and there you are, ride back into my life

i drove home from work today and narrowly missed a parked car. and two other moving ones.

tonight there would be chinese food and both cell phones would be out of reach. two whole DVRed episodes of grey’s anatomy and a couch to myself. it would be the perfect night.

and then one of the episodes was about a soldier dying and the person who loved him was right next door and couldn’t say anything. or even be in the same room. couldn’t tell him how much he meant, tell him i love you. be with him, hold him. live his last moments with him.

it has been months, a lifetime since i told him i wanted him out of my life. a petulant exchange of spiteful words and we had mutually written each other off.

i would give anything in the world to do one of two things – have another moment, or go back and prevent it all from happening.

i’ll admit i’m free with my emotions once i allow them to have some breathing room. sure, it’ll take me several months to permit that first unhindered flash of feeling, but once i’ve stepped over the edge, it’s a freefall. and inevitably, the hard landing.

you, you who stole the heart right from my chest and still hold it, albeit carelessly or even without knowing, in your hand. you are the bones that broke and never healed straight. the jagged lines i can feel in cold weather, the shards that overlap when i’m running in heals. the edges that catch whenever a commercial for the marine corps. or anything related to anyone in any branch of the service.

you may have been a terrible mistake, but you were the brilliant flash. and then you were there, on my laptop, a simple message away.

months, a lifetime away, and yet we carried on a conversation as though it never happened. as though none of it had ever happened. your hand tracing the line of my jaw, my head on your chest. like it was this morning, last night.

ride back into my life, sweep me up, carry me away. be my hero, my best friend.

i’d do it again in a heartbeat.

the prodigal blogger

i wouldn’t blame you if there was no one left ’round here. to be quite frank, i haven’t been here myself in months. not even to check in. not even to delete spam comments.

so let’s not call this a full return yet. let’s consider this peeking around the corner into a room that desperately needs the cobwebs cleaned from the corners and formulating a plan for new growth.

i’m still up to my eyeballs in work and i still don’t do much else. i am newly single (!) and have moved back into my house with my less-than-clean roommate. i have restored my laptop and lost all of my iTunes (because a nasty breakup isn’t bad enough, now i’m without commiserating playlists).

sometime soon, i’ll dig a little deeper. tell you about what happened. tell you what it was like watching a man twice my age curl up in a ball at my feet and sob. explain just how it felt having his children factored into the equation, and his job, and his mortgage. sometime soon, i promise.

for now, i consider it a victory simply to have remembered my password and to have overcome the embarrassment that i could very well be writing this for absolutely no one, since all of you have probably assumed i was dead. or something.

baby steps.

…SHAMEFUL.

i have a horribly wretched confession to make (aside from the fact that i haven’t been around in weeks. yes, weeks. or… a month)…

i had to google my blog to remember which hosting service i used.

i know. SHAMEFUL.

i do miss being around though. work’s all about kicking ass and taking names (good god, i wish i could explain what i do so you guys wouldn’t think i’m a total flake. it really isn’t uncommon for me to be so tired that i wake up and don’t remember sleeping or go to work with only half of my face made up. but i love, LOVE, my job.) but the relationship? i’m not as enchanted as i was. call it my unswerving desire to never commit. call it the three-month itch. call it whatever you want, but i’m restless as hell and part of it is based on the realization that i don’t do “me” things any more. grey’s anatomy? haven’t seen it since before christmas. thank god for the writers’ strike, i’m hoping i haven’t missed much. return, in a timely manner, phone calls not related to work? heh. you’re funny.

and clearly we’re all painfully aware how little blogging there has been.

it’s just hard to hear my own voice in a small apartment with a clingy boyfriend. (i don’t know when exactly i moved in, but it just kinda crept up on me and i was six weeks into it before realizing what had happened. really, i’m that spaced out. i also distinctly do not like living with people who are not also standoffish like me, so it certainly wasn’t something i sought out.)

we’ve mutually agreed (and by that, i mean i told him.) that if i don’t get some space, i’m going to combust and it won’t be pretty for either of us. so i’m taking a weekend to visit my cousin for a pajama party — she’s in the kitchen right now making foods with vegetable purees in them — and to clear my head. also, to look for my voice. perhaps we’ll be able to salvage our relationship, but for now, i’m happy to be taking the time getting him to realize it’s ok for me to have some independence. i’m not the wilting flower type, really.

so just maybe, i haven’t faded too far into the background to be revived a bit. cause nothing says “i’m back!” like a weekend spent eating banana bread with cauliflower puree. mmm, mm good! can’t wait to tell you how the breakfast bars with spinach turn out.

notes from a saint to a sinner

even though my grandmother passed away days before christmas last year, this christmas felt more specifically like the first without her and everyone seemed to go through the holiday with an extra sense of… something. making her famous jello recipe seemed to take on a special meaning. taking family pictures was difficult to do when always feeling as though we were perpetually one short. boxes taped around the ends were done, “like grandma always used to.” in short, christmas was a little more heavy with emotion, a little more soaked in realization, a little more invested in memories.

my mother came back home for christmas and in the few days she was able to spend with her family, she also managed to take some time to sort through my grandmother’s things. christmas afternoon, she walked me out to my car and handed me a folded up sheet of yellow legal pad paper.

