A Good, Soft Thing

Lately, I have been having a difficult time getting started in the mornings. I get up, feed the dog, make the coffee, but then sit and browse. Time I can’t get back and can’t really account for. Certainly, it’s nothing that’s bringing me pleasure. I am on my second cup of coffee before I open the new post screen.

This feels like a Monday morning. I try to get a little handle on what the day and the week will entail, but it’s like staring out the window into fog. There’s something there. Moving around. And I worry it will jump out at me suddenly.

But that isn’t where my head should be right now. The day will come. The week, too, more than likely.

I am crying in the car again. I don’t often use the car, but do drive to yoga on Sundays. And driving home, I cry. It’s a good, soft thing. A kind of surrender really. And there is no one to touch me, or to try to comfort me. And that is also a good thing. It comes like a wave, and passes like a wave. The grief.

I talked to B. yesterday and our trip to Iceland is back on. Suddenly her calendar is filling up with places she wants to be. People she wants to be with. We don’t say it, but: while she is well enough. She’s looking at dates to work around her chemotherapy weeks. One a month for six months. Timing. Logistics.

I wonder if she cries when there is no one to touch her. If it sometimes can be a good, soft thing for her when everything in the world is sharp edges and punctures. Now that every assumption, every conception has been sliced open.

I wonder if crying can numb the raw borders of what was and what is.

I have no way of knowing. No hope of empathizing. And no meaningful comfort to offer. So I listen. That’s good, right?

E.’s footsteps on the stairs. Time to walk Leonard around the block and then head to the lake for a run. It’s Monday.

Into the fog.