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

51.

51 posts. In 2009, I watched this blog crash and burn.

I started this damn thing nearly ten years ago. TEN YEARS. Back then I was writing up posts in Notepad (light coding, mind you) and FTPing up static files. I converted to Blogger. I later converted to WordPress, and spent hours in a bar with Dave and Paulie helping me fix things that broke during the move.

Somewhere in there I met The Mc, continued to heal in grueling, Kleenex abusing weekly therapy sessions, and subsequently found myself with less time to write and less things I needed to purge.

I counted a few weeks ago and found I’d only written/posted 51 times last year, as opposed to an average of 300+ in the years prior.

Unsure of what 2010 holds, I’m still thinking about the blog. I’m thinking about and missing writing, I’m thinking about and missing the things that used to make me write. I’m also thinking about all the effing self-censoring I’ve been doing that has stood in the way of writing. Oh, but the list of excuses goes on and on: the cats won’t let me sit without wanting to be petted, that I’d rather be with The Mc than write/run/walk/justaboutanythingconstructive. Twitter and Facebook which mean a shift in thinking complete coherent thoughts to thinking in 140 character summarizations. Then there’s the other mostly secret blog I’m keeping about the big thing in our life I’m still not allowed to talk about. There’s watering the plants. Doing laundry. Running errands.

Meh.

This year, despite being off to a contradictory start, I’m going to try to do better.

For me.

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.

It’s a picturesque fall day – though around me people are complaining that fall was skipped entirely and we’re in the throes of winter.

Me? I’m okay with it. Sitting outside at a coffee shop – one I used to frequent far more than I do now – with a sweater under fleece, a hot cocoa and my trusty yellow tablet (oh, how I’ve missed you). On the sheet prior to the one I’m writing on now, I’m making a list of goals for myself in 2010.

The wind is gusty, sporadic. It holds a definite nip but it’s just teasing the leaves of my tablet. Flipping up the corners of the pages I have yet to fill with scrawl and navel gazing, I’m smiling back like the village idiot at the invisible when it greets me and flushes my cheeks.

The jolts bring me into the present: to feel my skin and pay attention to the nourishment filling my lungs. To revel in the silence broken by passing cars and footsteps of people hustling in and out of the shop as if they’re outrunning a blizzard. It reminds me at 9 knots that too much time has been spent worrying about where I should be and with who and doing what, and that it leaves me empty, even when I fulfill my obligations. Even when I have fun. Noodle that, Freud.

There’s an itch on the back of my brain, it has a face and a name and a little gray body with Gumby arms and it’s clearing its throat repeatedly to get my attention and pointing at a picture of The Mc and I not spending enough time together. Correction: enough quality time. In the picture, we’ve hit our routine stride as we encroach on the 4 year mark (my God! Has it been so long already?). We come home – exhausted – share a meal and collapse. Or, many evenings, I’m out and come home to him already in his second round of dreams. Thank you, Little Mr. Itch. I needed help seeing what was right in front of me.

I imagine that most of the coupled-up, once giddy and swooning population reaches the same space, but I don’t imagine they move through it. I imagine they stay there, forever. I see it in the way their bodies don’t touch in restaurants and in the sparkle missing from their eyes in the grocery store aisle when they hand off the box of pasta to be dropped in the cart beside the Rogaine and tampons.

I don’t want that. Never have. I want romance and love and I want it to ooze out of us like an abscess partnered with a fever you’re not sure if you should be scared of or not.

Luckily, I found a man who doesn’t want it either. Of course we’re moving forward and building our future (honoring our inner adults), but we’re also recommitting ourselves to dating and affection and affirmation and being silly and playful and not taking one another for granted and embracing the good and the bad we both carry with us. There will be tudes copped and eyes rolled and groans at bad jokes but in the end there will be this: mutual respect and adoration.

Contrasting history with reality, contrasting the days I spent at that coffee shop 5 years ago, the nights and weekend afternoons of writing my way through my own rebirth after thinking I’d failed at life against the balance (but with an acknowledgment if a permanently restless soul) I’ve been given today…well, it’s really something to behold.

You actually can start over. If you want it, if you try, if you fight for it and if you stop long enough – once in a while – to visit the old coffee shop, get slapped around by a premature winter wind and listen to Little Mr. Itch.

Pen to paper, carving a depression trail filled with ink.

I ran out of time to transpose/energy it, but it’s a step in the right direction. Right?

I can’t explain what it’s like to be someone who – for most of their life, let alone adult life – has suffered from depression, manic episodes and the like. The fact is: when “bad” is all you’ve ever known, it isn’t terrifying and you don’t feel out of control. With depression, there are no expectations, so mood swings don’t surprise. Bouts of darkness are familiar and comforting, they’re the friends waiting for you at the end of the day…they’re home.

Midway through my thirties, life has stabilized. I’ve never known safety or predictability the way I do now, I’ve never known consistent love or understanding, and I’ve never known what it is to have someone/something to fall back on.

Over the past four years (two months shy) I’ve been introduced to growth in places I’d long since mourned and moved on from. I’ve learned about open communication, honesty with my own vulnerability, keeping my wings spread with my feet on firm tera… it’s unsettling.

I’ve never felt as out of control as I do when life is in control. When things are calm I’m uncomfortable, when I don’t have to worry about being abandoned or cheated or lied to or emotionally betrayed…I’m lost.

It makes no sense to those who don’t know it, how foreign and unsettling happiness can be.

When dropped in a strange town (of my own doing or someone elses) I’m most at peace – taking it all in and putting the puzzle together. What words do they use for this and what is the dress norm and how do people greet each other here are all mysteries I get to solve (and observe and romanticize) on my own. Theirs are stories or I tell or create and its all great adventures…but this?

I’m thankful beyond words…I’m just a little lost.

Next Friday afternoon I’ll board a plane for Ireland and all I can think of – besides “omgwtf I haven’t even started packing” – is “omgwtf am I doing, I’m going to die. The Mc won’t even be with me and we’ll never get to build the cabin and I still haven’t gone swimming with turtles and who will give the boys mani-pedis and and…”

I blame him completely.

Apparently nearly 4 years of being with a man who gets hives at the mere mention of boarding a plane has turned me into a ragingly unstable, paranoid lunatic.

Never having thought of myself as an easily influenced person let alone a person easily influenced via the osmosis like transmission neurosis of her partner, I am disgusted. Disgusted, disheartened, confused, lost, disturbed, a little pale though reasonably well groomed, and oh, did I mention disgusted?

My mental bags are packed. The itinerary is set, passport and car rental and plane tickets all printed and waiting to be put into a yet to be determined piece of luggage. Am I avoiding packing because I’m inexplicably freaked out or because my tripod won’t fit in my wheely bag and I’m frustrated I’m going to have to go buy another one?

I’ve always adored travel! (see exhibits a b, c, etc.) Especially solo travel (though this trip won’t be solo it also won’t be with The Mc) and travel to far away beautiful places and omgwtf I’m bringing my camera with me this time and last time all I had was a half dozen shaksy disposables and it’s going to be awesome…so could someone please tell me what filthy bar toilet seat I picked these voices up from so I can go back and sue the cleaning service?

Did the plane landing on the Hudson and the chopper colliding with a small plane and countless others falling from the sky screw me up, or can I legitimately blame The Mc?

I ask because blaming him is easier to stomach than me just getting old and scared all by myself. I’m not capable of such heinousness.

So here I go, typing it all out hoping that talking about The Boogyman (capitalization is called for in a case such as his) will make him less real and keep my plane in the air.

Quick. Someone. Validate me!