I didn’t get laid off today.

But 1000 of my friends and colleagues did. And my heart is broken. 

I’ve been there.

Downsizing, they call it.

Restructuring.

But it all amounts to the same thing: uncertainty.

It’s “business.” It’s not “personal.” 

Oh, but it is. It’s food, and shelter, and child care, and medicine, and music, and so many things were not supposed to care about. (You have your health, right?)

Oh, its’ very personal. And I’m trying to heal in the only way I know how.

With sun. 

Earth.

Air.

Water. 

Crying by the lake as I walk the trails. Letting the sun scorch my winter skin. Letting too-warm-for-Spring air blow flower petals into my hair where they are now hopelessly stuck in a tangle of neglected curls.

Watching geese glide across still water; the neighborhood kids turning cartwheels on golden dandelion-covered lawns. 

Breathing the scent of spring and then the unwelcome whiff of an all-too familiar cologne on a passerby.

Nostalgia comes flooding back in a sticky wave of Davidoff’s Cool Water cologne. (Why do they even make that shit anymore?) 

In my overly sensitive state, I’m transported to 1996 dance floors clouded in the stuff. 

To mornings of waking with it stale on my own skin. 

To the company I worked for back then and how they broke my heart so many years later when they closed their doors.

And I don’t know who I’m crying for anymore.