Just Write {184}

My friend is in the hospital in a city about an hour away. I drove there yesterday, with the wind trying to push my creaky old minivan from side to side. I love seeing her, no matter where she is, and I’m grateful for the ways she is being cared for there. She is a sober friend, who has been through more of life’s Hard than anyone I know. She says things that feel like the best kind of slap to the heart and mind. Wake up. Stop ruminating.

You are going through hell. Keep going.

While I was there, a physical therapist came in and I sat off to the side to wait. He was from our same town, and so kind. My friend knew all the tricks he would ask her to do before he asked. She’s been fighting her body for seven years, it’s old hat.

My phone rang and it was another sober friend. She said, When I feel like this, I’m supposed to call someone…so I’m calling. And we talked about the way we have a tendency to get on some kind of insecurity spiral and figuring out how it is triggered is probably fruitless but we want to try anyway. What we’re trying to uncover is probably already glaringly obvious. Oh yeah, we’re human.

I left my friend’s hospital room and walked the long corridors and even found my way back to the right level in the parking ramp. This is rare for me. I like to forget where I parked because I’m probably too busy trying to figure myself out. When I do that, I just end up getting lost. I am learning to just let myself be, not perfect, but just here.

This was one of those ramps, like most parking ramps that are like a vortex in which you cannot possibly be finding your way out. I followed the one way, up up up and couldn’t figure out how I was going to end up at street level with all of this going up business.

My friend, she has an infection in her leg and her foot looks really bad and she said something about how maybe they’ll just have to amputate it. This is what we do. Okay, fine. Just cut it off…that’s probably what’s going to happen next. And you know what? Maybe that could happen, but staying in the day means remembering that perhaps the doctors will just fix the foot she already has….that maybe things will turn out in a way that we could not have imagined while making the trip.

So then I was on the roof of the parking garage, and I was thinking about trust. I was thinking in analogy, of course I was. I was thinking about how once I got there, I could see, the path was starting down toward street level again. It just took longer than I would have liked, and it didn’t make any sense to me. But I just kept going and like always, I went home.

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This is the 184th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {New here? Please see the details.} I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. (Then link back to this post in your Just Write post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.)

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