…Like a red rubber ball

What in the goddamn hell is going on? Look, an entire year + has passed, and nary a word from my brain to this page was recorded. Lots of things in life got wrecked beyond recognition: my daughter was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in late 2017 (+ underwent chemotherapy, and has been cancer-free now for 10 months, so there’s a happy ending). Then, after that emotional ablation, love came to me and just as swiftly it slammed the door shut on itself. Hey, what’s that I see on the horizon? Oh, it’s me, holding myself up, all by myself, and that's all it ever is.

It’s a miracle to be exactly in this spot, where time is not a straight line but more a dimension on which we travel laterally & beyond, outward, on a carpet or a bedknobs-and-broomsticks-type situation. I love my daughter and am mad with joy that she will graduate high school in precisely 4 months and go out into the world, with courage and spirit that grows out of shit circumstance. Sure as fuck won’t take shit for granted. And won’t take shit, either.

Random, related wonderfulness: I danced next to my friend Josslyn on New Year’s Eve for a time and drank a whisky-infused cup of coffee. I’ve taken up watching a long-delayed teeVEE series with a dear friend. I’ve heard geese flying north in the middle of the night two times in the past week. I drove out in the country with Joe and did some non-adult smashy things that felt really fucking great. I’m writing some lines of poems again, and I am okay with most of the feelings that arrive in my forebrain. I know what it’s like to be held by community: how people brought us dinner for 4 straight months last year so I didn’t have to shop and cook while my daughter and I were home from her chemo treatments in Oakland. How my best friend Gillian hand-drew for me monthly calendars of meal deliveries & brought over an illustrated list of things I can do when I was feeling crap. How my family continued to show up for me so many times, helping with house care and beyond. Considering all of these thoughts, I recently became aware that I might be in a state of happiness. Enjoying this probably-brief excusion into that foreign country. <3