We’re back in the Bay, and hallelujah does it feel good. The air smells like ocean and fog and blooming things. From 5 degrees to bougainvillea in one flight! Our cats are alive, well cared-for by friends, the house smells stale in that comforting Victorian way, and our Christmas tree is turning into tinder in the living room corner. We’re settling back into life, putting away some new gifts (my brother got me a matching set of green kitchen utensils, because he is a genius), doing laundry, reviewing the stack of holiday cards. Those of you who sent cards: you’re amazing. Watercolors? Letterpress? Your heads as ice cream cones? Nuts.
I feel suspended, observing myself in the middle of ridiculous tasks like mourning my aunt by occasionally weeping while putting clothes away, and planning a wedding, but I also feel like time has catapulted me, that I’m flying through the air like cartoon cannon fodder.
Earlier in the week, when I was having trouble sleeping, Mike gave me a half a sleeping pill that my mother had given him, but that had originally been prescribed for our old, uncomfortable and anxious dog Skip. (Oh god, I need to write separately about Skip – his epiglottis has fallen [!] and now he whines when he breathes. It’s pathetic.) The pill did help me sleep, but it also gave me the spins and made me dream that my email inbox was whipping forward and slapping me in the face. If that ain’t a message from my brain, I don’t know what would be.
Oh and insult to melting-brains injury ,my phone is dead, victim of a watery demise in a bar’s toilet on our last night in New York. Classic. It’s buried in a bowl of rice on my counter right now, but I’m not optimistic. Do you know what it means when you’re phoneless? You have to do things like find your way home without directions (tonight I followed the sunset to get on the 280, I shit you not), and tell people things like, “Let’s meet at 10, but we both have to be on time because I don’t have a phone and I can’t tell you if I’m running late and you can’t tell me and neither of us wants to be standing outside forever just waiting.”
Also, I’m going wedding dress shopping tomorrow. Pray for me.