Hiatus

I’ve been gone.  I’m not even sure why I’m back here.  DJ isn’t forcing me to write, he’s not even here, he’s staying with friends in Denver, I’m sleeping in a guest bedroom with family.  My home was in the floods.  I don’t usually share such specifically identifiable information, but the spammers can enjoy it.

There’s nothing like natural disasters and tragedy to show you who your friends are.  And who they aren’t…

Random strangers and volunteers have been pouring in, they’ve worked every weekend with us since the flood and some people have even come during the week.  Family has come from all over the state to help.  Relatives I haven’t seen in 15 years have shown up to help.

The day I was evacuated and my cat was dying, I reached out to M.  He wrote back and said to write him all the details.  And then silence.  For two weeks.

I guess it’s good.  Maybe I needed to be slapped in the face with it this hard.  He’s got priorities other than me.  He always has.  Even writing an email and saying “Gee, are you okay?” doesn’t make the cut and… that hurts.  I guess it shouldn’t anymore.  Nothing he does or doesn’t do should hurt anymore.  Most days I don’t even think about it, I go to work and I go home and I clean up mud and throw out my ruined pieces of history and life and I don’t think about anything else.  But then another guy at work was talking to someone and I overheard him and he suddenly said something and the inflection in his voice sounded so much like M it was like being punched in the stomach and all the pain flooded back in.

My kids are so sweet, they keep asking if I’m married or have a boyfriend so I told them I had someone special but things didn’t work out for us.  When I almost lost it in that moment, they asked “Are you sad because of your house?” and I said, “Yeah, I am,” and one of my girls said to the other kids, “Well she lost her boyfriend this year, too, she’s having a hard year.”  And that made me get all teary all over again.

They’re good kids.  They have hard lives and they get hard in order to survive, but they just need someone to care and to be real with them and to not give up on them and to keep them in line so they know that someone is in charge and it doesn’t have to be them anymore.

I don’t know why I’m writing here.  I guess because Adele has kept writing me, even when I haven’t written back, when I’ve been away and without computer access for long stretches, she still writes.  So this is for Adele.  A better friend than I am.

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