Everything Will Be Alright

Kate at Sweet/Salty gives this Reverb prompt : Tell me about one 2010 moment that served as proof that everything is going to be alright. It doesn't need to have been profound. Think a passing serenity that makes you pause in the middle of a blink. Beyond trying to believe. A knowing that's as deep as bones, neverminding the how or the when.



My one and only Reverb reply for 2010 :: I am writing on this for two reasons. 1) A serious girl crush on Kate. It did not abate when I met her in person. Actually I think it got worse. 2) Her words make me want to write. With the full knowledge that they cannot shine in the way her prose that is actually poetry does, but still, those words of hers make me want to find expression here.

2010 was a really rough year. It started out promising enough. I was part of the Mondo Beyondo class in January and that experience opened me up to new people and possibilities that made the horizon seem saturated and bright. But then kinda' things went to shit from there.

We had a year of joblessness and return to full time for me. We had struggles with role reversal and resentment and wanting to just be comfortable again. We got sued. We got sick. I ran away for a bit in order to take a breath, learn how to breath ... instead, I landed smack in the middle of a world I inhabited when I was in my early 20s and found it was really not to my liking. I turned 35 which threw me for a huge loop. For a girl that never really paid attention to the years passing, this one, well, it just about did me in. And I feel quite done with 2010.

At the beginning of the year I declared it, called it the Year of the Gypsy. Guess what I found out? That gypsies are poor. Also you should not declare a year because it will bite you in the ass somehow. In truth, it was the year of the Gypsy. We roamed far from home and found that we really could. We discovered that home is where We are, where that core community of family and friends reside ...

But it was hard, ugly even sometimes. There were missed moments and tears of frustration and the eternal wrangling of two small people when sometimes all I wanted to do was stare at a wall.

What made me know it would be alright? There is not one moment in the year, rather a moment of the day. It is that moment before sleep, when I am prone and my mind is unwinding, the events of the day unfolding and reflections on small moments flick by the screen of my mind. I kiss my husband, or if it one of those nights when sleep will not come and I find myself in the boys' bed, snugged between them, I touch a unbelievably soft cheek. Sometimes a tiny bubble of panic will rise in my throat when I think of the unfinished paperwork, that dying patient, the next bill, the lack of time, the demands of Life. But then I touch them again, these people, this man and these boys that connect me in a way to this world where sometimes it is so hard to live.

And I know it will be alright. Because they are real. And they are mine.

And then my mind begins that slow descent into oblivion and my last thought is invariably of the cup of coffee I will drink in the morning, fragrant and loaded with the synthetic creamer to which I am addicted and I know, I just know, it will be okay.