“it’s yours, [c.f.]. she must have wrote it for your 16th birthday and never gave it to you. it looks as though it might be a rough draft, but she definitely wrote it for you. you should read it. you wouldn’t believe how much she loved you and how much she believed in you, even when you were only 16. merry christmas, from both of us.”

for the past few days, it’s been sitting on the counter of my cousin’s kitchen where i’ve been holed up, jealously guarding my vacation hours. it’s been eyeing me and i it, but i couldn’t bring myself to read it until this afternoon. not because i didn’t already know pretty much what it would say, not because i didn’t want to feel connected to her again, but because it needed to be bigger than that. it needed to have more weight.

when i was a very little girl, my parents and i lived with my grandparents while we built our house, moving out just days shy of my fourth birthday. in her letter, she teasingly reminds me how for six months after we moved, i would call her several times. AN HOUR. she jokes that my mother and our phone bill must surely remember that and how that always meant so much to her because the house seemed so empty after we left. she also reminds me that after my grandfather died when i was eight, i drew her a picture of a cross on a hill, indicative of the hymn they played at his funeral. his favorite hymn.

that picture is still on her refrigerator, a year after she’s passed away. years ago, when she wrote this letter, she tells me how she looks at it every day and remembers how much he loved that hymn.

my grandmother worked hard her entire life and most of that work was for her family. i can remember the three story dollhouse she built for me by hand, complete with window boxes full of flowers and a wrap-around porch. i have dolls and stuffed animals she sewed for me, complete with intricate wardrobes. i have a hand-made Raggedy Ann doll with a sewn-in candy heart. my seven cousins and two brothers also have Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, as appropriate.

when i was in high school, i declared myself to be an island, which meant i boycotted my family’s vacations and spent as little time in my house as possible. my grandmother lived close to where i worked and at least once a week, we had dinner together. more than once a week i’d stop by to shower or change quickly on my way from one thing to another. she never minded and almost always reminded me that i could just stay overnight and save the drive home. she would always stand outside and wave to me as i drove away. in college, one of my favorite things to do was show up on her doorstep and surprise her, until one year i realized that the surprise might actually kill her one day. i started calling ahead after that.

as the years went by, i noticed that her wave was becoming more feeble and she wasn’t returning to the house as quickly as she used to. she started going out less and less, started only moving between the bed and her chair and the kitchen. the parkinson’s disease embarrassed her and she didn’t want her shaking hands or shuffling steps to call any extra attention to herself. she fought for as long as she could. she fought it as long and as long as she possibly could.

of all of her grandchildren, i’ve been the one to test the boundaries, to try new and unusual things, to shock the family as much as possible. just a few days before she died, i sat in her room with her and showed her the video of my sky diving experience. too weak to talk, she looked at me, rolled her eyes and shook her head. if she could have, she would have told me i was crazy. i grinned right back at her and told her i knew i was crazy, but it couldn’t be helped.

this christmas, i pulled out the ornaments she used to hang on her tiny christmas tree and smiled. she loved this time of year almost as much as i dislike it. and unwittingly, she’s given me the best christmas present imaginable. she’d be crowing now if she was here. i have a feeling she’s crowing anyway.

in which i feel like a cow.

i ate too much.

i’m not known for eating until i cannot possibly manage another bite. it’s always been a firm rule of mine to stop eating when i stop feeling hungry or to not start eating unless i’m hungry, but tonight i couldn’t control myself. there was rosemary-stuffed chicken soaked in wild mushroom sauce, bruschetta with just the right amount of garlic, escargot. wine. my very first cigar. more wine.

i’ve just finished lamenting over the phone to E, bemoaning the fact that my stomach feels like an over-inflated balloon, somewhat distended with the skin stretched just this side of uncomfortably tight. i can tell he’s balancing disbelief that i ate so much and the overwhelming desire to laugh at my pitiable state. i secretly think he looks at me or listens to me and all the while is thinking, “she’s so damn amusing, always entertaining me. but thank god she’s cute or some of this might get tedious.” fortunately he never says anything of the sort, just takes my hand or puts his arm around me and trys to soothe me, to calm me down, to talk me off of my ledges.

i’d pay good money to have the man next to me now, if for no other reason that just to have him here to make fun of my contorted facial expressions and my i’m-going-to-die-any-moment-now moaning. at least i’d be distracted long enoug to forget that i brought this whole damn thing on myself.

moderation is clearly not a quality i embrace and embody on a consistent basis.

