Miss Tricky Takes Over

So maybe it’s just me, but I have this bizarre tendency to think that I am never really sick even when I am. Whenever I experience pain or other symptoms of illness that would send most normal people running to the nearest care provider, I instead sit around and wait for it to go away. For some reason, now matter how poorly I am feeling I am always convinced that I am making it up. I do not know if this is because of some childhood trauma, general craziness or if it might have something to do with 23 years of intense joint pain that doctors said they could not see a cause of. I will spend hours, days or weeks talking myself out of making a doctor’s appointment because I probably am not all that sick but am dramatizing my symptoms. I suspect that this unique mental disorder is why I ignored some pretty obvious warning signs for over a year. Ever since I had this damned IUD put in it hasn’t felt right. Intermittent pain, a general “ucky” feeling and across the board “hey, this doesn’t seem to feel how it’s supposed to feel” sensations have plagued me for over a year. Lately you have all seen me write about my desire to have it taken out because I thought it was slowly killing me- did I make an appointment to do so? Hell no! I mean, obviously I was just being a baby about it all and imagining all of my discomfort.

 Well, Friday morning a familiar pain crept into my lower abdomen. I have felt it periodically for a year and was prepared to grimace and ignore it as usual. Except, it didn’t fade or change. It hurt! I showered and got ready for work, thinking that if it still bothered me after my lunch shift I would go and get it checked out. (Read: I assumed I was using my special crazy-brain powers to create this phantom pain.) Then when I got to work it didn’t go away. It got worse and walking around wasn’t helping. It hurt enough that I decided to go to the emergency room even though I believed that they would be sending me home in an hour or so rolling their eyes about the crazy cry-baby faker with no problems. So I went to a hospital close to my work. And then I waited. I waited while people got choppered in and ambulance after ambulance arrived with critical patients. I waited while the elderly with breathing issues and pregnant women with asthma came in around me. Four hours later with a busting full waiting room and my name no higher up on the list I decided that I certainly wasn’t ill enough to sit here all day and headed for home to reassess my situation.

 Except as I was walking towards a bus stop it got much, much worse. New plan! Take a cab to Penn, which is nicer and bigger and closer to my house! Genius! And when I arrived I saw an empty waiting room! Huzzah! 4 pm, two people in the waiting area and considerably more pain. Surely I was only moments from relief! Except I live in Philadelphia and the ER was busy. Very busy. The rooms were packed and as I sat and waited the waiting area filled up around me. I considered leaving several times but each time I got up to leave the pain was still there so I waited a bit longer. Finally at about 10:30pm my little pager went off and told me to head back to a room. I have never been so excited to wait in a different location as I was at that moment. Once in a room I was palpated and questioned and I talked about my IUD for the umpteenth time and they gave me some Motrin and went to consult with a more senior resident. I was situated right next to the center desk so I heard each trauma call as it came in. More waiting. At some point I was informed that a full pelvic exam was in my future and that the appropriate pain medication would happen before anyone tried to put anything inside my seriously hurting parts. Exam, and the decision that despite having no symptoms other than pain that I had PID and did I by chance have syphilis? Ummmmmmmm, no. Decidedly not. As the nurse came back to get blood and my discharge papers were being printed I finally flagged down my doctor and asked if everything looked normal with my IUD. She said…(wait for it)…”what IUD?” Really? Then all of the sudden an attending comes in and says since we couldn’t see it anywhere you need a cat scan to locate it and here’s an IV and some morphine and drink this nasty contrast stuff and someone will be with you shortly. That was at 1 am.

 God bless my lovely nurse Barbara who was friendly and reassuring and chatty and didn’t make me feel like I was being rushed despite how busy they obviously were. 5 am I went for a cat scan and at 6:30 they came back and told me that a large cyst on my left ovary had ruptured and that the IUD seemed to be in the right place but the strings weren’t visible which means they might be stuck in my cervix and I should probably get it taken out. Gee thanks.

 I made it home by 7:15 or so and after being awake for over 24 hours and in pain for most of those I spent the rest of the weekend alternately sleeping and eating. Sheesh!

 Today I am waiting for a nurse to call me back with appointment time to get the IUD removed and the rest of my test results back. So I guess it has all worked out in the end. Let’s hope I have learned some sort of lesson and will not put off the inevitable until it comes looking for me, binds and gags me, slaps me around a little, throws me in a trunk and drives me to the end result.

