Word of the Year: Perseverance

For 2024, I didn't create grandiose resolutions of losing weight, getting fit, or saving money. Instead, I chose a single word and built my aspirations and dreams for the year around it: perseverance.

2023 had more challenges in it than I would have liked. Two surgeries, one more elective than the other, and recovery is just.damn.hard. Coming to terms with my physical health failings has been one of the most difficult parts of getting over the hill, but today, I'm feeling good physically, mentally, and emotionally...and that's a win!

Nobody

Sometimes I just miss him. I think about all of the "what if" scenarios. My mind creates unspoken dialogue, unhappened interactions, and unexpressed emotions that he will never hear, see, or feel. And it just makes me profoundly sad. 

"Nobody could love me the way that you do." 

Nobody by Dynamq

Cascada

"She was like poetry - like prose, like love letters and lyrics - cascading down the page." -Ugly Love by Colleen Hoover

That moment where someone across the room catches your eye; your breath quickens, your thoughts jumble, your stomach turns. I am not reticent to admit I have always loved that feeling. The meet cute. It's what sets the stage; everything after is just that...after. 

The initial cascade of emotions is intense and raw, rippling over you like a waterfall, drenching you fully. You can feel it from your head down to your toes, millions of nerves branching from your center, completely on fire. 

After 5 years of marriage to my Lizard, he remains my rock, my present and future, and the best part of my day. I LOVE my husband, and though we are light years removed from our own meet cute, there are many moments where I am transported right back to that day. I am not without gratitude for knowing I am who I am because of him. 

Yet. Lizard is human (not an actual reptile), and there has been inevitable disappointment, mountain peaks and very low valleys in our relationship, and if I put him on a pedestal, the only place he has to go is down. I have made an inordinate number of mistakes during our time together, thrown irretrievable verbal daggers, and am acutely aware that he has chosen to overlook these catastrophic incidences for a future with me. I have never been perfect, but neither is he. Like me, he is not without flaws. And there has been real hurt there. 

But what I have gained in my 40+ years on this earth is that we all need people in our lives. It is impossible for one person to embody all which we need, yearn for, and even love. I cannot rely on him, or anyone, to provide for all that I seek. Our lives are enriched through the relationships we develop with others, and regardless of my interactions throughout the day, I know I want to lay my head next to his every night. 

And that's enough. 

Adventure #53: Cruising

Cruising is not for me. My family and I recently headed out for a 7-day cruise aboard a 5,000-passenger megaship, and it was a one and done kind of adventure. 

Pros: 
No internet
Quantity of food

Cons:
Seasickness
Claustrophobia (entirely too many people, which results in having to take lots of stairs constantly)
No flexibility
Limited time in ports (only able to do one excursion and/or walk around tourist traps)
Insufficient on-board activities
No internet (yes, this one makes both lists)
Meh food quality
Expensive and a lot of hidden charges
Did I mention too many people?

So, yeah, the cons definitely outweigh the pros for me. I'll stick to making my own travel itineraries...for land adventures. 

Pensive

He said I was pensive. And I looked at him and told him the truth, "No one has ever used that word other than I, and no one has better described me in one word."

And, yet, it wasn't enough. I wasn't enough. Again. 

Breeding and Other Such Nonsense - Part I

Many years ago now, I mentioned a book a friend had given me as a gift. With the gift, she said it reminded her of me, and after reading it, I completely understand why! And when the first chapter is entitled, "Drugs Make You a Better Person," you know it's going to be good!

Because I had my underlining pencil on overload during this read, I've broken this installation into two posts. Without further ado, here are some of my favorite comments from the author, Kristin Newman, all of which could have been spoken from my own lips:

"My friends who met their spouses young have often told me they live vicariously through my adventures." 

"So I'm not so good at sexy face." In my former dance life, a coach once said to me that my sexy face looked angry. He told me just to smile instead. Sigh.

Kristin's appreciation of one of her lover's skin color: "'Dulce' because his skin is the color and smoothness and sweetness of a baby covered in Argentine caramel."

"I was now the type of woman who...acquires lovers and uses the word lovers." 

"Why wouldn't she want to go to the place that was her 'favorite place'? I was afraid it wouldn't live up to my dreams." I often dreamt of going back to my Caribbean island of bliss, yet I knew it would be just like Kristin's experience with her Argentine lover.

"It's almost impossible to have a meal alone without something to read."

