Well here I am again sitting here in a coffee shop on a rainy Saturday night feeling a bit sorry for myself. Nothing new there. One of the consequences of enforced marital seperation is a sense of dislocation, of drift, of emotional deadness that only those who have been there can begin to understand. Four years on those feelings are as prevalent as ever, more so perhaps as they are more ground in now, more entrenched. Just as painful also. As with bereavement, which this state resembles in more ways than one, people expect you to have "gotten over it" by now and to have "moved on". Such people have probably never experienced either, at least not at close quarters, otherwise they would banish any such ideas from their mind. The phrase "move on" has to be one of the most singularly galling anyone in my position can encounter...my advice to anyone ever tempted to trot it out in conversation with someone facing wrenching or devastating change/crisis in their life is to keep it to themselves...it will rarely be helpful (even if reasonable) and at its worst can cut like a rapier. Moving on carries with it the assumption of hope for the future and often those to whom it is addressed are too raw to think of one..yes we all must, and do, move on but we do it at our own faltering pace and in our own broken way. There is no one size fits all for moving on , as with most things in life...and like many perfectly obvious and logical ideas it must carefully and painfully negotiate a tangled mass of damaged emotions and ragged feelings before it can become any sort of reality. As I sit here in this coffee shop I have moved on in time but my mind and emotions lag inconveniently and resolutely behind...perhaps some day soon they will catch up. I am not yet ready to "move on".