Run boy run

Temperature: 15/59 degrees

Eating: a slice of chocolate date cake I wanted to test for our end of school/start of summer holiday festivities. When did it turn into a buffet? I blame the male adolescents who eat Everything All the Time.

Drinking: Recent events have put me off the sauce.

Watching: The Good Place

Listening: to the sounds of spring and summer

Reading: Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez. Every human being even remotely interested and invested in equality should read this book. It will make you gasp and seethe, but never again will you be able to say that who knew.

Writing: a letter to my coming-of-age son so that if, for whatever reason, I’m suddenly not here, he’ll always remember how much I loved him, and what I wanted to say and wanted him to know. Does that sound crazy to you? Call me old school, old-fashioned, but I felt at peace when I was done. There. It’s all on paper. So that he’ll never have to doubt or second-guess, and so that he doesn’t forget. No quotes, like the ones below, just the heartfelt words of a mother to her son.

Thinking:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
     With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,  
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,  
     And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
(Rudyard Kipling)

Feeling:
Oh, and you in all your vibrant youth
How could anything bad ever happen to you?
You make a fool of death with your beauty
And for a moment I forget to worry
(Florence + The Machine)

Please don’t go

How’s your week been, sweetie darlings? Mine has been incredibly sad. Starting last weekend, really. So, if you’ve had all the sad you can bear with all the Covid coverage and what not, I suggest you find something else to read because I’m not fit to cheer you up. I’m sorry but there you have it.

You see, one of my oldest and dearest friends was hospitalized. She’s had health issues for a while now and has taken a turn for the worse. Much, much worse. And she’s been keeping this turn from her friends because she’s been keeping the truth and the inevitable consequences from herself. As if that would change the end result, which it didn’t, since she is now, as I said, in the hospital. It’s a relief. It also makes me and another dear and close friend of mine and hers sad and angry and disappointed and worried and scared, and a hundred other things; trust me, we’ve felt it all along the way.

You see, we’ve been best friends for almost forty years now, so since we were kids. These are the oldest friends I have, and it’s nothing short of a miracle that we’ve managed to stay together. I’ve lost so many friends (acquaintances? both) along the way (because the internet/mobile phones didn’t exist, to geography and ghosting, after betrayal and exploitation) that these women, dearest denizens, I’m not willing to let go. Till death do us part. But I hoped that would be decades from now. We’ve shared and gone through ev-ery-thing together. Our whole lives, all the ups and downs and joys and sorrows, pains, miseries and victories. We had plans for old age. So what are you doing? What are you doing to yourself? I love you. We love you. Why have you stopped loving yourself?

How can I bring her up, talk about her this way? Oh, I’m sorry. Do you know who I’m talking about? Maybe you do. Maybe you know someone who is struggling, someone who is fighting their way into the light but losing faith, will and spirit fast. Maybe you feel, like I do, that you are losing this person. Maybe I am. Maybe you are. Maybe we are and there’s nothing we can do about it, and by God we have tried, time and time and time again. It certainly feels like loss, a loss before the fact. And it’s a self-regarding grief you feel, but isn’t it always, that you are about to lose someone you depend on, count on, lean on. How do you live without them? How do you live in a world without them? Love has held you together. Isn’t love supposed to conquer all and heal all and make everything all right in the end? But when someone has decided to give up on the world and everyone in it, they don’t hang on love, do they? They hang on the thought of the pain ending. They hang on anything that dulls that pain, be it drugs or alcohol or a variety of self-harming habits that only hasten their descent into their personal hell. Throw all the love you have into that abyss and see it disappear into a gaping black hole. That’s my experience. Tell me, please, there’s some other way this story ends, because I know it happens. (So why do I have a bad feeling about this?) Tell me your loved one got clean, got sober, found the will to live, found Jesus or Buddha or the Flying Spaghetti Monster [it’s a thing, look it up], found their way back to herself or himself or themself [it’s a word, look it up.].

Because the way I see it, she is lost and in no hurry to find her way back to anything anymore. Her friends and family have tried to bolster her, help her, but she is neither strong nor motivated. She seems to have passed the point of caring. To hell with life, the universe and everything, I’m winehousing it to the bitter end.

I’m hurting so fucking bad right now. But nothing compared to how much she is, I’m sure.

Don’t go. Please please please don’t leave me here without you.