Have you any idea how nice it is to be home from work at an hour when there is still enough daylight to show how badly the floor needs to be vacuumed? At an hour when exhaustion and sleeping baby boys do not prevent you from cleaning and dusting and putting away? To be home at a time that will allow you to actually make the dinner you planned? It is heaven. For the past several months I have been working from 11 am to approximately 12am 4 days a week, 11am to 5pm one day a week and more often than not from 3pm to 12am thrown in on a weekend for kicks. I did it because I love the restaurant I work in and the people that I work with. I did it because I am a workaholic. I did it because I had a nanny and a partner that allowed me to do so, but now I have something much more important to do. I have a Philadelphia life to wrap up, put in packages and send out into the future. 41 days….

41 days until I drive away from a city I have thoroughly enjoyed since last May. 41 days until I leave friends behind. 41 days until I pick up and move out of town for the eleventy-billionth time. It seems so familiar to be cramming things into boxes and sneaking off in a hurry. Four times before this I have moved far away hoping to find a magic reset button that would dissolve all the trouble I had made. Four fresh starts, four last chances, four good-byes. I am an expert leave-er, but so terrible at staying. This is the first time that I have nothing to run from. I am not off on a quest for yet another fresh start. This time is about continuing. This time is about expanding on 2 years of work rather than scrapping it all saying “maybe next time”. In 41 days I am moving because I want to, because it is the place I have chosen and because I am ready to go. In 41 days our little family heads out for home.

22 days until I make Mr. President a husband. 22 days until I am a wife. 22 days until we take a bold step away from the past and commit to our future. 22 days until we make official what we already know so well.

There are so many arrangements to make and boxes to pack and honeymoon road trips to map out in just 41 days. 41 days that I have decided to spend home early, with the people I love in the city I love savoring every moment of this tremendous new journey.

Now, how many cheese steaks do you think I can eat in 41 days?

The thing is, I am lonely. I was going to blame it on being in a new place and having some good friends but not the type you have history with – but, in reality, I have always been lonely. I was lonely in Rockford. I was lonely in Milwaukee, I was lonely in Pittsburgh and now I am lonely in Philadelphia. I might be a “loner”. Remember in school when that was a dirty word? A loner was someone who didn’t make friends and preferred to read quietly and didn’t go to parties and we were all supposed to try and not be that person. A loner was different and dangerous and strange. Are they still?

 When I fantasize about free time and what I would do with it, most often I am alone. I knit and read and write. When I get really crazy in those fantasies I take dance classes and pilates and am in classrooms learning new things. Only once in a very great while to I daydream about being with people. I have this perfect image in my head of what it must be like to have those relationships. Standing breakfast dates and stitch ‘n’ bitches and cocktail hours….. But at 28 wouldn’t I have created that by now? Am I just a loner? It is not my natural instinct to call a friend when I am blue or frustrated with something; I do not naturally reach out. But if I am just built to be solitary then why this lifelong feeling of loneliness?

 Sometimes I imagine that it can all be blamed on distance and that if I could magically place about six of my friends (some of whom have never met each other) into the same city we would bond and spend time together and it would be just like I picture. Unfortunately I suspect that that wouldn’t work. I think I would distance myself and be the same lonely I have always been.

 So then is it time to change the behavior or the way I think about loneliness?

I hate to admit this, but I watched most of a movie called “The Women” today. Not the 1939 one but the 2008 terrible one. It was terrible. All of it. And seriously, when is Annette Benning ever terrible? Anyway, the truly shameful part is that I was inspired by it. Meg Ryan’s character finds herself divorced and unfocused and completely clueless as to what she wants to do. She does two things that struck a chord with me. The first is saying that she has been ambivalent about life and that she wants to change it. I’ve never thought about it that way before. I am ambivalent about my own life. She also creates a sort of inspiration board for her life- this is my new favorite idea ever and also my newest goal. Done and done.

 I need changes. I don’t think they need to be huge and dramatic changes, more of the small but life-altering variety. I have been exceedingly restless and unhappy of late. Then I get depressed and overly self-critical about feeling unhappy and restless when my life is so damn good which just makes me more restless and pouty and…. you can see where this is going. As with everything in a mildly OCD person’s life, lists help…

Things that cannot be changed anytime soon or at all:

My work schedule. It’s intense.