"If there is one thing that is my favorite thing in the world, it's making out on the dance floor." 

"I'm someone a little different on the road."

"My life was starting to become what it was supposed to be."

"He kissed the SHIT out of me. One thing that a tortured, dramatic worldview does for someone is it makes him a HELL of a kisser."

"I could only communicate with our eyes, and our bodies. And we communicated really effectively that way."

"Having sex with foreigners is not the only whorish thing I do."

He was a "combination of ethereal and sexy beauty." 

"Running away from home to someplace wonderful. And then, sometimes having sex there."

"When I complained to my friend...that she lapped me in the marriage department, she replied, 'I'm not sure the goal is to do it as often as possible.'"

"I wanted love, but I also wanted freedom and adventure, and those two desires fought like angry obese sumo wrestlers in the dojo of my soul."

"You can have both love and freedom when you fall in love with an exotic local in an exotic locale."

"I love to do the thing you're supposed to do in the place you're supposed to do it."

"You're always rushing to fill up your life with fun fun fun. But nothing new or good can come in without a void to fill. Voids are necessary and wonderful."

"I didn't regret my path of fun and freedom for a moment, and really didn't wish I had settled down earlier, but there was going to be a cost."

"A hateful little ex-boyfriend once said that a house full of cats used to be the sign of a terminally single woman, but now it's a house full of souvenirs on foreign adventures...But I say that plane tickets replacing cats might be the best evidence of women's progress as a gender."

"Life is almost never about choosing between one thing you really want and another thing you don't want at all....life is an endless series of choosing between two things you want almost equally."

"Expectations were always my undoing."

"The deep feeling of oneness you have with someone when you've done all of the work on yourself you have to do to make a marriage work doesn't take away your independence. It frees you to be the person you actually are."

"...fell madly in love in the way it turns out you only fall in love when you're twenty and doing it for the first time. (It took me fifteen years of unsuccessfully chasing that first high to understand that. Slow learner.)"

"To me, marriage was an ending, not a beginning."

"The problem had never been our commitment to each other - it was a fact that we wanted to live different lives."

"I realized what a life raft Juan had been for me all of those years...even when we weren't in contact. He was out there. He made me different. He was a possibility, a maybe, just maybe. And that was now over."

"It never occurred to me that I was the only twentysomething woman who found thirtysomething successful men creepy."

A Favorable Distraction or a Time-Waster?

A very early theme of this blog was great expectations, which were closely and always followed by even greater disappointment. 

I met someone, who in actuality, turned out to be a child in the end. For me, he was a favorable distraction from the noise of life. When all around me I felt disappointment and sorrow, he was young, witty, and attentive. A reprieve from the monotony and gloom of middle age. Hell, he made me feel young again, and who doesn't like that?

But then he wasn't...all those things, that is. He became intent and singularly focused on having a physical relationship with me, something I was incapable and unwilling of giving. And in the end, he was hurtful and ugly. I had wasted his time, and he was no longer going to allow me to do that. His words wounded me more than I would like to admit, and what I saw as a blossoming friendship was tossed out with the trash. 

During our late-night chats, we often spoke of irrational expectations and the inevitable error in hoping for something never to come. 

At least this doesn't feel like the answers did a decade ago. 

xxx Do You Remember xxx

I've always kept my blog more or less pg-rated, but this one is not. Consider yourself warned.

I met him 13 years ago, a lifetime ago, and in a hotel lobby, by a non-descript elevator, our lips touched and our bodies will forever be intertwined. The most unforgettable movie moment there ever has been or ever will be. 

Everything was in slow motion. From the time our lips met, our tongues connected, our fingers explored. 

And all of this time has passed, and he still remembers. Why tell me when we haven't spoken in 5 years?

"Don't be scared about it. Don't forget it was real. Do you remember the way it made you feel? Do you remember the things it made you feel?" Do You Remember by Jarryd James

Anxiety

It's hard being me. 

A feeling I have all too often. It's panicky. It's all-consuming. It's my burden to bear. For being me. 

Just a Feeling by Phantoms 

5 Years

It's been five years since I last had any communication from him. A text out of the blue is like a punch to the gut. Why? 

And yet a single text, and I can feel him. My breath catches; my heartbeat quickens. I'm overwhelmed with need. And then I wonder if never knowing how it could feel would have been better. 

Favorite Crime by Olivia Rodrigo