I don’t know what my love language is, but if I had to take a guess, I’d say language.  Words.  Certain turns of phrase create such vivid images in my mind and I carry them with me, revisiting them occasionally and smiling, just for myself.   I feel the best, most authentic way to show the people in my life whom I love how I feel is with words.  I find comfort in them.  Reading them, writing them.  Understanding them.

I love wondering how writers decided on phrasing or word choice – how clever and tight screen plays can be, how lyric some prose, and harsh others.

I’m amazed by my sister-in-law’s mastery of not one, but two languages.  How she translates and manipulates words in her brain to make sense of things, to express herself.

If language does not define us, what does?

**

I feel as though I’ve spent much of this year on the edge of a cliff, teetering so close to slipping over the edge.  I’m tired; more tired than usual, and I am in pain; more often than usual.  I am wrung out with stress, my jaw and my shoulders and my back.  My joints.  My muscles are spasming regularly,  a twitching heartbeat of the unrest.

I mourn life passing by as I sit and watch, unable to move, unable to participate.  I mourn my health, I mourn the rhythm of life before everything changed. I worry about Lucy’s surgical site and her need to sleep/inability to rest.  I go to sleep tired, and wake up tired.  I wish for the raging pain in my head to subside.

My good days used to vastly outnumber my bad ones.  Now it’s hard to keep track.  I am afraid and ambivalent.  I am searching for something in which to drown myself – another story of a different time.  I am struggling with all the things I believe and how to act properly, how to be part of a solution while still needing to advocate and care for myself (which can be all-consuming and is absolute f*cking exhausting).  I am wrestling with the tremendous guilt.

I feel lost.  I miss my mother.

I miss my mother.

Xox, g