Isn't she lovely?

I have a broken heart. It's so so very broken. I think about my broken heart when I wake up in the middle of the night. I think about it when I wake up in the morning. I work hard all freakin' day long to keep from falling apart. I have a broken heart.

"People are better than no people." When I'm sad, I need to be alone a lot. I need to sit in a quiet room and not think, maybe cry, but mostly stare at the ceiling and be sad. At some point in the sadness, I begin to wonder if it will ever end, and if I'm isolating myself to the point of depression. Then I hang out with my people, and I feel a lot better, and I realize that things will not be awful forever.

Right now, I am trying to live my life as normal. I go to work. I go to yoga. I try to feed myself on a regular basis. I cry and get mad at dumb things and then say "I'm sorry". I have good moments. I have bad moments. I try not to cry at the pharmacy when they mess up my prescription for the hundredth time (even though I try to keep this from happening, and plan ahead, and check and double check, it stills happens - I have no control). I try to keep my life as stable as possible. I take a lot of walks at dusk. There have been times in my life when the walks at dusk were accompanied by swinging on swings at the park, but I don't have any swings near me now.

I don't know what is going to happen in my life, or with my heart. I'm learning to be a person who tries not to control everything. Not trying to control everything is probably why my heart is really truly broken. I'm proud of myself for letting that happen, for letting my heart be broken. That's progress.

The ideal is not real.

This morning, whilst en route to an estate sale a hundred miles north, I heard an interview with Nicole Atkins on NPR. She talked about Marcel Proust, and how he had influenced one of her songs with the idea of "the ideal is not real". She talked about how we, as humans, try to idealize our romantic partners, but in the end, it's all chemical and we have no control over who we end up with; that felt empty to me.

Couples were everywhere at the estate sale: sixty-year old antique dealers beside me in line, a man who told me he had to find something for his wife so she'd forgive him for all the junk he bought, wives asking their husbands to bring the trucks around to haul their finds, a hot bearded man with his wife and son that I couldn't take my eyes off of. I wished I'd brought a person with me to hold stuff, haul junk around. save my place in line. I couldn't stop thinking about it as I was alone in that line of fifty people, pushing my box with my feet because it was so heavy.

I ask strangers to hold my place, to watch my stuff. There are dogs and kids, and workers moving around constantly. I love people-watching, but in that moment, I wanted to be share my awesome thrifting life with somebody. But I guess I haven't found that special smelly somebody yet ;)