(i know a “woe is me, i ate too much and feel like a cow” post is about 30 paces on the wrong side of BORING, but my brain has apparently gone on strike in an effort to reroute every possible resource towards digesting my dinner. i’ll do better tomorrow.)

regional blog posting half-week

so the posting, it’s been light. very light. unfortunately, so has the blog-worthy material. i was speaking to charlotte on the phone on sunday and we were both remarking that neither of us knew what had been happening with the other. neither, i suppose, do any of you. nor do i know much about what is going on out in blogland, as i’ve been just as negligible about reading other blogs as i have been about writing my own.

to partially right this failing, i have declared it to be regional blog posting half-week. i’m currently enjoying the first real annual leave i’ve taken all year, having only answered the cell phone and Blackberry a handful of times and having forwarded (most of) the emails i’ve received. (this has taken a remarkable amount of self-control, as i liken leaving my office in the hands of my associates to leaving a small child with a babysitter who may or may not actually know how to perform CPR. they are, however, doing quite well, no artificial resuscitation having been necessary yet.) i’ve holed up in my cousin’s house roughly four hours out of town, although less than 15 minutes away from a field office should an emergency require me to make an appearance. i’ll be here until saturday, leaving four days for me to relax, read, cook, breathe, and write. in short, i am reveling in this short period of uninhibited and un work-related existence.

when charlotte asked me how i was spending christmas and i told her about our plans, it took a split second for her to respond.

“you’re spending christmas with a guy?!”

there was a heavy holy shit! implied in her response.

it would seem that i’ve tripped and landed myself right in the middle of your modern day screenplay romance. i feel as though the character they’ve written to play opposite myself is the one that by the end of the movie, everyone has fallen for and the heroine is still unnecessarily turning up her nose. don’t get me wrong, i’m very happy and still wondering that someone hasn’t made a terrible mistake casting me for this role.

it’s true that this role isn’t one for the faint of heart. i’ve been put down in the middle of an instant controversy, the middle-aged man and the much younger woman. there are children and a very contentious ex-wife. there are my hopes and dreams, most of which necesitate individuality and a lot of free time to achieve. there’s a man who, night and day, professes his undivided adoration and affection to someone who has often regarded overly expressive displays of emotion as unecessary and embarrassing.

it’s not been easy, by any stretch of the imagination. but most of my friends and family have been supportive, which gives me the courage i need to look strangers in the eye with confidence when they look at us with disdain. golddigger, they must be thinking. she must be after his money. he must be after younger ass. it’s every age-discrepancy movie come to life. it’s the episode of friends where monica gets called the twinkie in the city. it’s the movie stepmom.

it’s harder in real life.

i’ve never been one to step away from a challenge.

resurfacing

i know, i know. it’s been a while.

i started this blog so i could complain about a really bad breakup. i kept blogging because i kept having terrible run-ins and terrific stories and things that just deserved more explaining. i wrote because my heart, my mind and my soul each had different voices and they were dying to be heard. and you’ve been a captive audience.

i’ve laid very few ground rules. one was that i would not provide enough information to be identified, except in very rare occasions. another was that i would never blog about work or reveal my occupation. this was probably the most inflexible rule given the highly sensitive nature of my line of work. it’s also this rule that has, perhaps, been the hardest for me to follow without slipping.

i’ve been dating the other guy, the scandalous guy, for a month now and i can’t tell you how we met. or how we had to vet our relationship and clear work-related obstacles before i would even consider anything. i can’t tell you how perfect we are for one another because we work in the same profession with parallel careers and we get it, really understand each other and what we’re up against every day.

i also can’t truly explain why i’ve been so tired every single day for the past two years of my life that even just writing a few sentences can be the little bit that pushes you past tired and into exhaustion. how every single area of my professional and personal life has been tested over the past few months. how it’s about to get so much better and so much worse at the same time. how i live for my job — it invigorates me even as it drains me. i love it. it defines me and i shape it around me.

so without telling you everything, i want to give you a brief glimpse into my life over the past few weeks.

i have found a man who treats me like i hung the moon. i don’t know how much of it i believe yet, but he’s been pitching the same message consistently for a month and i have to admit i like the way it sounds. perhaps i’ll never stop looking over my shoulder and identifying the exit routes but for now, i’m better than i’ve been in a long time.

