Five years ago, W. was president again, PJP II had passed, the first face transplant went down in France, and I was single. I wasn’t struggling with it in any conventional sense, and I wasn’t miserably lonely – quite the opposite. Life had taken on a comfortable rhythm post divorce- running 5 nights a week, Law & Order marathons, “Welcome to Moe’s!”, a goal set and met of a 5k a month, peppered with kind friends and mini adventures. Maybe not your cup of tea, but it was mine, and it. Was. Delicious.

While my debt (*cough* thanks ex husband *cough*) had me working a second job a couple of nights a week, I had few complaints. My affordable 2 bedroom, 1.5 bath apartment was in a bustling and alive part of town, and it was painfully charming with its squeaky hardwoods, eat in kitchen and spacious back deck — ideal for writing under a canopy of leaves, among screaming squirrels and birds.

My rub with relationships then wasn’t a source of panic or frustration or desperation – it was one of annoyance and whybotheritis. I’d met and spent time with smart and wonderful men, they just didn’t fit me and I didn’t fit them.

Cut to: my seester.

My seester with a brain as giant as her overly generous heart, with her masters in forensic psychology and her multiple life-coach certificates. My sister, who always has time for one of my rambling ranty calls from across the continent.

As we spoke one afternoon, I imagined her in her LA garden surrounded by bougainvillea and under the orange tree near the guest cottage/her office.

“Go to your happy place.” she said, and I nearly choke-laugh which really isn’t that funny since I’m pretty sure I was driving at the time. “Do you have one? Maybe a park? Maybe a diner? Go there. Go there and bring paper with you and a pen – this can’t be done on a computer, there’s something primal and healing about the depression a pen makes in paper.”

I’m skeptical but intrigued and then skeptical some more, because I feel like there’s a hidden camera in the mix somewhere and I’m about to make a complete fool of myself.

“Make a list.” she tells me. I may have scrunched my nose or rolled my eyes or both.

“Make a list of what the perfect mate looks like – and I don’t mean physical attributes though a few of those are fine, too. I mean what kind of person are they?”

I’m at a loss, and I flashback to a seminar class I had in high school where there were no right or wrong answers but I still felt like every one I could conjure up was not only complete stinky BS, but also horribly wrong.

As if feeling the trepidation rattle in me via our shared DNA, she throws one out one of hers to get me started: “He walks up behind me at the kitchen sink on a Saturday morning when I have rat-nest hair and yuck mouth and tells me I’m beautiful and I believe him.”

“Oh shit,” I remember thinking, “that’s good. I’m using that.” She throws a few more at me and we hang up with the “I love you’s” we’ve been saying for thirty years.

Two days later on my lunch break I head to a park near my office with a blanket, my pen and one of my trusty yellow tablets. I’m still looking around for a suspicious van loaded with zoom lenses ready to capture my idiocy, and embark on the task reluctantly. The next thing I know there are 5 pages of requirements: heartfelt and goofy, they’re representative of things I’d had and never wanted again, things I had and wanted again, things I’d never had.

A few weeks passed and I’d already forgotten the list, the exercise, the trauma of waiting to show up on AFV or a list of Darwin Award nominees when I met The Mc at a social event. I watched from a distance…kind. Confident without being cocky. Laughed openly and freely. Handsome.

There were several weeks of awkwardness that followed before I gave him the nudge he needed to ask me out, and when he did I had circled back around to the list – I was armed and ready with my modern day Santa/cookie demands.

Some might say “the rest is history”, but I usually try not to be that big of an ass hat.

The 4 ½ years since haven’t been all ice cream and cool ocean breezes with sizzling sunsets, and the fact is I have no guarantee the he won’t grow weary of my shenanigans a month from now and kick me to the curb (though I don’t think he will). What I do know is it’s pretty great, and that having the list was no coincidence.

