Slow

It's a slow Saturday morning, there is Bailey's in my coffee, and my wedding playlist is playing in the background, songs more relaxed than my Sunday playlist; songs like "Never Tear us Apart" by INXS,
"Is Your Love Strong Enough?" by Roxy Music, "The Scientist" by Coldplay, "Sonnet" by The Verve, "One Love" by Bob Marley, "Charmed Life" as sung by Diana Krall, and, as always a little Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" thrown in there for good measure.
Slow, winding songs, matching my slow-witted computer, my thoughts dulled from waiting for its pages to turn, thoughtfully. My blogging has slowed since Mike went home and took his MacBookAir (sp? lol) with him. Maybe it's made me turn more to the fawn-lark journal, but mostly I've written in my head. And in emails.

A number of mornings this week, opening my email up was kind of like Christmas morning, if Christmas occurred randomly.  One day, an email from a long-ago, far-away old friend shocked me. The name in my inbox. The dredging up it allowed me of my old, young self. She seems so so far away that girl.
She had no idea what was going to come her way. 
I quote my Aunt here: "Thank God we can't see the future". Amen to that Aunt K.

I was explaining the last few years of my life as best I could to this friend, and even as I wrote out the barest of details, I realized how little you can actually transmit in a few short sentences. Only the surface stuff, really. Writing about Mike, I didn't write about his snug apartment above his restaurant, sloped ceilings of an attic, charming (hitting my head on them....not really). Living one mile from the Atlantic, the mile that is the warm-up of my run on the beach. It just doesn't seem real, even to me sometimes. Yes, I'm recently married. Yes, he's an American. It means alot of hoop-jumping and form-filling-out to make governments happy. Well, not happy really, more like satisfied. Content that we are married and are following the correct channels in this form-filling-out. But under the surface, it's hard to tell 'the background' story--the question I'm always asked: "How did you meet someone from Maine?" After all, it is, as so many have reminded me "so far away".  Not really, I counter. It's drive-able in a day. A long day, but a day. Eleven hours.
So, the answer to that question, when asked by someone I don't really know that well is usually,
"It's a long story."  One best answered over a bottle of wine, because the story itself, I know, doesn't seem real. It seems book-ish, meaning written by someone, someone else. But oddly enough it's my story.
The abject shock (funny, really) when I reveal I just got married. "YOU?! MARRIED?" I have to smile.
The tentative kind.

My email inbox sprang to life again this morning with another email from another long-distance friend, long-dear to me, our correspondence over the last few years, via the internet, on phone calls, sometimes in person fuelling me.  Fuelling my mind, my thoughts, forces me to turn them upside down, away from the conventional ideals, the functions we're supposed to live by.
It was a singular word in the subject line, block-lettered, and my heart kind-of sank a bit, in a flash of pre-knowing.
I read her email. I thought about it.  The kind of thinking my friend deserves.
I emailed her back. I believed every word I carefully typed.

I thought about the book I just finished reading, the one about the woman living in Maine, a one Mrs. Olive Kitteridge, whose widow-hood closes out the book, this widow-hood allowing her, as always in hindsight, to see just how precious those useless years that had preceded it were {never do we know love until the hour of separation"}  Gibran? Rumi?  So so true.
So I give you Mrs. Olive Kitteridge's most profound (to my reading tastes) observation in this book that is full of observations, it was something that came to me when I read all the emails this week, the ones from my dear friend, the ones from an old friend, flung at me from cyberspace, that person you're convinced you'll never see or hear from again, on your doorstep, it feels like, hat in hand, bearing a message {this being human is a guest house...every morning a new arrival.  Treat each guest honorably... }that IS Rumi.

"Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desparately hard every person in the world was working just to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became.  People thought love would do it, and maybe it did.  But even if...it was never enough was it? Her son; a bright buoy bobbing in the bay of her own quiet terror".
p. 211, Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout (c) 2008

I think that pretty well sums it up for this cloudy Saturday. That sea of terror isn't going to drain away any time soon. We strive, in my own social-reality theory world, to meet our number one need, whatever it may be for each of us; that secure job, that marriage, those children, more money, more things, more achievements. But, as I emailed my friend this morning, we are tied up in the drawstring bags of our choices, our fates (chosen, too) and all we can do is let the outside in a bit. As in, go easier on ourselves. The world will keep spinning, and we don't have to turn it.

That's me, musing aloud on this Saturday morning, five years to the day that I moved into this loft, floating on my own lake of fear (a mortgage on my own was I crazy? I'd asked myself that since the day I signed the papers, the money I'd saved for ten years out of my savings account, poured into a small slice of brick building I could call "mine"). But that's another entry (one I've been working on for a week. Please forgive me).  The lost blue earring story is still waiting to be written too. And there is running to be done, food-shopping to complete, and there are dinner plans in there too.
When I googled my blog this morning, an instragram ad popped up promising images from 'weekends around the world'.  And I loved the images that inspired in my own head, people all over the planet, starting their sacred weekend, ticking off the boxes of what needs to be done, fulfilling themselves somehow, with something, be it their number-one need or something else.

Happy Saturday.