Here it be cloudy.
Cloudy and peaceful and quiet.
I really needed this. I also really need a shower. I’ll get there. There is no rush. My legs are stubbly and my hair needs washing.
If the sun was out, I might feel more compelled to run around and do things. But this grey cocoon of mediocre weather suits me just fine today.
I have a few things I check on Facebook that set the tone for my day. Haven’t read my tarot scope and Rob Breszney was a little vague and unremarkable last week, they can’t all be diamonds.
Tomorrow is a new day with a new riddle wrapped in a horoscope to solve.
This is one of my morning tings, I shall abide.
I remember mornings like this in Milton when my kidlet was finishing high school in Toronto and we had to get him on the 8:08 train. I then had a couple hours to myself to put the house right and get to work myself.
Up at 6 in the dark of winter mornings. Stove light on, enough illumination to navigate the kitchen but not too bright. Coffee maker hissing, the clink of his spoon against a cereal bowl. Neither one of us like to talk in the mornings. Music on to break the quiet, but no conversations. Tiny dog sleeping on the couch of the library with one eye open, waiting for us to get bundled up and head towards the door. She always wanted to come with us, no matter how cold it was.
I miss her on quiet, chilly mornings like today, silent (yet insistent) snuggles keeping me in bed for a few more minutes. Her miniscule harumph of irritation when she had to go from sleeping in the bed tucked into me, to sleeping on the settee in front of the fireplace. She would watch me rebuild the fire every morning after I had tucked her into an afghan, and she’d wait while we went about our morning routine. Never in a rush to go outside that one. Preferred snuggles and naps, me too Alice, me too.
I miss that house and that life. I miss my dog too. She isn’t gone gone, she lives with her Auntie Mikah and they love each other beyond measure. It was an incredibly hard decision to let her go to a more stable life than I could currently provide, but I stand by it.
Sometimes we have to let the things we love go so they can be happy.
That is the definition of love after all.
7 years ago in July I moved into that house in the middle of nowhere with my little family. Sight unseen, I was functioning on trust and instinct.
It remains one of the best things I had ever done.
It was the jumping off point in my life where I truly started living and doing things for myself.
We are encroaching on my 7th year of being pretty much single. January something 2014 I said ‘get out’ and out he got. I am sure Facebook will let me know in my memories and I can have a small celebration. I have a feeling it is the 9th. The same day next year that I will be leaving Mexico to regroup one more time.
No regrets.
A year ago today, at this very moment I was getting in Dave’s jeep at the beginning of our 2 day journey to Florida. Another place I loved, a roof and 4 walls that represent so much change and inner peace for me. Another place that is no longer.
Jumping off points galore.
Today I mourn small losses of safe houses I no longer hold the keys to.
This is not what I intended to write when I sat down at my laptop.
I was pouring a cup of coffee half an hour ago and thought “you made your bed, go fuck in it.”
It’s a line from an episode of Weeds I watched a million years ago.
Before the car wreck punched holes in my memory, before ex-husband and the life I’d rather forget maybe. I honestly don’t remember.
Yesterday I was having a conversation with a girl I should have met a million times (but never did) about old clubs and where was I in 1999, 2004, etc. etc., ad nauseum. And reaching that far back splintered off tiny shards of memories, which popped into my head as the coffee maker hissed and spit an “I’m ready, come get me.”
Which then became clouded by the nostalgia of the clouds.
If nothing else comes of this blog, at least everyone can have a small glimpse into my strange thought processes. Maybe they aren’t strange, I have only ever thought as myself. Nothing to compare it to really. But on mornings such as this one, where I decide to write a thing and something else entirely spills out effortlessly, it becomes notable.
So what do I do now?
That is the million dollar question even though I know exactly what I would be doing if I had a million dollars.
But in this moment do I…
Keep waxing nostalgic with no point in sight? Do I let my fingers do as they please and see what happens or do I redirect my own course?
Let’s do that. The Weeds quote can wait.
I can just talk without having a point. I forget this sometimes. I do not always have to have a purpose, sometimes I can just be.
I am 4 days into a 7 day shark week. The pain has subsided, mostly (they come at night, mostly*). But I find myself fluctuating between weepy and emotionally disconnected. Like a tap I can’t adjust. Too hot, too cold, never just right. This too shall pass and the cosmic timing kinda worked out.
This was a good week to bleed.
The less I plan lately, the better things seem to work out.
“I’m not really a planner, more of a fly by the seat of my pants kinda girl.” Pretty Woman
Me too hooker Julia, me too. (Vivian, her name was Vivian)
I didn’t really get to indulge in many free falls or deliberate lack of planning when I was younger, I was someone’s mother, I had to be somewhat responsible, and being ‘homeless’ and wandering wasn’t really an option. So I am doing it now as he is poised to finally have an apartment of his very own, with no help from me and no roommates. I have experienced this, and I am living in something like it now and it is a bliss everyone should experience.
That isn’t to say I didn’t make leaps of faith, see above where I moved to the Milton house sight unseen and made a home there, found myself there, my son graduated there. Make a decision, make it work. The decision was a good one and making it work was pretty effortless after I cut the deadweight of the last ‘real’ boyfriend I’ve had. 7 years, now that is something.
Some previous leaps left me flat on my face with the wind knocked out of me, gasping for breath and thinking I might die, drowning on dry land. But eventually I catch my breath, get my bearings and get up. I don’t regret the jump, I survived the landing, but sometimes ‘making it work’ grated against my soul so hard I lost myself clinging onto things that were not meant for me. When all I really had to do was let go and fall into the next thing. It’s a human thing, we do this.
My son is actually the result of one of those leaps I took as a teenager. Packed a bag and ran far, far away. It didn’t work, but I became a mother and forever altered the course of my existence.
Farm life too. Fuckboy Island. They don’t always work out, but every decision alters my path in indelible ways, and that is okay. Everything is a gift or a lesson.
Sometimes the lesson is just give up when things stop working.
Shouldn’t need to be so fucking hard, this is life on earth**
I have eluded to another one of those life altering crossroads coming up soon, and it is. I am not 20 anymore, and this is definitely not my 84th rodeo. I can see them coming now at least.
I can go left, or right or continue on my present course. I won’t go back. Sarah in the Labyrinth.
(Author’s sidenote, I clicked out of MSWord to find the caterpillar quote from Labyrinth and somehow got sucked into a 90 minute internet surfing vortex, 3 conversations, checked my horoscope, played a few rounds of solitaire and now I am back… without the quote. Fuck my life.)
“If she’d have kept on going that way, she’d have gone straight to that castle.”
There it is.
Things I am keeping in mind as I ponder which way to go. Unless I am clear about my goal, any advice I get might be skewed to keep me safe, but ultimately get me no further ahead.
Do I want to go straight to the castle, or do I want to wander this unfamiliar labyrinth and have more adventures along the way? Do I even really have a choice in any of it?
Do I even have to solve the labyrinth?
So many questions and I am in no rush to find any of the answers. Today I can just enjoy the comforts of a cloudy day the respite the weather has given me.
The way home, this is always the way home, so you can rip that map to shreds my dear. **
*Newt, from Aliens
** Snow Patrol, Life on Earth.
And I forgot how cute that caterpillar really was.