The fact that I have a 4 year old in school and therefore have heightened responsibilities.

The fact that I do not have a disposable income.

Things that can be changed and should be immediately:

My health.

My overwhelming sense of melancholy due to being unfocused and ambivalent.

My attitude and approach towards my blistering schedule.

My priorities.

My lack of the emotional energy needed to tend to the important people in my life.

With that in mind I have quite a bit to do this week. First up? Find a doctor and get the hormonal deluge and chronic headaches sorted out. Purchase cork board and push pins for my inspiration board project will follow and then I MUST find a reasonably priced yoga/pilates studio near my place of employment. Three things in a week doesn’t seem like a lot to accomplish but it will be a small fucking miracle if I get all of that done. Speaking of hormones, does anyone else out there have an IUD that they think is making them ill and crazy? Inquiring minds and all that.

 Lastly, an open letter of apology…

 Dear Mr. President, Rhiannon, Sisters Two, Michelle, Rachael, Courtni, Sasha, Kim, Stephanie and The PQ Nation in its entirety,

 I am an asshole of a friend/squeeze/family member/contributor lately. I know this and I am desperately trying to sort it all out. I miss you all terribly and I feel guilty about not being on top of life enough to manage to have a conversation. I think I am going to try and make my needs and myself a priority for the first time ever in my life and you guys and our relationships are what I want most. I miss the banter and feedback and support and humanizing contact we used to share and I am committed to finding time for it again. Thank you for your patience.

 Love,

 Tricky

What would I even write about anyway? That life is still dreamy? It is. That I work and come home and spend time with the family? I do. That the NEW! PART-TIME! NANNY! is working out beautifully? She is.

 Life has become insular and rather rhythmic lately. It is all cozy and warm and good. Now that fall is here and the breezes have turned cold, I find that I am content to hunker down in my den.

 Well……..

 All that plus the fact that a lingering weirdness has descended upon me and I have absolutely no desire to talk about it at all. I am actively ignoring my internal monologue. It is not trying to help, it is just kicking up fuss and I am enjoying the first ever “fuss-less” time in my life and I will not have it bothering me now for no good reason. I am not used to this feeling of contentment. I am not waiting for something or killing time or weathering a storm- I am just living and loving and enjoying where we are now. The dreaded autism monster has been pushed back and for the first time in 4 years I am reveling in my son. He delights me now in a way that wasn’t possible 5 months ago. So I am going to retract my earlier statement. I am not suffering any weirdness. I am simply taking the time to settle in and really get to know the new me I have built- and all the great things that have come along with her.

 And more importantly, right now I am cold and cannot think about anything but thick socks, red wine and a stack of unread magazines waiting for me in his gorgeous leather chair….

As you know, or would know if I ever actually wrote blogs anymore, Mr. President has been off on vacation since last Tuesday. If you count them up, that is SIX long nights with no squeeze to annoy. We used to go for two weeks at a time without seeing each other before I traversed the state and moved in with him but this is our longest stretch since the whole fam damily decided to cohabitate. Anyhoo, my point is that since the end of May I have already turned into a wimpy little idiot girlfriend. The first night was mostly okay but all five nights since then I have been a tossing and turning, bad dream having, no sleep getting mess.

Wednesday night I started bleeding profusely from my pores at a dinner party and no one but me thought it was alarming. Thursday night I was lost and cold and really upset about nothing and my old boss kept wanting me to get ice and then go swimming but I didn’t want to because I hadn’t shaved my legs and all my co-workers already didn’t like me and I didn’t want to give them more ammo to use against me and why was there a pool at work anyway? Except we weren’t actually in work it was more like an abandoned hotel and there weren’t any people to get ice for except my boss and co-workers so maybe I was just working at their party and I kept trying to go upstairs and look for something but every time I got to the top of the stairs I got poofed back to the pool that I didn’t want to swim in. Friday night was filled with urgent voices that I needed to help but couldn’t seem to get to and everyone I asked for help just looked right through me, plus my hands were broken and then Saturday my old friend hypnagogia came back. (Those of you saying “hey! What’s that word you just made up?” should click on the link. Be sure not to skip the paralysis part-that is the most fun.)

