I am thinking over the week to come. I won’t see my traveling partner again for a week, and sometime Thursday we’ll lose touch altogether while he’s away, and I won’t hear from him until sometime late Monday or early Tuesday. In all other respects, the next 7 days to come seems entirely ordinary in every way. It’s strange that the presence of one human being, the specific characteristics of one voice, one touch, one human being’s… way, can be so completely woven into so many other elements of my experience, isn’t it? I won’t actually be “without” him… not entirely; I am reminded of him everywhere I turn.

Love is everywhere – well, everywhere we make it.

It’s a gray morning. Traffic in the distance sounds muffled. There is no obvious sunrise, just the day lightening from twilight to definite day time as I sip my coffee. I sit quietly. Writing isn’t so easy today. Some days the words queue up in my consciousness, sentences forming faster than I can type, ideas spilling messily onto the page. This morning? Thought. Consideration. The slow gathering of recalcitrant words. Sentences… sort of. My mind wanders to the lawn beyond the window, the caw of crows on the far side of the park, the morning itself. I am slow to wake fully. I continue to sip my coffee and consider the morning, and to wonder “what life is made of” other than details, choices, consequences and time? It’s not really fair to the topic to describe life with such brevity.

I ache from physical therapy, yesterday. The gray day hinting of rain ensures I don’t overlook my arthritis, either. No headache – that’s something.

A few words exchanged over instant message with my traveling partner makes my morning feel more “real”, more complete, and it’s something I will miss while he is away. This week we don’t travel through life together. We are each having our own experience. Sharing those details will come later. His absence feels more real this morning, having spent last evening together and knowing it’ll be one week from today before we can be in each other’s arms again. I keep coming back to it. Fussy and fretful in some moments, relaxed and content in others. How very human! 🙂

I don’t feel much like writing this morning. That’s come up a few times recently, since being emotionally attacked by someone I thought was a friend, on Facebook (a connection to my recent disinclination to write that I hadn’t previously made). It’s a feeling of subtle over-exposure, an awareness that, yes, people who don’t like me, don’t support my views, disagree with me wholly, find me without value – or worse – may also read my writing. It is, as they say, a free country. I am discomfited by that. It is a strange emotion to acknowledge, and one of the very few emotional experiences that has ever left me feeling reluctant to write. I am struck by the detailed awareness of something that has the potential to silence me as a human being. I don’t like thinking about the feeling; it is as unpleasant as feeling it.

“What is life made of?” seems a good question to ask, and the answers I contemplate have their own value. “What silences me?” seems a terrifying question that I don’t want to ask, and have even less interest in answering – and I resent that. So. Perhaps I will spend this peculiar and rare solo week asking myself that question, and listening to the answers. Life’s curriculum reaches me in many forms.

Today is a good day to face the woman in the mirror quite fearlessly; we’ve been through a lot together, and I know she’s got my back. 🙂