Another autumn morning, no sunrise before the work day begins and I’m okay with it. I’ve got these quiet minutes of solitude to reflect on upcoming holidays, ongoing genocides, and an important election. (Please vote, I hope that goes without saying.) The world feels like it has gone mad… maybe don’t contribute to the chaos, pain, and mayhem. Don’t add to the body count. Seems almost ridiculous to say such things, but… there’s a lot of killing going on, and it is being perpetrated by human beings. Don’t be one the killers. Actual people are committing atrocities against other actual people, and somehow finding a way to justify their participation in these horrors. Don’t do that.
It’s morning. I’m okay, though I am aware of the world, and the pain, misery, and destruction we somehow refuse to end. It’s a foggy autumn morning. The sky overhead, though, is clear and starry. It gives me a brief hope.
Traffic in the fog.
Yesterday was a good start on a new week, that is already almost over. I’m over being ill, which is nice. Monday is a holiday, which I had forgotten, and the long weekend ahead feels like an unexpected treat. I sit quietly awhile, grateful for the small win. I gently shift my thoughts away from more worldly matters, and reflect with gratitude on the many things in my life that are working out well. Small moments of joy and satisfaction. Contentment. These things matter, too, and there’s an enormous reserve of resilience waiting within them. I breathe, exhale, and relax, giving myself over to a few moments of meditation, before I begin again.
Nice break from the day-to-day, and I definitely needed it. Now it’s back to life, back to reality…. and, oh, hey, there’s a song for that. I add it to my playlist, queue it up, and sing along as I drive to the trailhead feeling grateful that I took today off to “reacclimate” to real life after I returned from the coast.
I slept deeply last night, the first really good deep sleep I’ve had in days – since before my trip to the coast. I rarely sleep really well in a hotel. I often sleep poorly at home. I don’t take it personally or fret much about it anymore; I have sleep challenges and I’m pretty accepting and real about it. Sleep disturbances have been “a thing” for me since I was a child. I’ve experienced multiple parasomnias, some of which persist to this day, and some that I seem to have “grown out of”, or recovered from with medication or therapy. I don’t think of them as “part of who I am” so much as relatively commonplace challenges I happen to endure. I’ve long since given up seeking a root cause or wanting to assign blame. It just isn’t about that. I’m generally grateful to sleep well and deeply. It’s quite a wonderful experience when I do.
Watching the traffic pass by, waiting for the sun
The morning is dark and foggy. I watch the traffic pass by on the highway and sit quietly with my headache (which is a 7 out of 10 this morning) and my tinnitus (which seems to be turned up to 11). Unpleasant, uncomfortable sensations on an otherwise pleasant morning. My head is filled with the remnants of surrealistic dreams of running down forested paths between festival tents and brightly painted caravans, and strangers doing strange things. I was playfully evading a group of my friends for some reason, and woke before I could figure out why some angry old man was hucking tangerines at me. lol
… How’s that for having nothing at all to do with reality?…
I breathe, exhale, and relax. I am vexed by this headache. I feel certain I have “things” to do today… but for the moment I don’t recall what, and there’s nothing on my list to guide me. What am I forgetting? Anything? Is it just that nagging feeling, unattached to anything real? I sip my coffee, and wait for the sun.
…Fuck this headache, though…
My Traveling Partner definitely missed me while I was gone. The reality of having me back home, in his presence, with all of my issues, and very authentically me, this woman that I actually am, wasn’t embraced with the same enthusiasm, or so it seemed to me. I’m sometimes quite frustrated by the sensation that the woman he loves so deeply may not actually be the woman I am. I’d love to be able to see myself through his eyes…both the version he holds in his heart when I am away, and the creature who vexes him so when I am with him. I wonder what I might learn about myself – or about my partner?
Daybreak comes.
The gate to the parking lot finally opens with a familiar rusty screech and a quiet clang. The timing has changed. I take note. Reality legitimately does not care about my expectations one bit, and it’s a useful practice to reset expectations with new information. I try to do it often.
It’s still early. Chilly morning. I’ve got a warm shirt on, and a comfy zip-up fleece. The sunrise is orange through the mist. I lace up my boots and grab my cane. Good morning for walking and for self-reflection, and a good morning to begin again.
It’s shortly after midnight. I’m awake, not because it’s Friday night and I stayed up late doing something. Nope. I went to bed a bit early, in spite of the somewhat noisier Friday night guests, and crashed pretty hard. I slept deeply for a little while, but woke several times to discover I’d pulled my CPAP mask off in my sleep. Weird. I’m not surprised that woke me each time that it did; I struggle to fall asleep without the mask these days, in spite of it giving me occasional nightmares of having to wear MOPP gear. Not an experience I ever enjoyed, and not a bad dream I want to have. Tonight wasn’t about that, though, it was just weird. lol
I woke a little while ago, and my consciousness roused sufficiently to recognize more than that I had removed my CPAP mask – I recognized the likely cause(s). Acid reflux. Headache. Osteoarthritis. The exceptionally quiet darkness after a rather noisy evening. Now I’m awake. I took an antacid. I got a drink of water. I put on a capsaicin patch where my pain was worst. I took something for my headache. I got up and stood on the balcony looking out into the velvety dark night, out across the bay, feeling the cool air on my skin, and looking out into the night for some little while. No moon. Few stars – fog? Mist? Clouds? Across the bay, most of the homes along the Salishan Spit are dark tonight, which surprises me at this relatively early hour. No bobbing lights of shallow bottom boats on the bay. The tide is coming in. I stand awhile, listening, watching, embracing the solitude and the darkness.