If you’re having a hard time wrapping your brain around it, humor me a bit longer and let me hit you with an analogy. When you need a new pair of jeans, where do you go? Knowing that we each have our own answer, I ask you next, where would you go if you’d never had a pair of jeans. If you’d never SEEN jeans? If you’d never even HEARD of jeans? You might end up at U-Haul rental or a florist or a recycling center. Right? Because you don’t even know what you’re LOOKING FOR.

Same deal.

So just now, I’m writing all this out for you on a yellow tablet in another of my happy places, with a sliver of Sunday morning sun sneaking through the cracks of two tall buildings. The sun is finding its way to my pale, rickety legs while I sip coffee and worry about you.

I’m writing this in case you’re lonely and trying to make something or someone fit that doesn’t. I’m writing it for you in case you’re lost and frustrated.

I’m writing it for us – that we might appreciate what we have or have not, as a reminder that if we focus, if we breathe, if we have patience – we will find what we’re looking for…if we know what we’re looking for.

In the last month, I’ve lost my step grandfather and my pseudo mother in law. It’s been both a heart wrenching and brilliantly beautiful couple of weeks – filled with unexpected trips (to Seattle and South GA) and family reunions. Brimming with celebrations of long lives, surrounded by unseasonably beautiful weather, and riddled with cloaked lessons.

“With every goodbye we go to seed again, this is how we come to make family from strangers, this is how we learn ‘always’, we are candles lit from each other.”

I’ve butchered a poem that held me enraptured in my teenage years, one that resonated with me and made my bones vibrate with an understanding of grief I didn’t realize anyone else was capable of. Here it’s like cheap beef stew meat in a styrofoam boat – still delicious but not nearly as much as if you’d been given the entire mess of meat to do admire.

Just the same, the words are still there. Sixteen years since I lost my mother, fourteen since I lost my father. Now I stand on the sidelines of life’s gymnasium – watching people I love find their rhythm in the dance of the mourning. I’m just the awkward girl with the glasses, the lazy eye and the ill-fitting dress, they’re the football quarterbacks trying to figure out what to do with their hands and attempting to look relaxed.

We all suck at this. We’re supposed to. It’s not supposed to be easy or come naturally, it’s supposed to ravage us and spin us around, and when we get our equilibrium back in check, when we can focus on the horizon again without tipping over, we’ll see a present there with pretty little bow.

If there’s one gift those I’ve/we’ve recently lost have graciously and silently granted, it’s their example of this: live. Work hard, and live the life you want to live.

Bill spent the last 20 years on a lake almost every day, fishing. He shared his passion and his love with his grandchildren, his friends, and his wife of 60 years. Karleen spent the last 16 years cooking, baking, visiting with friends and family, and driving her sister half mad (*giggle*). She died in the same house she was born in – the house her father built, on the farm he owned and worked, and it was exactly how she wanted it to be.

While I’m still trying to figure out how to balance the greedy “want” from the soul filling, world rewarding “want” and what that means for my actions, activities, hobbies, etc., I’ve found yet another quote to pin to my mental lapel (in hopes others will see it even without seeing it):

“I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.” – Ernst Fischer

Four years ago he sweated through one shirt and changed into another before heading to my place. Four years ago we walked our way through my (now our) neighborhood to three different venues: a glass of wine with his body turned away from me while I vomited up everything that might eventually scare him away, dinner half a mile away where au jus dripped down my arm like a savage and finally a nightcap at the Irish bar which needs no additional detail.

Four years ago it all started unraveling and unfolding, neither of us knowing how much our lives – and we – would change, how much we’d stay the same.

Thank you for four wonderful years, Mc – you’re up for sainthood this time next year.

The last time I was there, it was overwhelming. With every turn, I saw a fresh, familiar shock of white hair and thought “that could be him. Maybe all the shit became too much and he faked his long, slow, painful death to reclaim his life.”

Knowing he didn’t, of course. I’m mental, but I’m not completely mad.

