I broke down. It’s spring, silent and still outside. The world has stopped working. Yet, I keep running. Running even faster than I was before all this happened. It’s like the world has collapsed and I did not get the memo. I want this to stop. It must. The world as we knew it, does not exist. It will never be the same. I want to sit still and absorb all that is happening, or not happening in fact. I want to change things so we adapt to the new. I want to drain out my anxiety and make room for love. I want to just hold this moment still and let it know that I am giving up. I am surrendering. But none of that happens. I am living in the pretense of everything being the same. I want to show myself that I am resilient.

I fail. I succumb. I withdraw. I only want to survive. Nothing more. Can this just be a dream? I want to go back to my life.

I held it all together, until I heard that my friend lost his Mom. The walls came down crumbling. The vacuum chamber I was living within exploded. And I was there – barely breathing. In a meeting, where everything that was happening was by magnitudes less important than me running over and giving my friend a hug. Sharing a tearful chat with him. And giving him hope. And that’s when I broke.