Wish I were here
The universe hasn’t done a whole lot to kick my ass this week. There’s your gratitude journal entry of the year. Yay!
Other than one ongoing annoyance (OK, two), I’ll call this week a success. There are more pluses to outweigh the negatives, although it’s not hard to find two (OK, three) good things over the span of seven days!
I awoke today with an odd sense of familiarity — a shocker since I’ve still not unpacked and I’m living on bare essentials. Like, I don’t know, maybe I’m not going to move in another four months and it’s OK to feel comfortable where I am right now.
The morning was uneventful till I got a call from Maddie’s groomer — I’d called them to see if they could get the fleas out of her fur. They were unavailable at the time but I’d told them to call me in a couple of months, as I’d make sure to get her shaved regularly.
She died two days after I’d made that call, so hearing from them today threw me for a fucking loop. I walked to Starbucks to get a soy pumpkin spice latte, but I would much rather have preferred making a beer run had it not been 10 a.m. and the lunch places hadn’t yet opened.
“It was almost fine
You were almost mine
And from town to town
We chased it down
On a broken white line.“Looking in your eyes
Was just like staring at the sun
Always thought that I’d go blind
Or end up all undone“And in the end I turned my face away
From where you shone so bright
Now I wake in all this darkness
Crying for a little of your light.”— Kris Delmhorst, “Broken White Line”
Other than the two reasons why I start to wonder just how fat I’d look in the orange jumpsuit I’d have to wear for the rest of my life if I acted on my impulses, I’ve been able to retreat back into my head to times when I was loved.
I thank four of my guys for that, for being good people and being good to me then and now, when I can barely strangle out a hello.
It’s not that I remember them so much as I remember me. And I’m not even going to insult them or you, for that matter, by claiming that I had my shit together when I knew any of them, either. But it puts a certain spring in a certain girl’s step to know that once her flaws were loved as quirks, her strengths were noticed and lauded, and that she even looked beautiful when they made her feel that way.
And even if that beauty was transient or even imagined, it comes back when she sees that she was important to them. Not that she defines her worth by others, but maybe that’s the problem — that her worth is no longer lauded or visible, and her beauty is hidden and diminishing behind a very heavy cloak — and it’s so good to have those who have seen her soul to force her to remember its value and, hell, its existence.
“It’s been four years and now I find
I’ve been living all this time
I built myself a little world
Of rhythm and of rhyme“But sometimes I take your picture
And I turn it to the wall
Because you are still a cliff
And baby, I still know how to fall.”
I didn’t mean for this to get so existential. It just boggles my mind — those days when I felt I was half a person — that certain special people saw me as whole. Maybe I wasn’t in such sorry shape as I’d thought.
And now when I do feel whole, yet it feels challenged from every angle and I begin to doubt myself sometimes, I realize I just need my cheering section. And I’m glad they stepped up and realized it before I even did.
Thanks, boys. Love you all. Wish you were here. And I really do mean that.