RESPONSIBILITIES

Do you know how long it has been since I have spent my morning like this?

Saturday morning, I sat at a cafe table outside with a mug of coffee and my Fortune Cookie journal. It is the first time I have cracked open that journal in months and months. It is the first time I have sat with myself, enjoying the solitude of one at a cafe table, in months and months. I will not say this is a return to normal. There is no normal, only habit. My habitual routines of before the pandemic got placed into a cocktail shaker where it was shaken and then strained over ice. I thought maybe the Saturday morning routine had gotten lost in the straining part. It still might be; this felt like a test run. I went to a new place with ample outdoor seating, but cringed and shrunk up into a ball every time someone walked by my table. Which was often because it was one of those areas where people are out walking or running in the mornings.

The prompt was something about integrity and bravery being displayed on a billboard and I wrote about the pandemic and masks. I might be a bit rusty.

I am for sure a bit of crank pot.

Public interactions turn me into an unstable nuclear core, vibrating from the strain of keeping myself from violently shaking some people while yelling “WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?!?!?!” But that would require getting close enough to touch them. I honestly thought that my current rageyness was, in part, due to a lack of sleep. I am not sleeping well. There’s tossing and turning, throwing blankets off and pulling them back up. I wake up with some sort of numb digit, sometimes it is one whole leg that has disappeared or disconnected itself from my body. I would wake up in pain. So I finally broke down and bought myself a new mattress. I used some of my rage for fuel to haul my old mattress off of my bed and drag the new one onto my bed frame. Maneuvering bulky items in a small space without wrecking that space takes just as much finesse as it does brute force and I did it. All by myself. Because Michael only has one good arm. The new mattress is nice and I am no longer waking up with missing limbs or pain, but I am still tossing and turning and throwing blankets off only to pull them back on the bed. The anger inside my body is persistent.

The angry eyes I have been looking out at the world with are my eyes. My responsibility. -Sarah Blondin

My anger is formed from loss and grief. It is fueled by a sense of helplessness to effect good changes. It festers in the knowing that we could do so much better than this and it blazes with the idea that at least one person on that lost and grief list would help me find a way to channel all of it into something useful. And that makes me even more angry. These angry eyes are my eyes, my responsibility. I can meet my anger head on with understanding, patience and kindness. I can tell those who attempt to egg-on that anger that they are unwelcome here. I can not control the behavior of others, but I can control my reaction to their behavior. I can flip the tone from positive to negative. I can rotate my view from disparaging to hopeful.

I’m healthy and strong.

I have a job.

My family is healthy.

We all have safe sound roofs over our heads.

We are fortunate.

UNPREPARED EXPEDITIONS

Spa day

I had agreed to go on a kayaking expedition to Cuba with three other people. It was expected that it would take us at least three days of kayaking to reach our destination. As I sat down into my kayak, I noticed my other travelers really packing stuff into their kayaks. I looked around me inside my own kayak and realized that I had packed three cans of Slim-Fast and a bag of potato chips. I also had a broken fishing rod attached to one side of my kayak. Before I could even really think through my choices of things I should have packed, a crowd formed around us to send us off with fan fair. Every one kept asking me if I was sure I really wanted to do this. I have only been kayaking three times in my life and all of those times were simple day trips, tooling around on a lake. I kept replying “Yeah. Of course. I can totally do this. I can do this.”

It is probably a good thing I woke up before I actually headed out into shark infested waters in a small kayak.

It had been a crappy night of sleep from the get go. I struggled to go to sleep at bedtime and then I woke up around 1:00 AM where I continued to toss and turn for well over an hour to get back to sleep. I was hot. I was cold. My hips and knee were achy. Laying on this side wasn’t comfortable. Laying on the other side wasn’t comfortable. When I flipped onto my back, I could feel my sinuses starting to drain down my throat. I just couldn’t get comfortable and when I did finally drift back to sleep, I was in some variation of the above dream, sometimes stopping by my house so I could get a sweater or a granola bar. Every time I’d wake up, I’d marvel at how unprepared I was for a three day kayaking trip. I mean, that’s one Slim-Fast a day and a third of the bag of potato chips, which were already opened and sealed up with a close pin before I even started the expedition. If I managed to catch a fish with my broken fishing rod without capsizing myself, I’d have to eat the fish like a wild animal, just biting into the fish and ripping the flesh off with my teeth. I did not pack a knife.

But isn’t it just like me to insist that I can totally kayak three hundred and thirty miles to Cuba with very little resources? Hell, my kayak could be leaking and I would be bailing water while frantically paddling along and still insist that “I can totally do this.” It is not that I am not willing to admit defeat or that I am stubborn. Except I am stubborn, but I insist only to convince myself. I need to prove it to myself. Though while I’m willing to say right now that I can do this, I’m going to fess up and tell you that I’m going to need more potato chips.