It has been a long time since I had one of those episodes. In fact, since about a three-month stretch during the very worst of my marriage-fueled nervous breakdown where it happened every night, I can only remember two other occasions. It is unpleasant to say the least. I will be sort of dreaming about something but still very aware and realizing that I am falling asleep when suddenly this pulsing, static-y, deafening noise starts rolling through my head. Next comes the cascade of horrible imagery. (It used to be seeing people go into The Spawn’s room and take him, mixed in with classic satanic imagery. Weird, right? The worst episode involved seeing a big black bull with red eyes charge through my window and into my body and then my room was full of people trying to exorcise it out of me. I know how crazy that makes me appear but try and remember that I was sort of dying from stress and misery and was totally bat-shit crazy at the time.) Once the images start to get really horrifying things get worse. The strange part of this state is that you are semi-conscious- you can’t tell you are dreaming because it’s all too real but you also know you can make it stop if you could get up and get away from it all. (Makes no sense, I know.) So only once you are properly petrified and desperate to make it stop do you realize that you are paralyzed. Completely and totally paralyzed. The first time it happened I knew I was lying in bed with my then husband next to me. I knew these people were hurting me and all I had to do was wake him up and he would help me. Except I couldn’t move to touch him. I could feel him breathing and warm right next to me but my body wouldn’t work and I was trying to scream but I couldn’t move my mouth or vocal chords or whatever you need to make noises. Eventually my mental thrashing and screaming turned into actual thrashing and screaming and I woke him up panicked, and was too terrified to sleep normally for months. It was so disturbing that I called my sister early the next morning and described it to her. Sister dear hopped online and researched and found the term “hypnagogia” for me.

 Anytwats, it happened again on Saturday; That terrible noise, the pressure on my body (this time flat on my stomach and pinned to my bed), the paralysis, and as a fun new twist, my ex-husband walking through my bedroom door and toward me.

Saturday night was a bad night. I shook myself free of it at about two in the morning and baby jesus himself could not have made me go back to sleep again that night.

 Last night was just sort of a hodge-podge of all those things. Not any actual hypnagogia but my fear of it happening again kept my mind churning and me waking up every 10 minutes just in case, ya know?

 I’m tired.

 Luckily the squeeze is on his way home right now and will be here well before bedtime tonight. And so help me if his presence doesn’t work and I have bad dreams all night with him here I will…well…….. do something really rash and serious!

I fell sort of down and off of the stairs on Thursday. I wish that I could claim that accidents like this are rare and infrequent occurrences in my life. Sadly, they happen often. So often, in fact, that when Mr. President heard the racket and came to the top of the stairs to ask what happened and I responded with “I fell down the stairs” he merely said “oh” and went about his business. I’ll set the scene for you….

 It is Thursday morning at approximately 7:20am. It is The Spawn’s second day of school and the first day he is riding the bus to get there. I go in to wake my sleeping boy and since he is delirious and not awake yet he jumps into my arms and says,

 ”Hold me downstairs, mawmy”

 So I do. Things are going just fine until about the second to last step. Somehow I miss the very last step and start to fall. Since I am holding a child my brain jumps into super-speed ‘minimize the damage mode’ and I start considering my options…

The scene of the epic fall...

As you can see from the above photo, we live in a very narrow row home. It would have made sense for me to free one arm and fall forward into the door and use said free arm to protect my loin-fruit from impact. Unfortunately the child had thrown my already poor balance into disarray and I found myself leaning far left and into the TV/coffee table area and with my feet miles away from any sort of floor type surface. Landing on top of my child on the coffee table would probably break most of his bones and while I was imagining that horrific outcome I neglected to free an arm, which might have been useful in breaking the fall. Suddenly a stroke of child-saving genius hits me- the couch! Aim the child at the couch! Just as I toss the baby into the soft and bouncy embrace of the couch, impact is made. The impact of all 175 lbs. of me in a horizontal free fall landing on one tiny little corner of our coffee table. Me, panicked:

 Are you okay? Are you hurt? It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, are you hurt?!?

 ”I’m fine, mawmy. Mt feets are okay- you go get me breakfast now? Pease mawmy?”

 Can you believe the little shit didn’t ask if I was okay? Maybe it’s because he’s four and four-year-olds don’t spend a lot of time thinking about other people. Maybe it’s because I am laying on a coffee table, unable to catch my breath and making that half sobbing, half-braying noise that injured people make so he just assumes that I am NOT okay – or maybe it’s because he wanted breakfast and didn’t have time for my antics. At any rate, his casual food request assured me that he made it through the ordeal unscathed and now I could assess the damage I had done to myself. The impact seemed to have occurred at the tender, fatty little area between butt and thigh, front and back, hip and…well…. thigh again. You know, this part…

That is an arrow, not anything dirty.

