It is now almost a year and I keep trying to convey the difference between now and then, as though I mean to preserve this moment, which is nothing like I imagined, and also still occasionally kind of sad and odd and hard to quantify.
I have two more sessions left with my therapist and that also seems odd. Right now I am OK with it, it seems to have come to a natural conclusion. I am aware of what an impact it has made, how it has prepared me for the rest of my life, how it has made certain things easier for me to manage.
A year after the height of my eyeball freak out, I am calm about my terrible vision, and I have found a way to handle the painful flare ups, even the screamiest red scraping blinks and the headaches, It was kind of like learning how to handle yeast infections and UTIs and strep, faster than a doctor. With mostly things I stir up in the kitchen. I am in charge, I am the powerful witch doctor and spiritual guardian of my own body. This all reminds me of a long impromptu conversation I had with Heather at Giant Eagle, that look she gave me, like, dude, you are telling yourself that other people are giving you bad answers, and you know their answers are wrong and that if you give yourself a second to really believe it, you already know what to do. I did, and I was right, and I found my answer. It was a wake up call.
Last year, on this day, I was like a half blind cat, waiting for someone to come back and pet me, put water in my bowl, tell me they were so glad I am where home is.
I was an impossible ache, a too rapid terrified breath, a lonely waiting ghost. A few days later I was an empty heap.
I had finished the last winding of my paper tabletop, pulling and pounding and straining to finish it, and crying for all the stuff wound up inside. I was that giant wheel of carefully arranged tension, one poke, a slight accident, and the entire center would come sproinging out. I cried the whole time I finished it. Karen Dalton low in the distance just filling and spilling and breaking my heart until he called me, late, using tones and words that were stupid and empty of awareness, and my guts did sproing out and I spent days weeping on the floor.
Then I was full of light, then I was full of bees, then I was full of promise, then what if, then loss, then I was a carbonated underground spring, then raw powerful wanting, then lust and anger and more buckets of sorrow. There followed embarrassment, abandonment, illness, panic, freak out, then finally, thankfully, certainty. Then curiosity, connection, conversation, Speak Easy, possibility, work, play, love, realization, personal awareness and accountability, shorter cycles, tighter circles and always the sense that this life is interesting and worth it, and mine to finally live.
I am lucky. I know that. I am grateful, I live in that. I am aware, that is the best gift, I am alive, that is so ridiculously easy to take for granted. I love. I am loved. I know who my friends are. I am not broken. I do not squander. I have everything I need in this moment.
I did not remain knocked down.
