Take my hand, we’ll make it I swear
Nov0
It’s amazing that the time really does feel like it passes faster… I feel like I barely turned around and 2007 was almost over.
Thanksgiving has given me a lot of pause this year. It has not been an easy year for me. Work was downright harrowing for about 6 months, the energy it took me to get out of bed in the morning to go to work was greater than the energy I used the entire rest of the day.
I moved, twice. Both were good moves, but moving is always stressful (and often full of minor physical injury).
I think that the thing which has been hardest of all, and which I am still coming to grips with, is how close I came to losing my best friend. Leia was very sick in June, and it was a series of dumb luck circumstances that prevented her from dying. My heart skips a beat even thinking it, let alone writing it.
Leia is like half of my soul. She has rescued me more times than I should really think about, and I’d like to think that I’ve given that back almost as good as I’ve gotten it. People talk about soulmates like a fairy tale romance, but Leia is my soulmate in a different kind of way. We can not talk for months at a time, and pick back up where we left off. We can be totally, brutally honest with one another when necessary, but we rarely let it get to that point.
I cannot imagine my life without Leia in it. Not for a single moment.
Last night I saw Leia for the first time one on one since she was in the hospital, and there was a moment when I realized that she has accepted how close she came to dying, and that was a truly sobering moment for me.
This year has been full of tragedy, and some hope. I find myself listening to Low Strung again. I saw my brother for the first time since HBC, and it is awesome to see how the experience has changed him, physically, emotionally, and in his maturity level. He is an amazing young man, and I am so proud of him, I don’t think that I can say it enough. Recently I’ve spent some time thinking about what it must have been like for him to come up on his friend after the accident, before the ambulance arrived. As scared as I was the first night I saw Leia in the hospital, I knew she was out of the woods. How must he have felt, seeing his friend in the road, with only miles and miles of pavement and fields (it happened in Kansas)?
The more I think about these things, the more I think about the Nine Inch Nails song The Becoming. I cycle through these feelings, and I am a little bit different each time I encounter them.