i’ll try to keep posting with more regularity, but it’s possible that soon i’ll trust him enough to let him read me and if that happens, inevitably my voices will change their tones.  i’d rather they stay silent than allow an outside source to influence their message. i’m independent and shit like that, you know.

snippets

i know i said there were a lot of ifs. i know i said a lot of things, reasons why i was holding back. and i’m still holding back.

there’s a lot more to say, like how my mother reacted to hearing that i was dating someone more than 20 years older than myself. like how his children woke me up this morning, calling to see if my dog and i would come over to play. like how he keeps telling me i’m the one he’s been waiting for his whole life.

but i’m really tired now. it’s a lot of work entertaining a four-year old and a six-year old and those children have worn me right out. so if you’ll excuse me, my very tired dog and myself are going to sleep, the sleep of two beings who are been living in a world very different from the one they’re used to, one that has exhausted every last spark of energy.

good. night.

raining, pouring

so the last few months, they’ve been dry. the men have been sparse and not of much substance. two rounds of match.com and they still weren’t lining up at my door. not a storm cloud in sight. no thunder. no lightning. nada.

and then, in the blink of an internet and work-related eye, the heavens opened. and now i feel a little like i’m drowning.

i know i teased about the one potential match, but since then i’ve grown more wary. our chemistry is still just as strong. we’ve spent hours on the phone (and i hate long phone conversations.) and he sends me upwards of 20 messages a day at work. in short, he’d be perfect. if he wasn’t twice my age. if we weren’t parallel professionals in a world that doesn’t take kindly to any advantages, perceived or realistic. if he didn’t have two children and a recently divorced wife. if. if. if.

seriously, in any other situation the kids would be a selling point. and it was really endearing when he invited me to spend the day with the three of them. except that while i wouldn’t mind someone else’s kids at some point, today is not that point.

and the other one, the very quiet one? he’s still very quiet. it’s possible, however, that his lack of words might have been from sheer nerves and not a lower level of intelligence. get him out in the woods and he opens right up about hunting, fishing, etc. start talking work or politics, he freezes right up. complete with shaking hands, flushed skin, the whole nine yards. but it’s awfully cute. especially when at the end of our eight-hour date, he finally worked up the courage to ask me if he could hold my hand. and then if he could kiss me before i left for the night (mind you, i wasn’t actually leaving, i had just mentioned that i needed to leave soon.)

i ask you, single women (and married too, why not?) everywhere — when was the last time a guy asked permission to kiss you? or to hold your hand!

as of this evening, i have learned that he’s told his family and his father’s boss that we’re dating. i have also been invited by his father to thanksgiving dinner.

and of course, this has all happened in the same two-week time frame. because it never just rains on me. my rain puts the flood to shame and makes my life look not unlike noah’s ark, trying to stay afloat with a million bickering species of thoughts straining within the confines of my very muddled brain.

but at least the drought has been temporarily suspended.

no NaBloPoMo here

as much as i’d like to pretend that i could suck it up and write a post every single day for a month, it would be more likely for me to suddenly stop caring about arranging my books by size in the bookshelves so they’ll balance aesthetically, or wash my hands fewer than 27 times a day. seriously. how do you guys do it?

it’s not that a lot hasn’t happened since last we spoke. i went out of town to a festival and met a guy who looks like J will in 10 years with 20 more lbs. he seems to be intent upon driving me over my 1000 texts-per-month limit. really… three texts all within two minutes of each other? is that really necessary?

the next night there was a halloween party where i met a pirate. not even a sleazy jack sparrow-type pirate (although i do love me some jack and will turner), but a real commodore. i flirted shamelessly and still don’t really know his real name nor what he actually looks like without the wig and the hat, although i do believe he’s approximately 30 years older than i am. in my defense, he’s aged rather well and still has it.

a few days later, i went on the speechless date. we’re going fishing on saturday. this is the make-it-or-break-it date.

somewhere in the middle of all of this, i met someone else. and the circumstances are so uncertain, so unlikely, that even if i was participating in NaBloPoMo, i don’t know that i’d bring it up more than casually. so you’ll either hear about it when it goes up in flames or i’ll be declaring my profound happiness. if you know what’s good for you, you’re routing for the second choice.

other than that insanity, i’ve been working. and i don’t blog about work. so given that i get up, i go to work, i come home and i go to bed, there’s not much else to talk about. i know that makes me boring, but it keeps the dog fed and the heat on and the laptop charged.

(oh, you don’t even know the trouble i’m flirting with right now with that guy. the scandal!)