Echoes

Dear Latayah,
We talked last night. Or, I should say this morning, to be more precise.

You knocked on my door in my dream, and I opened it to you being your same beautiful self. We talked about...something. I really can't remember and its not important. What mattered was that I was able to see you again. To hear your laugh, to ask your advice (you always gave the best advice) and to see your smile.

There were bizarre parts of the dream, of course-you had an obituary of someone else you carried with you. I don't remember who's it was, but it felt like it was your own. Odd, right?

And then there was the moment when I looked away from you. At that moment, I realized you were dead. I was talking to a dead woman. I looked back and your face was covered by a cloth. I asked you about your apartment; if you were still there and you said "Yes." And everything froze for me.

Suddenly I was back at your apartment- staring at the door. (It's been replaced now, but it was the old one I was looking at). I'll never forget seeing the scars on your door--you know the ones. The hatchet marks where the fire department broke down your door to find you, already gone.
You were Sleeping Beauty on the couch, only no prince could ever wake you.

I miss you, my friend. I hope you're not still home. I hope you're resting peacefully and happily, wherever you are. I'll see you in the sunshine and hear your laugh across the room.

 

And The Thunder Rolled...

I'm sitting here, in my quiet little cozy corner of the house. (Cozy being a euphemism for hot and small, but whatever. Glass half full, and all that.)

As I write this, the RainPocalypse has descended upon my neighborhood. Thunder roars as it beckons the rain to slash mightily through the tree lines and across windshields...and here I sit. Safe. Warm. Excited.

I love storms. Always have. There's a cleansing quality about them that can't be replicated by any shower you can ever take. Perhaps it's the unpredictability or lack of control, but storms, they are magical. As the RainPocalypse continues, I can't help but think about what storms meant to me when I was younger. 

They were nights snuggled on the couch with my parents, who rarely even spoke to each other, let alone snuggle on a couch. They were candle-lit walks to the kitchen for snacks because our power always (ALWAYS) went out during a thunderstorm. They were boardgames played by lantern light because OH MY GOD, the Nintendo was out.

It was thrilling and bonding, at the same time. It was extraordinary to see the lightning spider like broken glass above the lake.

It was during a storm that I found my first true love. We sat on a dock in the rain for hours and talked of everything and nothing. We've since lost touch, but I will forever have the memory of that storm tattooed on my heart.

So, as this storm rolls over our house, I'm taken back to nights where life was simpler, safety was a given, and love was earnest and true.

It's amazing how a little water, noise and electricity can do that. 

Corner of Sunshine

We live in Florida- the land of eternal sunshine, as it were. People move here specifically for that reason, though, I confess: I miss the change of weather and the cold. This is  not a topic you speak of amongst true Floridians- when the thermometer reaches 50 degrees, people are scrambling for parkas and wool-lined this and that. True Floridians think you are crazy for wanting to go anywhere other than the Eternal Sunshine of the Sand-Filled Mind.

But me, I miss seasons. I miss cold weather and bundling up and the bedamned Sisyphean snowsuit;  because "I don't have to pee!" turns into "Mom...? I kinda hafta...".

That said, we're in the middle of a cold snap here in Florida. (Yes, I consider 40 degrees cold, and so do you. Stop being such a showoff.) Apparently, when constructing this house a century ago, no one had the foresight to think of modern inventions--like sub-flooring or double-paned windows.

My office sits in one of the rooms we've been meaning to renovate, but haven't gotten around to. All to say, it's drafty and cluttered and wonderful. Every wall, save one , is filled with single-paned windows that let the sunshine and the drafts pour in, in equal measure. I have my sweater on, a cup of steaming hot tea on the desk, and a beautiful vista of ridiculously dressed neighbors walking by to entertain me. I swear, one woman just walked by with fur lining around her head, and her dog(!) had on a full jacket.  

In the summer, I have to close the curtains, place the air conditioning on 70 and pray I don't die of heatstroke while working. It gets lonely working in here in the summer. My view of the neighborhood gets obscured in favor of not risking death via sun-stroke.

But now...in the winter, what we have of it down here, I get to enjoy the awesomeness of sunshine that doesn't blind and isn't suffocatingly humid, all from my little corner of the house. My escape that I've taken over, like kudzu over a building; slowly, almost imperceptibly, but always moving forward towards my goal of a sanctuary I could call my own.

Perpetual Quarter

I showed D how to spin a quarter the other day. She thought I was made of magic for the rest of the day. Yes, I completely used that to get her to eat her vegetables that night and pick up her umpteen million toys. Parenting win!

Sometimes I look around from the minutia of the daily grind and wonder: How in the holy hell did I get here? I've often asked that question, but pre-D it was generally asked after a night I wouldn't remember but had thoroughly enjoyed. But how did I get here? 

That's easy. I moved my home, gained a husband, had a baby and a miscarriage all in one year. And then, not so unexpectedly, then I had depression. 

So, I wrote. And I wrote and wrote, and wrote some fucking more. Because my brain was a mess. Because I couldn't breathe from the isolation of being home alone all day just to be alone at night. Because typing out my words made me feel...not so alone. Even if no one ever read them but me, at least they existed. They were proof I existed. It's easy to forget that when the only person you talk to for days on end is an infant with the vocabulary of a cat in heat. That is to say, all screams.

And in that writing I discovered quite a bit. 1) I loved writing. 2) I was a fucking smartass and I liked it that way. 3) The confidence to quit giving one flying turd about what anyone else thought.

Put all that in a blender, toss in some time, a degree, a metric fuck-ton of hard work, a pretty great husband and one really rambunctious dog and you get: me. An actual, no-shit, writer. Who ran off and started her own content generation company that is actually growing and thriving and expanding beyond the dreams that she never even dared have.

I won't always say life is good. Sometimes life hands you shit and you have to keep your eyes on the prize. Sometimes the prize is just making through the day so you can say, "Well..fucked that day up right to hell. At least tomorrow is another chance to get it right".

But, most of the time this life of mine that resounds so loudly is like a carefully spun quarter: teetering, balancing, swaying from awesomeness to pain, but always spinning and moving and making me grateful.