Still. There he was: everywhere. My trip was one of heritage seeking. Of standing where he stood, of taking deep gasping breaths outside the building where he took his first. Standing in front of the building where he slid down the banister and broke the glass door at the end of his short, thrill riddled trip. Standing at his parents grave, where the etched letters in his fathers name disappearing, while his mothers were never bothered with.

This time, less so. They say you only have one first time, just as they say you can never go home…and that you never stop missing the ones you’ve loved and lost.

I can corroborate all of the above with one single trip and attempt to find him again.

Time alone on a quiet lake, cutting through the water in the silence and wind. Watery eyes that could be the result of the nip in the air or the happiness spilling out. Changing leaves marking the passage of time and showering you fairy tale style with another gust of wind.

Day trips to the mountains are such a tease.

I’ve made a number of bad decisions in my life, some attributable to youth and ignorance, but more are attributable to a simple sense of mortality.

As a child, an adolescent and later a teen, my father would jest “I’ll be surprised if you live to see 30.” As children we’re apt to do with adults, I believed him. He was wise and knowing with the touches of grey at his temples and his big, round, smiling, baby blue eyes.

I have a picture of me in a box somewhere I’ve lost track of, I’m curled up and passed out on his chest in my wee footy pajamas. We were on one of the overstuffed brown leather chairs in our living room, and around us you can make out the red shag carpet, the wood (not wood panel) walls and a few artifacts only family members would recognize. In the picture my father is also K.O.ed – with a book in his hand, and me draped across his shoulder and side like a well worn blanket.

I was a clumsy child (still am. Both clumsy and a child.), which to an outsider may have been what sparked the comment, but it wasn’t. I ran through life with wild abandon and reckless enthusiasm. Through my 20’s – after he left me – I did more of the same. I was at life’s Suck Buffet, trying a little of everything: dating/marrying men who didn’t respect me, spending too much money on things that didn’t matter, jogging/walking solo at night on dark city streets in questionable neighborhoods. Mostly though, I ran from ghosts.

I finally turned 30 and held my breath. With eyes clamped shut so hard my nose wrinkled, I peeked with one eye, hoping I’d see it coming. I didn’t, and next came 31, and 32 and 33. I was still waiting for it. When I found my first lump/got the flu/had a toothache I though it was his prophecy. It wasn’t, and I came to understand this: I’m wrong a lot.

What the lump was, what his joke turned scar was, is this: a point of clarification. Live with intent. Choose carefully. Be kind – to yourself and to others.

I listened, though the truth is I’m still waiting for “it”, 6 years after 30. It’s lingering around like that final utility bill from years ago that hasn’t caught up to you yet but remains in limbo, angry and unpaid.

Until it tracks me down, I’ll be out here somewhere. Chasing dreams, smiling so big you can probably count my nose hairs and going on measured but daring adventures. I frequently imagine my father peeking out from around corners at the most perfect times and winking.

I get it.

I’ve been in what is admittedly more than likely a hormone induced funk the better part of the week. The trouble with hormones is that you can’t reason with them. Hell, I don’t even recognize them most of the time. I’ve gone through this once a month for almost twenty years and I’m still surprised at the wave of blues that washes over me every month. “What was that all about? Ohhhhhhhh right.”

Estrogen influenced or not, my thoughts have fallen off the path I like to keep them on. The well traveled trail of positive thinking and high energy antics, with roots strategically placed to trip over with names like “love” and “God” and “friends” and “ego”. No no. No path. I’ve been out in the bushes peeing in a patch of poison ivy.

Tonight a little Boy Scout came along with a cup of hot chocolate and helped me find the path again. And the funny thing? I was on it. I was exactly where I need to be, exactly when I needed to be there.

In an hour of listening over wine and gourmet nibbles, a stranger inspired me and made a mark that won’t fade with time. He called me out on the voice in my head, validated my belief in the good of humanity and made me think again.

I can haz a muse?