I could be

I'm feeling myself pulling like the hook side of velcro away from the other half--my fluffy, fuzzy old habits. It is always astonishing to me how much change I am capable of undergoing. I think we all see ourselves as made of granite. Immutable. Oh, but this is not true. For me, it is not true. I have a habit of looking back at a year ago, paging through the long-winded, sometimes obsessively detailed journals I keep privately. This week I read about March of '10 and I am astounded with the way my mind was even a year ago so different from the present. Astounded by how much tighter then I was clinging to the fuzzy size of the velcro. I love--I LOVE--differently this year. I am bolder, I think, and I am quicker to jump to my feet. In a year I am another belt notch, my reach has extended, my fingers are whole. A year ago was at the very start of the Cancer that ran ragged through the heart of my family, before I accepted a new sister, before a summer's worth of traveling and secret telling and falling deeper in love made me agree to give away the rest of my life to the tall man with the devilish eyebrows. I am far from immutable. I am built on a slope. What do I take from this? Oh, danger. Danger in that I might trip and just too easily roll down and back. Danger in that, what is another year going to create of me? I think I am trending well, but I am always a little unsure. I could be...

the peep

I was greeted at work this morning by a row of happy little Peeps on my desk. I waved them menacingly at the window streaked with rainy gray as I ate them. Suck it, freezing rain, IT IS SPRING.

divination

It's good that--six months before the wedding--we find out our zodiac signs are compatible. I hear something about his lion lying down with my lamb, and I think: into the fire.

why wait?

I keep hiding Snickers from myself because I keep having to.

could not take my eyes

I thought I had outlasted the burning early morning cold in my thighs. I had not.

I slept last night in the sling between a flashing 'check engine' light and an evening full of budding, adorable genius. Spiked right in the middle between the two.

Oh lord, there was a lot of frozen dog shit this morning and I could not take my eyes off of it.

my right arm

I am in a bathrobe and coffee dregs and pondering the nature of a human body. I think I've learned a new secret. It's so simple, really.

I've been handling all business with my right arm very cautiously for the past nearly-a-decade because of a hard tumble I took in a state park with waterfalls one summer. The torn muscle didn't heal well and as a result, I always always carried my right arm with more deference than my left, and my range of motion was much less and much less certain. But I've recently been taught some things I should have always known, and like, like MAGIC I am better. I feel like there are so many just general principals of humanship I am missing, learning years too late if at all. I am just now figuring out what makes my body do this and that, what creates these sensations, what fills it up and what tears it down. It is so obvious to me now that to fix a limb held immobile by scar tissue and fear, you must force it to be mobile again.

Since the new year I've been learning to lift weights with my arms, learning to stretch them out and gradually reach farther and farther. This fixed me. And it's not even as if I noticed the healing taking place--I'm still dense enough to miss out on why I needed these things until the results were reached. But it worked like this: while I was strengthening the arm I was also busting up old scar tissue, deleting the clumped fascia that held my arm pinned in a half life. And it worked, and finally I have learned my lesson. So here it is: move.

My arm is stronger and so much more flexible than it was just months ago, and the kicker of it all is this healing that feels like magic, the way I can stretch and reach and pull things from the shelves without pain. I am 95% of a whole person. It's MOVING. MOVING.

convicted

I wanted to say 'I am a convert!' and it came out 'I am a convict!'

fyi

Do you know, it took me three minutes to figure out how to spell 'penchant'? Do you know, I'm feeling much more whole today than I've felt all week? The two are not related.

spree

This goes against my ancestral bones (but then, so does the word 'fuck' and a penchant for Jack Daniels), but lately I have been uncoiling my mind late at night with fantasies of unaccountable shopping sprees. Just going out and taking everything off the rack.

Time to wake up.

orders

Relax into the fingers,
scalp.
Rest your fragile bones onto the insoles,
feet.

Start beating again,
heart.