Rain, again.

For the first time, the rain today doesn’t suit me. This morning I woke happy, actually happy. For a few minutes, I have everything I EVER wanted. Everything. I heard that lonely dissatisfaction that’s haunted me for as long as I can recall stop talking. But now it’s back, the damn rain, the rain and the lonely sadness that I am not willing to accept as my personality because of its otherness. It is entirely separate from me but it lives inside me, feeding off me, and I off it. 

Bone-chilling cold, damp cold, mixed with a pinch of sadness (but not enough to draw real tears) alienates and comforts me.  I tried curing it in a hot bath, but the water grew cool and my mind went wandering, restless, expecting more of me than I had to give.

 Dull sadness yells again. I resist the urge to call someone to stamp it back into the safe place I hide it whenever I need to do anything at all. I wrap myself in a cashmere sweater – thin warmth. It’s tough softness blocks most of the cold, letting in just enough to make sure I remember the chill. Cold grounds me.

When I told Ellie that I’d be working from home and asked if she wanted me to do that she replied with a definitive, “No.”

I shook my head like a dog shakes waking up from a nap. Before making this about me, as I am oft to do, I ask, “How come?”

She says, “Because you’ll miss your friends and be lonely.” Ellie’s generosity of spirit astounds me. Magnanimity in her still takes me by surprise, though it no longer should. This pure person, whose whole life is lived without affectation - she passed right through me and shares that with me. 

Cole just came into my office and looked at me with that quizzical, “humans make this whole thing way more than it is,” expression.  It’s not confusion or pity but wisdom. He’s dying and it’s killing me. He has cancer. He’s been there with me thorough everything, through the Evanston years, when things were really bad, the other year when I only thought things were really bad, and now. Cole never let me be totally alone. He sits atop the couch, just close enough for an introvert to feel him and not feel crowded. I try not to miss him yet. But I do.