Until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky
Until the ocean covers every mountain high
Until the dolphin flies and parrots live at sea
Until we dream of life and life becomes a dream

I have so much to say.

I just don’t have the words.

*  *  *  *

Did you know that true love asks for nothing
Her acceptance is the way we pay
Did you know that life has given love a guarantee
To last through forever and another day

I’m back in North Carolina, in the world’s weirdest hotel room (and by “weird”, I mean, “really crappy in a near-the-airport-kinda-way”), by myself.

Again, I was looking forward to the alone time.  Preparation time.  Thinking time.  Time to look for houses and figure out what’s going on in my life and in my head.

I need that time.  I don’t get that time at home — there are dogs and Adminnies and friends and boys and a host of craziness that parades in and out of my space.  I’m scheduled to the gills, barely stopping to breathe.

Here, I breathe.

And in between those breaths, I find a lot of empty space.  And not in the good way one thinks of empty space, either.  I find empty. Big empty.  Big, scary empty.

And I look at it. Stare it in the face, and wonder:  am I really such bad company that without distraction, there’s nothing left?

*  *  *

As today I know I’m living but tomorrow
Could make me the past, but that I mustn’t fear
For I’ll know deep in my mind
The love of me I’ve left behind, because I’ll be loving you
always

I’ve known for some time now that I’m in a Seeking phase.

A friend told me tonight on the phone that I have a typical MO — things fall apart, and I finish the job, so to speak.  I raze and burn what’s left of my life, probably from figuring that starting from scratch is easier than trying to work around the messes I’ve made.  (I added that last part.  His assessment was more of a “be kind to yourself”, but the razing-and-burning is probably more accurate than platitudes.)  I get rid of everything I own, extract (and distract) myself from whatever’s going on, and I move, geographically.

He told me that there’s probably more to it than I’m aware of, which is probably true (though, I have to say, that I’m not a huge fan of psychology.  I think a lot of the whole shebang we call therapy’s just common sense, and if we weren’t all so freakin’ disconnected from each other and the world around us, we would probably be a lot better equipped to handle our own minds.  No offense intended toward the people who study this kind of thing — it’s fascinating and admirable to want to help people.  I just have a different religion than that of the absoluteness of the mind.)

Ack.  Digression.  Go figure.

What I was saying before I went off into left field somewhere is that yes, there’s probably more to it than just what I think it is, but here ’tis:  I go through cycles.  I’ve been noticing them more for the past year or so.  Some of them are short cycles (moods and such), and some of them are longer-reaching, lasting months or years or decades.  (Like the one I talked about in a recent podcast, actually — the whole acquisition/release cycle with my current obsessions.  That’s a longer cycle.  A year or two of amassing everything I think I need for a particular thing, and another year of ditching it all, which I think I’ve talked about here before…)

Sometimes these cycles are from internal things and other times, there’s an external stimulus that kicks one of these things into a new rotation.  This time, I think, it’s the move.

I need to get out of Iowa.  I know this.  And I was so sure, for the last five years, that I wanted to be back in Seattle.  Then I wasn’t so sure.  Then I changed my mind and fell in love with something — somewhere — else, and my brain went into one of those Other Cycles.

I’m questioning everything now.  I’m butting up against parts of me that I didn’t question before.

And, frankly, it kind of sucks.

*  *  *

We all know sometimes lifes hates and troubles
Can make you wish you were born in another time and space
But you can bet you life times that and twice its double
That God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed

Thus, the Big Empty.

The spaces between breaths, the quiet seconds before I fall asleep, the times I pause to look up at the sky and wonder what’s next?

I feel, honestly, like a shell sometimes, just waiting for the What Next to tell me what I’m supposed to be doing.  I go through all these motions, follow the formulas, answer the emails — but I’m looking for it.  For meaning, maybe.  For the next step.  For the reason I’ve been led here through a thousand little coincidences to a place (metaphorically and literally speaking) where I’m tied to a life that fits and doesn’t, all at once.

And when I’m really quiet, I know what I need to do.

I just complicate it all with I don’t knows and emotional smoke.  But really, if I’m honest with everyone involved, I may need to just own up to my own commitments and give up the seeking.

Forget the thousand little coincidences and the thousand little decisions that brought me here.

Cowboy up.

*  *  *

Until the day is night and night becomes the day
Until the trees and seas just up and fly away
Until the day that 8×8x8 is 4
Until the day that is the day that are no more
I’ll be loving you always.

Someone close to us passed away today.

It’s cost-prohibitive to go home early, which isn’t helping the…well, honestly… guilt I’m having about being here.

It’s just one more reason.

Facing this loss of someone I liked very much, I’m reminded again that everything is so, so temporary.

I wish I could see tomorrow.  Read the last page of this novel.  Know where I’ll be and how it’ll end.

Maybe I need to just stop whining about what I want, and write the ending the way it should be.

It just breaks my heart a little more than I can bear yet.

(lyrics are, of course, Stevie Wonder’s “As”)

My life for two days now, in black and white to avoid giving many spoilers.

It’s all the yarn for the IY club’s first shipment (well, a portion of it.  The whole room is filled with columns of wool, all dyed the same.  And no, it’s not black and/or white. :>), and just a peek of some soap that’s curing on the table, waiting to be put on the drying shelves.

