Challenging Constants - An old entry

I slept on the couch for most of the night with a gray blanket and a kink in my thigh. Dreamed of telling recycled jokes about starlets and feeling like a fraud. I must have been in your city. Trying too hard. I woke up in a sweet ether of natural rousing, still dreaming of square footage and Spanish coved doorways. How many charming accoutrements equal a happy home?

Rushed my mother to the hospital for a heart attack and about 5 hours later we finally get home, I couldn't stand one more minute of that CNN bullshit anyhow. Back to the couch to watch a movie and its a slow comedy (is this what they mean by dramedy?) and I’ve plenty of time to spell with one mind and watch with the other. Eight letters, ten. And an insatiable need to make imaginary words in this imagined game. Focus on the challenging consonants. All the pay off is in the difficult to place. I have believed this my whole life. I guess it beats watering the garden and pulling weeds.

More scrabble on my laptop, I spell out the future. Stay. Go. Travel. Make a home. Run away. Trust. Sabotage. Risk. Relief. Sacrifices. Returns. Begin. Really begin to be happy. Same old shit.

Holding my breath, the lack of oxygen begins to distort and confuse my thinking. I know we need to get back to the top, but it’s hard to feel rational down here, hell you can walk outside and the turmoil is everywhere. It’s hard to remember how it feels to breathe and why we ought to fight for it.Topside, I’ll remember. I always remember and it always feels even better than the last first big breath. I decide that volunteering is just what I need to keep doing, work through the pain. Things will get back to normal soon enough.

It occurs to me, recently, that I am Not Getting Any Younger. Maybe I never hoped for anything that audacious, but I certainly believed in a sort of pause. A timeless continuity. Other than Lessons Learned, how have I aged a dozen years in as few as 5? How am I not the exact same dusty girl who tumbled back in from the world five and a half years ago. Almost six, if you want to know, but I hate to write that.

Home with the parents. The thing about coming home is that it settles around you like unset cement. The habits and the safety, the Things you accrue. And the weeks or months in which you meant to leave, stay and grow unwieldy around you, into a year and now I am thinking and thinking: There’s a finite amount of time for adventures. For actively choosing a life and rushing in to it. Not everyone gets free.

It’s raining again like cherry blossoms hatching. Like it will never, ever stop, just a constant drizzle. And I am considering wet shoes and grinning cheek bones in the coffee shop, eavesdropping and worrying about the hearts of the people I love. Worrying about the women, for whom you can have a world of respect and admiration and still not know well enough to comfort. Women who don’t need comfort. Times are hard all around. And still we all keep going toward so many better ends. We might be the luckiest people who ever lived and never know it.

Headlong into a second cup of coffee, the one you never need, I am thinking over and under it all (like another multi-tasked word game) about the scent of oranges and where they grow. There’s only so much time left to waste. And you can make it anywhere you wish it to be, you just have to make up your mind to waste it.