my fears....they like to creep back and hit me with the force of an atom blast. So...you know I think it's okay to say "This is hard for me, this frightens the heck out of me!" No matter how logical it seems to be otherwise. 4- And mostly, it reminded me even if it's great, heaving, sorrow.....it's better than a dark, endless void pulling you slowly downward. 5- No matter how many times I tell myself, "Most people are NOT like this, so stop being this way!" It doesn't change the fact that I AM like this - I feel deeply about things. From nature to dogs, from children to family, from written words to music in my heart......I FEEL DEEPLY! - and it's NOT going to change. Like the 17th century poet, who expressed his feelings about his homeland as "a thousand splendid suns", in my heart I have moons and suns casting their light and their shadows, too inumerable to count, but they make up who I am - Kate. Quote by.... 17th-century poet Saib-e-Tabrizi "One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs / Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."