Shut up, that is totally what my thighs look like.

 The good news is that most of my left leg had gone numb immediately following impact. The bad news is that the parts that hadn’t gone numb were experiencing sharp, shooting, awful arrows of sharp, shooting, awful pain and that a goose egg the size of a cantaloupe had already formed on my haunch. (Do you call it a haunch on a person?) Oh yeah…. it’s going to be one of those bruises. It hurt to shower, it hurt to walk, it hurt to pee, it hurt to have pants on and it most certainly hurt every time I bumped my very swollen butthigh into things at work for the next fourteen hours or so.

 I wish I could tell you that swelling had gone down by now. It has not. It has also only sort of started to discolor. It’s a faint blue with an angry red center and there is a perfectly straight, ½ thick purple mark that you could probably use to take accurate measurements of our coffee table. That’s good news since Mr. President only had this to say about the incident…

 ”Your ass took a chunk of wood off the coffee table. It’s fine, that thing needs to be sanded and re-finished anyway.”

I am beginning to wonder how to fit all of my old activities into my new schedule, or if it’s even possible. Generally speaking Saturday, Sunday and Monday is my weekend now days. Tuesday through Friday I serve lunches at one of my jobs and Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday I spend my nights behind the bar at my other place of employment. This all means that four days out of each week I am up at 7 to get me and the Spawn ready and out the door so I can drop him off and get back in time to catch a 9:15 bus. Three of those days I do not get home until about 11:30pm. When that is all written down like this it doesn’t seem like all that much but I can guarantee you that each week races by in a blur and Saturday finds me too tired to move or function for most of the day. Saturday afternoons are spent with Mr. President flipping through magazines and snacking on fancy cheese and wine, Sundays I clean the house and catch up on laundry and all of the sudden Monday has come around again and is full of all that business hours stuff that needs to get done every week. Sigh. I suppose that is my pathetic excuse for why you haven’t heard much from me lately. Don’t worry, I have two more…

Number two is simply that I am annoyed. I am annoyed with stupid, paperwork, stupid fucking hassle bullshit and it is consuming my whole mind. There is a lingering issue with payroll that while far from cataclysmic, is none the less irritating and has left a nasty taste in my mouth this week. Money is a motivator in my industry and when some is still missing it gets hard to remember why I am spending so much time away from my family every week and I start to suffer a lack of motivation. In addition to that is the fact that the city of Philadelphia has completely fucked The Spawn’s state medical coverage that gets him his autism treatment. I went through it all six months ago and everything was allegedly taken care of for the transfer of services when we moved- riiiiiiight. Last week I discovered that Philadelphia just hadn’t followed through on the paperwork (putting Spawn’s position at his treatment school at risk) and then dragged me through over a week of phone call bullshit only to lie about it being rejected and make me start over from scratch. By Monday of this week I was so frustrated and angry that I couldn’t do anything but cry. My head is filled with those nasty “It doesn’t matter how good you are or what you do, it never fucking works out and everyone is just trying to screw you over.” thoughts. They are by far the worst thoughts to have; they reproduce at an incredible rate and they infect every part of your being.  This leads me to number three…

Sort of. Before I get to the third official reason I should mention that the national headlines from the past couple of weeks have got me and the mister all twitchy. Stress and irritation have left us extra susceptible I’m sure, but this country is a serious mess right now and it’s driving us crazy. The town hall meeting crap, shootings in my old hood, asshole drunk drivers and the NFL *proving exactly how fucked up our nation’s value system is are all working together to make Canada look better and better each day.

When you add up the busy schedule, stressful paperwork and finance headaches and a lingering and steadily growing disgust for where I live you get a tired and distracted Miss Tricky. Since she’s already pissy, that busy and distracted Miss T likes to use times like these to dwell on even more unpleasant things (she’s a real bitch). This week I am pouting about how disconnected I feel from my family and my home. I live in and with those things and I feel like I’m just bouncing around the edges. My friends far away? Yeah, I haven’t had a chat in weeks. I just feel like I’m on a treadmill set at an uncomfortable speed and all I have to offer my loved ones is lame excuses about being tired and busy.