It’s been a good couple days of painting. I’ve got another day of it, tomorrow. I miss my Traveling Partner – I’ll be happy to head home Sunday. I stand in the quiet darkness wondering how to bring “more of this” to my experience of life at home. I often wake during the night, at home, but rarely get up or doing anything much about it. Shared living subtly discourages it; I don’t want to wake anyone else. When I live alone, I often do something more than roll over and go back to sleep. Funny thing is, when I’m living alone, I don’t easily “just go back to sleep” – so getting up makes sense, and I do. No stress to it, just a way of living. When I am sharing a living arrangement, I tend not to be awake enough long enough to bother. I go back to sleep because going back to sleep makes sense. There’s no effort to it, these days, and no anxiety to being awake. I don’t actually know why there’s a difference in these experiences (for me). Perhaps living with my Traveling Partner simply finds me feeling somehow safer when I wake in the night, and more able to return to sleep because of it. I don’t generally “toss and turn” if I wake… I just go back to sleep, maybe after getting up to pee, or get a drink of water. Weird. I chuckle quietly to myself, that’s a known thing; humans are weird. lol
…The “more of this”, though, that I’d like to bring home with me, isn’t about the wakefulness in the night. I’m satisfied to roll over and go back to sleep, at home, in my own bed. I’m not grousing about that at all. It’s more… the art, the sense of creative presence and inspiration, the subtle feeling of freedom to “do whatever I want” in all the minutes of my day. Perhaps this really is best left to vacations and time away, alone… it sounds pretty “selfish” on paper, and a somewhat adolescent perspective on adult freedom – untethered from the very real responsibilities of adulthood that most definitely exist. I sit with the thought awhile, after I step back in from the chilly darkness of the balcony. I think about compromise. I think about choices.
I’ll go back to bed soon. I’m already both tired and sleepy. I’m only awake because my thoughts continue to meander wakefully, and I’m honestly sort of encouraging that, in spite of my awareness that sleep could easily overtaken me, given a chance. It feels like a luxury to enjoy the quiet of the night. The world sleeps, the moment is mine…
I’m awake in the wee hours. “The bottom of the night”, I used to call it – it’s just minutes shy of 03:00 a.m. Why the hell am I awake? I feel… sleepy… but I’m not asleep. I toss restlessly for a few minutes. I get up to pee, take an antacid, and go back to bed. Sleep chases me, but doesn’t catch me. lol
I finally just get up. Why not? I’ve got this hotel room to myself, and the world sleeps around me. Beach campfires that were lit in the darkness, visible in the distance, are extinguished now. The lights of late-night beachcombers are gone. Dinghies and fisherman, too, have all gone. There’s nothing but darkness beyond the balcony and across the bay. So quiet. My right knee aches for no particular reason – is that what’s keeping me from going back to sleep? Pain? How commonplace! I pour a glass of cold water and turn on a light. My back aches… more pain. Ridiculous. I’m annoyed by the pain, mostly because it seems such a stupid thing to be dealing with when I could be asleep, dreaming, resting, healing to take on a new day.
…Pain is part of the human condition, and most people have some, whether we see it or not…
I sip my water and let my mind move on. It’s late for it, and it may make me wakeful, but I don’t have to work, and if I chose to do so, I could nap all day tomorrow simply by choosing to… so… why would I sit here suffering? I mean, aside from suffering also being part of the human condition? lol I put a capsaicin patch on my knee. It helps.
…Now I’ve got fucking hiccups…
I breathe, exhale, and relax. The quiet is pleasant and uninterrupted by any concern about waking anyone else. I feel relaxed and contented, if not physically comfortable. Small win, but I’ll take it – it’s nice to be wakeful in the night with no hint of anxiety. Sure, sure, I could be sleeping right now, but I’m not, and that’s okay, too. I’m okay for all observed values of okay, aside from a bit of physical pain – and let’s not kid ourselves, eh? A lot of people have it worse right now, at this very moment, dealing with pain, sorrow, disadvantage, hardship, anxiety…fucking actual bombs… there are so many things that can and do go wrong in a human lifetime. I’m grateful that the only thing amiss for me in this moment is that I’m awake at 03:00 a.m. I’ve got this… (If you know, you know – if it’s 3 a.m. as you read this, I recommend headphones before you click the link. lol).
