Progress, maybe
More like process, and a six-month check in with myself
I have been trying on happy. Sometimes it works. A margarita with friends, playing ball with my dogs, making a silly reel for Instagram, tending to the daffodils and allium as they come back bigger and better than the year before. Sometimes it works. When you try.
Sometimes I don’t bother trying.
I have no less than five books started and left splayed open on flat surfaces. Twice as many half-listened to. On Sunday mornings, I spend hours in bed before I feel like I can do the day. I’m not sleeping; I’m reading headlines, meditating over my coffee and Wordle, sometimes writing like today, and overall just taking my damn time getting dressed and straightening up.
Throughout the week, the house turns into a giant, messy closet. Flannels and sweaters draped on the chair, a pair of socks hastily discarded during a hot flash under the coffee table, a measuring tape left on the bench, gardening gloves on the wood stove, dog toys literally everywhere. Oh my god, the stack of mail. When you’re alone, you realize very quickly just how bad you are at putting things away. And why is it harder to keep up with dishes when they are only your dishes?
My threshold for community is growing, though. In the first few months after Joe left this world for the stars, I was exhausted after ten minutes of conversation. My ability to focus was astonishingly bad, although I did weirdly complete many puzzles–little microcosms of control, I suppose. But it was hard for me to care about what anyone else was saying. And in those early weeks, people checked in with me non-stop. It was both overwhelming and comforting. These days, I don’t hear from people much anymore. Most of the time, I’m fine with that. I don’t need constant check-ins. Even my father eventually returned to his hobby of screaming at me for things my mother did when I was a child. Some things/people never change. I even find a strange comfort in that, comfort in the fact I can still get pissed at him, and that I still have the power to shut him out when he’s out of control. Messed up, maybe. But true.
But sometimes I wonder where everyone has gone, what they are doing with their time. They’re going back to their lives, I suppose, just like me. Only I’m not really going back, I’m going forward into a new one. No one else has to do that in quite the same way.
On Easter Sunday, I wanted Joe to resurrect. You have odd, impossible wishes when your loved one leaves–strange, slightly unhinged thoughts that seem completely plausible. In these small moments, vast chasms between worlds, it doesn’t seem ridiculous because I feel his molecules around me. He’s in the air, the drywall, birdsong, frogs chirping in the pond, trees creaking and swaying on the hill. He’s waiting for me in the car, and he’s laughing at me when I can’t find my AirPods, and he’s waving at me from the end of the driveway as he cuts the grass.
He’s no longer here, and he is everywhere.
I long to be back in the mind-space where possibilities are exciting again. Sometimes I’m very afraid that will never return. But I’m back to work now, in a full-time role with a great team, and forcing myself to connect. I’m back to chipping away at my novel, which I wrote about last year, and then got sidelined once more. Spring has given me a literal breath of fresh air–the flowers, the hummingbirds, the mulch. Yes, I love it all, even the mulch. People have asked me what my plans are, as though expecting me to pick up and skip out of the West Virginia forest as fast as possible, but if I didn’t have this right now, every morning would look a bit too much like Sunday morning. Rest is good, and I give myself ample opportunity for it. But the sunshine is necessary too. The time in my gardens, my hands in soil, the physical strength it requires, the little surprises of buds and toads and tiny blue butterflies, and even just sitting outside on the deck to work, is the real gift.
Two things that have tethered me in the last six months–making things (whether it’s puzzles or collages or goofy social media posts) and caring for what I already have. Being home alone is absolutely lonely sometimes, no question, and sometimes I drown a little in photos and memories, but nurturing both the creation of whatever is on my mind that day and tending to those creations is lifesaving.
Sometimes knowing that, feeling that so deeply, is all I need to move through the week.
And so, with that, it’s time to throw back the covers, get dressed, and go take care of it.
Purple = You are the Queen. Also, it’s a very pretty color. Sending you love.
"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it" Shug Avery