One of my favorite songs in the entire world is Feeling Good by Michael Buble. I don’t think I’m quite up to feeling good, but I’m getting there. Today, the best I can say is that I’m “feeling all right.” But it is a new dawn, a new day, a new life for me. Things are percolating nicely. Drinking cold coffee left over from yesterday and it tastes even better…. don’t know why, probably because all the chlorine in the water has dissipated. I don’t normally drink coffee in the morning, but I have some leftover Christmas blend, and I wanted to use it up. My dad and my cousin have given me a lot of Starbucks money over the past year, and instead of buying individual cups, I spent a lot of the money on beans… mostly because Starbucks tastes better fresh and you have no idea how long it’s been sitting there unless you arrive when they open. Christmas blend is the bomb, but I really, really miss morning Joe, named after Joe Scarborough. He probably did something that made him lose the endorsement, SBUX being the liberal company that it is, but I have yet to find the same blend with a different name. They also used to have what was called a “Tribute blend.” It was not the greatest coffee in the world….. you know where I’m going here. Although in a different turn, the best packaging would have been teenagers fighting to the death over a bag.
I realized yesterday that I wrote that entry on the first day of my period, which as all women know, is the worst day of the month to feel anything. Maybe that’s why I was ready to cry at the drop of a hat and sick to my stomach. At the same time, that day is when I feel the most vulnerable, and missing “A-dog” was more intense than normal. This morning, I took some ibuprofen and Sudafed, and things feel a lot more even keel. Grieving for Argo and Dana at the same time is just about the worst feeling on earth, and the best all at the same time. This morning’s memory on Facebook was wonderful:
Cutest conversation with Dana today:
Me: I take you, your crazy family, your crazy, your adorableness. I take it all.
Dana: Good, because you don’t get a discount on parts.
See, this is why I like the “memories” feature on Facebook, because they’re not all sad and depressing. Some of them are incredibly funny. My favorite, and I can’t wait for it to come up, is this one:
Me: I am so grumpy.
Dana: I know you are not grumpy with me, because I have been cute *all day.*
It’s memories like these that keep me going in the face of incredible grief, because occasionally, if I reach back far enough, the memories of how terrible divorce were fade into the background and I can just remember how much I loved her and how much I felt loved by her.
Dana is the first relationship I’d ever had in my life where we were both on equal footing. My “type” has generally been ball-breaking bitches, Type A personalities because I was just so, well, “B.” It was good right up until it wasn’t. Type A and type B work well in the short term, because the Type A helps the Type B get shit handled and the Type B reminds the Type A that it’s ok to calm down once in a while and stop and smell the roses. In the long term, it’s like dating a steam-roller.
However, as the trauma of my youth has begun to fade, I’ve realized that I am more Type A than I have ever given myself credit for…… and maybe, that’s where the breakdown in communication with Dana occurred. I wasn’t the same person, and had different reactions to everything. My counselors in the hospital warned me this would happen. That people who weren’t used to me acting differently would pull away because they didn’t recognize me anymore. I have a huge personality in a tiny body, I’ve just never used it.
Until now.
I love my work, I love my home, I get up excited for the day ahead. My moments of grief are abated when I am working, because it is the time in my life where I feel like I’m really on top of my game.
My room still looks like “dumped girl,” but I am trying to fix it. I bought a book (a real book, not a Kindle version so I could write in the margins) called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo. Over three million copies have been sold, so I figured that if it worked for them, it might work for me.
The bottom line is that I need to get rid of a lot of my stuff. Like, a lot of it. Not everything has a place and I end up with stuff all over my room that I just don’t know what to do with, as if a teenage boy has moved in and taken over my life…. which reminds me of something someone said to me once (I would quote them, but I don’t remember who said it), that I was like a teenage boy…. and his mother.
Not far off, really.
I am hoping that this book will elevate me from feeling all right to feeling good. To really see the dragonflies in the sun instead of living in perpetual rain.
Amen.
Stories That Are All True 