When There Aren't Words to Say

“Bless your heart.”

In the span of our minute-long conversation, my coworker repeats this phrase a good five times at minimum. I had hoped that my brief explanation would move her along, but she lingers by my desk, continuing to talk and sprinkle that phrase in. I start to wonder if there’s some kind of countersign I need to utter in order to satisfy her, but my mind has never been so blank as it is now. What can I possibly say without betraying my anger and sorrow? I finally give a general “thank you”—for the condolences, or maybe for her kind words trying to spin this in a positive light, or maybe for some other thing that I’m unaware of and thus not actually grateful for—and at last she leaves.

The conversation, despite its brevity, shakes me, my focus splattering everywhere like a too-small puddle obliterated by a rock dropping into it. I can’t bend my mind back to my work, to reorienting myself to this place after three days off (plus a weekend) when I was supposed to be gone for four weeks minimum.

My surgery was scheduled for last Thursday, and then I got a horrible cold and had to postpone it. So I stayed home to recover physically and prepare myself mentally. The time off was actually nice, that is until Sunday rolled around; I slept in late and then woke up groggy and grouchy and dreading the Monday ahead of me, and that grouchiness has slid into Monday itself.

There isn’t much left to do after that 9:40am conversation, aside from wait the day out and try to find some feeble way to occupy my mind. It’s difficult to focus, tho; I left my notebook and planner at home on accident, and that absence adds to the lack of focus, to the sense that I am untethered and just sort of floating in a murk. Or that I am a dispersed puddle rapidly evaporating in the heat of the late-spring sun.

In the afternoon, I’m talking to someone else when another coworker approaches. Her grandma died yesterday, and the bank has frozen access to the grandma’s bank account. The coworker’s family needs to access that account because they have bills to pay, but it will take weeks to get account access sorted out with the bank. I listen, try to find a higher-up who may be able to help with emergency funds, and then soon after that, I leave. I don’t want to stick around to make the situation more awkward and terrible, particularly since I don’t know this other coworker all that well. She already got one unsolicited hug, accompanied by a variety of pitiful stares. And her immediate concern doesn’t seem to be the dead grandma, it’s the lack of access to money. So I express my sympathies (I’m sorry you’re in this situation, and I hope it can get sorted out soon), and I leave.

I’ve already had one person linger longer than they needed to; I don’t need to pass the anti-favor on to someone else.

Sometimes there aren’t words to say. So instead of dragging things out, it can mean more to just goddamned leave.