Countdown

 This post is going to be a bit rambling and incoherent, because I don't know why I'm writing other than there's stuff in my head I need to de-junk before I'll be able to sleep.

Countdown.  It's March 20.  10 days before Bob dies.

I hang on to this.  Why?  I may have gotten a hint today reading Harry Potter. Ebaida and I are on a marathon reading.  We're on Book 3: The Prisoner of Azkaban, the first one where Harry meets the dementors.  Every time the dementors attack Harry, he can hear the yelling and screams of his parents just before Voldemort kills them and gives him his famous lightening bolt scar.  What he will not confess to anyone is that part of him welcomes the dementor attack - because that's the only time he's ever been able to hear his parent's voices.

I get that.  These last 10 days are almost all anniversaries that hurt, but at least we were still together, and I hang on to those memories.  He needed me with him, and I was there.  No one has really needed me since then.  I can be useful, and people like me - but it's not the same as being truly needed.  I'm not the love of anyone's life.

Hello, 2024 self.  Hope you're hanging in there.  Sometimes I wonder if 2021 self was, well, selfish, for not leaving us any messages on how she was dealing with this.  Or do I feel sorry for her, dealing with this on her own.  I do remember her calling Michael and Margo on the 29th and being completely incoherent and breaking down but didn't know if she would survive if she didn't talk to someone.  2022 self at least left messages in a bottle (and I go back and read those a lot - it helps.  If she got through this, so can I)

Three years coming up.  Has it gotten any easier?  Well - I ask - if you have been holding your breath, does it get any easier the longer it's been since you've had any oxygen?

Things that hit unexpectedly.  This joke, drifting by on Facebook.

Yes, it's funny.  And yet I found myself crying.  Old, sagging, flabby - you see the love.  The lines of Shakespeare return again to me:  Love alters not where it alteration finds . . . . Love's not Time's fool, though rosy cheeks and lips within his bending sickle's compass comes.  Love alters not with its brief hours and weeks, but rather endures until the edge of doom . . ."

It was cold today.  Tallahassee does this every year, and it's always a big surprise.  Around mid-February it gets hot.  Then, suddenly, mid March, one last spate of winter.  It was 32 degrees this morning, and never made it to 60 today.  After 3 weeks of tank-tops-and-shorts-weather, we had all adjusted.  Then this.  So I'm working at the farm with one of the college kids, and we're both talking about how very hard is was to get out of our warm beds this morning.  She commented that her boyfriend had slept over because they had not seen each other since spring break.  It was hard for her to get out of bed because he was sleeping with his arms wrapped around her.  Just for a moment, I felt like my ribcage had cracked.

And, with that, I think I'm suddenly done.  I'll go to bed and read for awhile.  Transfer some of my own body heat to cuddle pillow and receive it back again, while remembering warm arms wrapped around me.