Whoa- these grumpy pants are itchy…

Anyway, that’s what’s been going on around here. Lots of everything not leaving room for anything and never enough hours for cuddling and laughing with the people I love most. Boo.

*just go ahead and google “domestic violence in the NFL.

Another year of Miss Tricky has come and gone…. and I hate to be too cheerful, but it may be the best one yet. Out of the myriad reasons this year has been stupendous, there are two that really stand out.

First is The Spawn. It seems like everyday for the past two weeks I find new reasons to be amazed by him. It’s hard not to cry every time he sings. This morning he crawled into bed with me and sang his own version of Old MacDonald…

“Old bedonald has a farm,

eee, iiii, eeeee oooooooo.

The pig goes oink, oink,

Eeeee, iiiiii, ooooooooo!”

Last night he slept naked because he asked me if he could “sleep with my body”. All of this is incredible because it means he is engaged and interacting. In previous years life just seemed to bounce off him and never get in; he wasn’t a part of anything. Now he is a part of everything and is grabbing the world in big, greedy handfuls.

The other started exactly a year ago…

For my 27^th birthday a couple of small miracles happened and I got to actually make plans and go out. Some good friends of mine from back home drive the Jager bus all around the country and just happened to be in Southside (my favorite neighborhood in Pittsburgh) on my birthday that year. I secured a babysitter for the Spawn and made plans to go out for dinner with my parents and then out for some serious drinking with old friends. Dinner was lovely, my parents and I were starting to hit a stride in our newfound relationship and we stuffed ourselves on seafood and drank expensive champagne. I actually got them to stop into Jack’s for a birthday shot when they dropped me off to find my friends. (At some point I was walking up Carson Street listening to voicemails when I noticed two guys walking past me in the opposite direction. I don’t remember anything about them except that they totally checked me out. Who doesn’t want that on their birthday? )

I still don’t know which bar we were in when they introduced me to some guy they worked with- I suppose it doesn’t matter. I was drunk, it was my birthday, and I felt pretty and free and was having an amazing time when they insisted that I accept a ride home from that particular gentleman. Despite the fact that I had plans to meet up with some old Southside friends who I surely would have gotten into some debaucherous trouble with, I allowed myself to be ushered into his car.

I was far too birthday drunk to try and figure out directions and I know for a fact that his GPS took us the longest way possible but who cares? It’s my birthday and I definitely don’t know this dude from Adam! I do remember that I had a severe case of diarrhea of the mouth and that I ceaselessly scanned through his satellite radio the entire way home. So far so good right? Hot-mess, drunk birthday girl who won’t stop talking or pushing buttons in the car; it must have been dead sexy. We made it to my house at some point where I immediately marched inside, kicked off my shoes, grabbed a bottle of Cook’s Champagne (classy) from my fridge and dragged that poor man out on a barefoot walk through my neighborhood. We drank from the bottle, talked about life and he very wisely convinced me not to climb the fence and get in the pool.

I kissed him in my driveway. I kissed him because it was my birthday and I wanted to kiss someone. I kissed him because I was drunk and wanted to see if I could. I kissed him because he seemed like a good person to kiss. He was a GREAT person to kiss and when I pulled away he reached out instinctively and didn’t let me go. It was pretty fucking hot. That’s it, right? Birthday kiss with random stranger never to be heard from again…not bad for my first birthday as a truly free woman.

Except that I saw him again. The next night (where I embarrassed myself at a whole new level- another story, another time) and then that fool called me and asked to come see me again before he left town. I don’t know why but I let him. I let him come to my house where my kid and my friend’s sick dogs that I was watching were on a Sunday afternoon. The power was out and it was hot and sticky and all I had to offer him for a beverage was a Capri-Sun. He took it and we sat on my porch and talked. I was kind of a bitch to him. I was embarrassed and hostile and just threw my whole story at him and waited for him to be appalled. But if he was he didn’t show it and as he left to travel home he asked if he could call me.

So he called and we talked. Over time I discovered that he was the one checking me out on the street that night. Over time and hours of late night phone calls and visits and incessant texting I fell completely and totally in love.

This year I spent my birthday in his house with my son and my monkey-cat. (Oddly he spent it in Southside with my parents.) Life moves in strange and amazing ways if you let it, and some days I still can’t believe that this is my life. I guess if you are really lucky one year you’ll decide to steal a drunken, birthday kiss from a charming stranger who just happens to be the love of your life.