Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

 Two weeks into a six-week solo voyage, I finally felt my nervous system start to settle.  Settle after nine months of constant alert, nine months of wonder, nine months of life on hold.  Since April, my Dad's throat cancer has been clear, but the lung is being watched, and the trach had to come out weeks after the last radiation.  My Mom has been holding her own.  They're stable, and for the most part, my autoimmune chaos has been manageable.  Mom and Dad needed me here, in the states, so I took a few weeks this summer to scratch off a handful of National Parks and a dream--long overdue--road trip I've long talked about.  So, two weeks into a six-week hiking trip, I finally felt myself settle.  The solitude has been a welcome relief from nights and days of endless dark wonder.   In Montana, after visiting Kansas City, Wind Cave and the Badlands in South Dakota, Yellowstone and Grand Teton, and Custer State Park (SD),  I felt myself...

An Emporia, VA sunset.   In the run of things, 2024 was one of the hardest years of my life.  It began with a friend dying unexpectedly, and it ended with a new heart wound that I'm still processing.  It's been dark around here these days.  It's been dark for ages, actually.     My Dad's cancer was confirmed before Thanksgiving, the Wednesday the week before, to be precise.  In a phone call, as he was driving home (and stopping to see my Mom), I called him, and he told me.  He'd barely found out himself.  Then . . . Then, I made a phone call to an old friend of mine.  Little did I know that act would undo me.  Back in 2020, shortly after my sister passed, I was told that when it came to the heartbreaking, bad news, we called each other . . . no more texting things like "my sister has cancer" and "my sister died." It made sense; she insisted that we call from now on.  In all these years of being separated by ocean and ...

I've been writing again, and here's something different.  Vignettes and notes from the long piece I'm finishing this week.  Sometimes, the fiction we write can leave marks.  Deep marks.   While in Greece I've been working on the day job and getting back to my roots and me.  Enjoy the notes and windows into the next phase. Next time I'll pull out the notes on dating again.  Joy.  Now there's an absolute joy, so much that at one point I forgot how to speak English at the luscious advances of an American in Greece.  (Note the dripping sarcasm).   Greece has my heart in many ways, even with a stress and workload--this year--of epic proportions.  I am obsessed with life here, I keep coming back, and it feels like home time and time again.  Since that first voyage in 2013, when my best friend had to drag me back on the ferry to Turkey, to now when I wander Athens.  I stroll along these streets with such ease, knowing this c...

How does one start the next narrative? I do not know, yet here I am.   I'm back in Greece after a blissful month in the South of France.  There, I had elongated days filled with walks, stone fruits bleeding with juice, and the clicks of heels along smoothed cobblestones.  Of course, I stopped in Paris for a few sunsets, and then I spent nearly a month in Aix.  Knowing me as an urban dweller mainly thriving from smog and city noise, friends were keen to watch me as the days rolled by.  I have a hunch a few had bets I would lose my cookies and run back to the winding streets of Paris with panhandlers and pickpockets, tourist queues, and the endless noise and complacent stress of city life.  Instead, as the days lingered, I found a rhythm and solace within the small town.  Vendors at the market started to recognize me; the cafe I went to for iced coffee treated me as a local after my third visit--realizing I was there a long haul--as I blundered my F...

In late December, I tried to write again to fall short to the binds of writer's block and life. Yet, now, a month and a half later, here I am.   *** It's been three weeks now since the surgery narrative changed. The message on my phone saying she passed is still clear as day in my mind's eye. Two days ago, I let my iTunes play a random list of songs. That was my bad, knowing good and well that that's rarely a good idea.  Joanne came on, and it hit me as I climbed five floors, gasping for air--not from the steep ascension this time--as I struggled, shaking to put the key in my door. It's always something like that, a song out of the blue, to knock the wind and fragile peace right out of you.   That damned Lady Gaga song connected to us and me, and now it haunts me like a memory you can never fully pack away. I've lived longer with lupus and RA than I did without; that song was written about the loss of someone from lupus, yet in its release, it's more along ...

 Sitting an ocean away, on another summer of work via escapism (or is that vice versa), I've finally slowed down to process the past year.  The threats to unalive me from students, my resignation from there, my words being taken out of context (perhaps purposefully) in my day-to-day life and not even personally, to a three-word text, and being back together two weeks later, to being ghosted in the cold squalls of mid-February.  My head still spins at it all, especially with how busy I've been this year.  Though, as these things go, dreams and missed ones cross the mind's eye.  I'm still numb and waking up from the emotional coma.  It's not the emotional coma of 2020-1, but it hits different without a coherent definition or design.     While in France, I found a sense of peace one day.  I was so at ease and comfortable while kayaking that when someone asked where I was from, I answered something else.  Girls on the kayak away respon...