It’s been a good couple days of completion around here.  Things are, in fact, getting done.

I really like that.

*  *  *

There’s a ton of things swirling around the brainpan.  This is what happens when I’m forced to physically be still for any length of time — my brain takes up the slack and ends up wearing me out more than if I’d run a marathon.

They probably make a pill for that, don’t they?

Kidding, kidding.

* * *

There’s too much negativity in this world.

(This, coming from the woman who can complain about anything on a dime.  I admit my own contribution to this problem.  Just sayin’.)

When complaining and snark are seen as “funny”, I’m not sure there’s all that much keeping me from throwing out the television and living on a mountain somewhere with my happy sheep and even happier dogs. And it’s everywhere.  Gossip and tearing each other down and obsessions with lives of people we don’t know and, thus, can’t change.  I don’t get it.

Are we all really that unhappy?

Sometimes, it’s confusing being a part of this world.

I went to bed early.  The dogs were going all Sominex on me, laying on my legs and feet, and snoring and emitting some kind of crazy sleep-enhancing drugs from their unconscious pores, and who am I to resist the lure of Dog Sleep?

It’s powerful stuff, that Dog Sleep.  Resistance, futile, you know the drill.

I almost made it, too.

*  *  *

The past few days have been challenging in a whole lot of ways.  Rewarding.  Happy.  But challenging.

I know I talked a little about the evil infection of evil in my chest last week.  They gave me horse pills and told me to rest (hush, Minnie.), and after a few days, they said, the infection would go away.

A few days later, when my fever was 102 and climbing, they said that perhaps we just needed some heavier guns.  Gave me bigger antibiotics.  (Which were, ironically enough, smaller than the first ones in size.  Go figure.)

A couple days after that, when my fever broke through again, and I was exhausted, I went back to the office (to which, incidentally, I can now drive in my sleep), where they took a look, poked at the weird red places, pronounced it Not Good, and X-rayed me until I thought I might actually glow.

Turns out the infection isn’t just a staph infection.  It’s a streptococcus and staph infection.  Like, the Dastardly Duo of infectionworld.

And, even better, it had moved into my actual chest cavity, where it’d made a cyst-like mass near my left lung, which was, presumably, compromising my ability to process oxygen.  (Go figure.)  I’d noticed the Big Tired, but no shortness of breath or blueness of lips (which I would have totally taken as A BIG FAT SIGN, mind you), so I had no idea.  I knew that my chest hurt.  I knew that (avert your eyes now if you’re squeamish, by the way)…it was draining all ickylike.  But I didn’t think it was all that serious.  Kinda thought it was just part of getting better from the Big Evil Infection Of Doom, actually.

I’ll spare the goriest of the gory details.  But they sent me to a place with very big needles and a guy with very cold hands and a lot of lidocaine, who jabbed a Very Big Needle through my chest.  Drained a bunch of really disgusting stuff that was living on my body’s figurative couch, eating my food, and leaving dirty socks on the floor.  He essentially evicted a really bad roommate, with a giant needle and a “Oh, this might pinch a little.”

(Lie, by the way.  It did not pinch.  It felt like someone was stabbing me.  Which they were, really.)

I started feeling better pretty much right away, however.  Part of that might have been the drugs they injected in my hip after the fact.  I claim ignorance of the way the body works.

Either way, the new-found oxygen was fabulous today.  I had more energy today than I’ve had in at least a week, but didn’t know that I didn’t have.  (I knew the coffee wasn’t working.  Kinda thought I’d built up an immunity to Starbucks, actually.  But nope — was that whole not breathing right thing.  Go figure.  Who knew oxygen was good for you?)

*  *  *

I bought tickets to fly away at the end of this month.

I was trying to make it through until at least mid-April, but I couldn’t do it.

I’m strong.  I’m just not that strong.

*  *  *

The clock was ticking in time with my heart earlier.

I was laying in bed.  Early, like I mentioned.  And the clock next to me kept time with my heart, which is, despite being irradiated and drugged and infected and poked/prodded, still beating.  Thankfully.

For half an hour, I lay there, looking up at the godawful acoustic ceiling and trying to will my eyes to shut.  (I blame oxygen.)  The wind has been picking up all night, after what passes for a near-Spring day, and I just could not make the brain stop.

I’m surrounded with the most amazing people.  People so amazing, in fact, that I wonder what in the hell they need with the likes of me.

Sure, I can be amusing.  I bake a wicked pie.  I’m smarter than your average turnip.  But compared to some of these people I’ve been around lately, I’m like the dorky kid in every bad teenage movie from the ’80’s.  Flolloping along behind the hero/ine and acting as a combination of comic relief and confidante, until finally finding some equally-dorky cohort to ride off into the sunset with.

Or maybe we all feel that way, and inside, we’re all the dorky kid with a pocket protector, playing heroine in everyone else’s perception.

Some smart person said once that we’re all the hero of our own stories.  But I think she got it wrong.  I think that we may be heroes, but only in everyone else’s stories.  To ourselves, we’re just us:  bumbling along and making it up as we go.

*  *  *

I should sleep.  Or at least go stare at some more acoustic ceiling and listen to the rhythms of dogs-breath and clocks.

I just wanted to check in.  Tell you what was up.  Babble incoherent philosophy from the Land of Dorks ‘r’ Us.

Someday, I’ll have it all figured out.