About a year ago, my mother recited the most recent Mobile, AL gossip to me during one of our daily conversations. It seems tragedy is constantly plaguing the people with whom I grew up. That week, a girl my baby brother had gone to school with had lost her mother to a tragic, sudden death. When the daughter had entered the mother's wake, she had dropped dead from a heart-attack herself brought on by actual heart break.

Yesterday, I learned that a girl with whom I went to school was currently mourning the death of her mother. The mother had been diagnosed as bipolar, and at one point in my years in Bama, had broken into houses in their neighborhood and cooked breakfast in each of them. Her husband had stayed with her until the children were both in college, and then he had left her for another woman. The story of her breaking into the house was rather humorous to a teenager. I remember joking with my mother that if I ever became manic, I'd prefer to shop lift from Barney's like Winona Ryder. Unfortunately, I can't have the same light heartedness over pain and suffering as an adult. The mother was found with a broken neck at the bottom of her stairs. Apparently, she'd attempted suicide a week beforehand, and then thrown herself to her own death at the bottom of the stairs.

My blood pressure has not gone down. I'm 26-years old and according to the 3 readings a day I've taken on my $77 blood pressure monitor, I'm experiencing hypertension 1. My heart hurts... possibly from the anxiety of worrying and possibly from a bigger issue that's not been diagnosed. I found myself looking towards these tragedies to put myself to sleep last night through tears of most likely self-inflicted pain. I suppose that to die at 26 with a decent life and good friends and a loving parents, having only experienced the death of 2 grandparents and 1 dog, wouldn't be such a bad thing. It'd certainly save me the pain that life seems to cause. Not that I'm suicidal, just trying to escape the anxiety by looking at the bigger picture.