G’damn, I should fucking go back to bed. I laugh quietly. Now I’m not only awake, I’m managing to have a good time with it, feeling merry, feeling… joyful. A great playlist and Bluetooth headphones; I am untethered and free, dancing in the darkness. lol Good grief, humans are weird. I smile to myself, enjoying the moment, aware that somewhere “out there” on the fringes of the many people I have known, and lives once lived, the Party People are probably also dancing, wrecking themselves midst the house-parties that never end, in some un-named trap house somewhere far away. My recollections connect me to them by a mere thread between the recalled “then” and the lived “now”. I’m okay with that – I’m not about that life. lol I do love the music…
The music plays, and I dance on. Eventually, I’ll sleep, wake, and begin again.
I’m eating oatmeal and drinking a fairly uninteresting cup of hotel coffee. I slept in – I mean, for me – rather a lot; I didn’t wake up until 06:30, just as day break hinted at a new-day-to-come on the eastern horizon beyond the hotel room balcony. I sigh contentedly. I don’t even like oatmeal. lol That’s not the point.
Afternoon view from the hotel balcony.
I arrived yesterday in the late afternoon and started getting settled in… set my phone down while I brought my bags and pastels in to the room, and missed some pings from my Traveling Partner (after he had rather abruptly told me to stop pinging him because he was trying to use the phone) and he called me, worried about the prolonged lack of reply. I was fine. Everything was fine. “Nothing to see here.”
An exchange of pleasant messages a short time later managed to become a stressful conversation about an irritating eBay purchase for which we’re waiting on a refund. The circumstances themselves are annoying, and I very much want to see those resolved satisfactorily, but I definitely wasn’t seeking out opportunities to be stressed the fuck out about anything, just then. At all. Regardless of relative importance or the amount of money involved… I’m not here for that, right now. I have been teetering on the edge of “see a professional” levels of exhaustion and just frankly overwhelmed by having to do every fucking thing, basically all the time. (I recognize that a great deal of that stress and overwhelming effort is “emotional labor” vs actual physical workload, and that I do get some help with some tasks around the house from the Anxious Adventurer.) I say something about it to my partner, and he reminds me that I don’t have to look at – or respond to – his pings in real-time every moment.
…I think back to the earlier phone call and wonder how true that really is…
…I honestly don’t like leaving him hanging, and don’t want to miss responding to something truly urgent…
…Adulting is hard…
…Then I set expectations (again) that I’m going to lay down (because I’m in pain) and I set my phone aside and do that.
I wake to the sunset.
I wake to the ringing phone. I hadn’t meant to sleep… “Definitely tired,” I think as I answer the phone. My Traveling Partner greets me with a loving tone and an apology (for being cranky earlier and stressing me out) – he called because he realized I was likely to crash hard and possibly sleep past the point I’d wisely pause for healthy calories. He was right. He generally is right, about most things he bothers with at all. I’m grateful. I go across the road to the food carts and get some tasty Indian food, a nice treat. We chat briefly when I return. He misses me. I get it – I miss him too. (and I also miss me.) I’m grateful to have a partner who supports me taking care of myself in this way…and we sometimes benefit from a chance to miss each other. Perspective.
I wasn’t up much longer last night than it took to “let dinner settle” (I don’t enjoy waking up to acid reflux, so I avoid going to bed on a full stomach). I ended up calling it a night at a more or less typical time (for me), after a pleasant shower.
I woke this morning, after “sleeping in”, to a lovely new day. The sound of sea birds on the bay. The sound of ocean waves beyond the channel. A view of day break and dawn yet to arrive. Lovely. I made oatmeal and hotel coffee; I have no need to rush around doing anything more than this. I’m here, now, making the most of an opportunity to rest. This is an endeavor that has a surprising number of verbs, itself, frankly – they’re just different verbs. lol
Time to begin again. It’s a new day.
My phone pings me an alert from the security camera; the Anxious Adventurer on his way to somewhere. I send him a quick good morning message, and ask if he remembered to make coffee for my Traveling Partner (I’m clearly not there to do that!). New habits, especially short-term, can be easily overlooked, and I truly need the backup on this – not checking in on it this first morning seemed unwise. This? Right here? This is one of the major drivers of my fatigue; I struggle with feeling responsible for “all the things”, almost all the time. It’s probably a trauma-based character flaw of some kind. I breathe, exhale, and relax – and let myself return to this place, and this moment.
I open the balcony door to let in the fresh ocean breeze. I sip my coffee and write. A little later, once there’s plentiful daylight and the delights of the sunrise have been savored from here, I’ll go walk on the beach, reflecting on life and love, and feeling life’s minutes tick by gently. Later still, I’ll return to the room with fresh coffee, properly made by some professional coffee-making establishment, and set up the pastels for a day of painting and creative musings, listening to love songs and sea breezes. G’damn I needed this restful time. I’ve been pushing myself so hard, and so little of that effort has anything at all to do with me. I don’t resent service to family, hearth, and home – it’s not that. I’m just tired. It’s been a lot, and I am one mere mortal woman with my own limitations. I can only do so much for everyone else, before I have to stop, just stop, and do something for me. Rest. Paint. Wander. Exist quietly for a time without external observations, however helpful – a moment to simply be. Now and then I need a couple days alone with the woman in the mirror.
Evening Light 