brianna.org

It’s been awhile since I’ve written, and all the movement of these passing days merits an update.

We have been home from Kansas City for a month, and I am surprised at how much we’ve accomplished, and the enormous amount we have left to do. Between clearing the house out in preparation for some renovations, going through Mom’s stuff and sorting things for donation, doing paperwork, working on servers and stopping occasionally to breathe, I have found this last month to be difficult and educational.

To be diplomatic, that is. One thing I will not deny or lose sight of is that through this entire journey, I have had enormous amounts of support. So I hesitate to delve into how overwhelmed I have been these last few weeks, because it could have been far worse. A thousand times worse. I have had it as easy as the universe and my family and friends could make it, and for that I am ever grateful. But there have been a few dark days, days of little motion or insight where I have merely drifted, numb, before getting up with a sigh and finding the next thing to do.

The activity has been a blessing. Some way to keep my head occupied while it drifted (occupied drifting is not an oxymoron. Think “fishing”). I mentioned in my last entry that my memory has been fuzzy, and that hasn’t entirely let up – anything before three or four days behind me seems to fall away into a vague haze of color. The first two weeks we were back from our roadtrip, I found myself making phone calls to utility companies that I had already made before I left. In my anxiety over making sure I got everything done, I found myself doing some things repeatedly while forgetting others.

It has been a strange August, somber, perhaps, but there has been a lot of laughter and around the middle of the month I finally remembered that Josh and I are going to Greece together at the end of September – a tentative plan we had made months before – and for the first time in months I found myself truly excited about something happening in the future – losing the vestiges of hesitation, getting out of the mode where every day was lived entirely for itself with no plans for later, because I didn’t know what the next day would bring. It was a shift, definitely, and a somewhat rocky transition at that. A few weeks of nightmares, culminating in the most terrible in which I dreamed that my mother showed up at the door, still in pain, still sick, and in the dream I felt the horrifying conflict of wanting to be glad that I had more time with her and absolute terror because she brought with her that agonizing wait for the end.

Yeah, I debated sharing that here. That nightmare colored my mood for days. Putting it here was a way of exorcising it and removing the various blocks that have kept me from writing this month. I can truthfully say it has been a month of processing and transition, reflection. And now, I return. To document a part of it and to continue the rest of the story. Because there is always more, isn’t there? There is the love story to return to. The physical journeying, to Greece and beyond. There is the making of mistakes and the learning from them. There is always something.

I look over what I’ve written here and see the ungrammatical truthfulness, the excessive misplaced hyphens and overabundance of commas that have characterized my writing from the fourth grade, and I think this – it has been one year since I promised myself I would be truthful and direct if I was going to use this site as a blog, and I am so damned glad I did. There are so many treasured memories kept here already, and I can honestly say that I look forward to seeing what next year brings, and all the years after. I might have said differently last week, in the fog. Tomorrow there may be a moment where I think “No more, please”.

But right now, I have so much to look forward to. I feel like flying again.