I'd like to call back summertime and have her stay for just another month or so.
Well, I was feeling pretty good yesterday, for the most part. I got some things figured out, and was elated to have answers. I was feeling proud and confident. I guess it started flagging last night. As Sophcles said: "What a terrible thing is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise." I still miss her. I wonder what she is doing. I couldn't sleep, or at least it was hard to find. I think it was sometime around 3 AM this morning when I finally fell asleep.
I've got to find myself a doctor and go get a check up. I've been needing to do that for years. It's moved up the list a bit now, though, since that trip to the emergency room. That damnable UTI keeps coming back and disappearing again, but it hasn't presented such strong symptoms as it did before. The burning was back last night, but it's pretty much gone this morning. Last night was not the first time since the ER visit that this phenomenon has popped up. I'd like to know what is going on but my prior experience with the doctors left me not any more informed than I was before I spoke with them. The keflex kicked the fever and the other symptoms but that experience provided very little in the way of illumination. It would also seem that it didn't get everything, or else whatever it was has managed to revisit me. Shit. As foolish as it sounds, it feels like trying to talk to someone about it is an exercise in futility. I asked questions. I got no real answers. I am just so tired of doctors and dentists this summer. I want a break from the barrage of insults from my mortality. I've got enough on my mind right now.
This morning when I woke up, I was consumed by a feeling of longing, and loss. I'm really curious about why that emotion is coupled with the physical sensation that one's heart is the size of a bowling ball, and made of solid lead. What is going on there? What causes such physiological sensations? I haven't really put a lot of consideration into the question of it before I got intimate with a sensor. I feel a strain in the muscles along the tops of my shoulders and in the back of my neck. Longing and sadness are difficult. There's nobody to whom to complain, save myself. Are there any sub-parts happy with this situation? No? Well, maybe that's good, but I caused this. Ignorance is no excuse, nor is it any kind of consolation at all. I know it will pass. I DO have answers. I can't even be angry with myself as there is so much grief in the way.
There was nothing to be done but to pick up my burden and go to work. The sky over the Bay Area is a dark gray and there is a haze on the hills. The weather is appropriate. I want to go to some place like Salt Point, stand alone among the trees, feel the cool damp breeze on my skin, inhale the scent of the pines and the sea, look out across the gray rolling Pacific and weep until I am empty. That is exactly what I would do, to act on what I am feeling, but I can't. It would feel dishonest to take a sick day for a heavy heart, and I value my ability to earn my living higher than indulging my emotions. I keenly feel the opportunity cost of my choice though. My cubicle is no place for weeping or consolation, although the hot coffee feels good going down.
I know what I am doing is the right thing. All I have to do is just hold on. For better or worse, a resolution is coming. The course is good. Whatever mistakes I've made, what I am doing right now is the right thing to do. We are fundamentally, existentially alone. We can do naught but acknowledge this reality. It is an essential characteristic of communion that its pleasures are also in the hands of our counterpart to grant or withhold for reasons of their own. Waiting is right, at the moment. Indulge my curiosity about the time. How long will it be? Why? Wait, and find out, and you'll learn something new about her, if you but pay attention and watch. Find your steel; allow her to find hers. I don't feel very successful in talking myself out of this feeling right now. Self-soothing isn't looking very easy. Still, wait, work, read, and think, steel myself to act when opportunity presents itself. What I'm feeling is inevitable and an unavoidable consequence of what it is into which I have gotten myself. Acknowledge it and it will fade, when it has had its say. Maybe I'll feel better during or after my noon walk. I do hope the sun burns off these clouds before I head out. Solidity. I've just got to keep grasping for my steel core until I can catch hold of it again.
Accomplishing things feels good. Building software this morning, for a release, feels good, or at least, better. Getting something done is some consolation. Accomplishment is a poor challenger to the Goliath of grief, but we root for the underdog. That breathing trick she showed me feels good, or at least better. I keep forgetting to do that. Funny to think that something which seems to accomplish so little would change so much, but apparently, it does. It does have a certain soothing effect.
I miss those blue eyes of hers. It's funny how the absence of pigment lends itself to such variation in color. Both of my daughters and Laurel have blue eyes and the variation in color is unique to each of them. Laurel's are darker than Jackie's but brighter than Shannon's. The color is a lighter blue near the pupil. Jackie's eyes are like the summer sky; Shannon's like the deep blue of the Caribbean; Laurel's remind me of star sapphires; they're shocking, in a pleasant kind of way, and sort of hypnotic.