Hello again, world.

Here is what I want from life: wide open arms, wide open heart, fire and blazing light and all the extremes compacted from both ends of the line into one perfectly rounded central point. I want the mist over the pond this morning and the night wind across my bench in Manhattan a week ago and the wildness of the rainstorm that brought flash flooding two weeks before that, when I drove through the storm with my car windows down and Other People's Heartache by Bastille throbbing through the onslaught of hail-force rain drops. I can feel the draw / I can feel it pulling me back / it's pulling me back / it's pulling me. 

I've been drinking too much coffee again. There were a few months where I was doing better, living stronger, thinking more clearly. That sort of thing ebbs and flows, though. I've barely come to accept that: instinct still fights recognition. Because to acknowledge the ebb and flow of mental clarity and reason means that I acknowledge being less than well, and that's a hard admission to come by. Even in this paragraph I'm fighting the words already. No. No, don't put that down, don't say that. You're fine. You're fine, dammit. And I'm not.

But three years of running and seven years' drought of good decisions has taught me a thing or two about this bizarre organism I call myself, and even though these days carry the tatteredness of too much tired and too much heartbreak I'm not so afraid of waking up in the morning, because one of these mornings, whether next week or next year, I'll open my eyes and that stain on the ceiling will suddenly be in close focus, and from there the stain will connect to the coffee in the French press in the little trailer kitchen which will connect to the hydrangeas by the drive (or their ghosts, if they don't make it through the summer) which will connect to gravel which will touch the wide cloud-studded sky which will touch the plains stretching over Utah which will meet the red cliffs which will spread northeast to Nebraska and greet Chloe who will be eight and still blonde and definitely taller, and on that day I'll get up and go do whatever it is I'm going to do and everything will seem sweeter and clearer and more excruciating, but real.

So for now I'll turn in my accounting final and finish re-writing my care protocols for NARM and wrap up that business software class and go to Georgia. I'll keep writing letters and seeing people and planning events and pulling the weeds and making breakfast wraps for dinner, not because the exhilaration of living is there now, but because it will be. And because in all this rubble of a bombed and scattered existence, there's plenty of building material left to be used in the process of constructing a life worth living. I'm going to keep on using it.

Have a magical second week of August.

Signing off,
Donny