we were all living proof

Tonight, my 3 year old neighbor, Bo, lost his shit.

I heard some screaming and crying as I was fixing dinner, and looked outside just in time to see his blonde trouble self making a break for the yard, clad only in his little boy tightie-whities. He toddled down the stairs of the deck, careened toward the side yard, and then stopped, seeming to have been carried by momentum a couple steps ahead of his plan. He stood there, stunned by his own escape, and waited for someone important to notice. Sure enough: a moment later, his dad, Michael, appeared on the deck, looking stoic, and a tense standoff began. Michael is a marathon runner and a teacher to boot, so Bo may have been a bit outmatched in terms of patience. Peace talks. Negotiation. More crying. I think the problem was likely related to bath/bedtime, and this is summer when the dusk comes late and there are fireflies. Eventually the deserter was reclaimed and even held his father's hand as he retreated back inside.

*

In May, camping, I was bitten by a brown recluse spider when I was sleeping. It must have been in my sleeping bag from it being stored in the basement. I didn't feel it when it happened, although I was dizzy and breathless when I woke up, and then there was a strange, big, swirling almost hurricane-shaped pattern from the site of the bite up my ankle and down my foot. In an hour or so, the skin around the bite started to just wipe off if I touched it. It hurt a lot, but it didn't hurt enough that I stopped doing anything. I wasn't sure it was a brown recluse at the time... I had never reacted strangely to a spider bite before, but I didn't feel that badly. I didn't think it was worth getting upset over.

Later, when I got home and researched it, it seemed pretty obvious that it was, but the places my skin had died weren't festering or growing, and the internet said some people had pretty mild reactions if any. So I never went to the doctor or anything. I'm going to have really bad scarring there, but it's healing up fine.

I don't know if I was being horribly careless with myself, the way I need to train myself out of, or if it was genuinely not a big deal. I keep waiting for my spider powers, though.

*

Tonight I did my first mile run with Sven, and then three more just for me. When I was running with Sven, we had to stop for a mother deer and her two twin fawns, which were picking so silently through the gravestones. It was so odd to see the movements of a deer among the hard gray shapes of the tombs: warm, redbrown liquid light moving against static stone. I've rarely seen anything so lovely.

As ever

Suddenly, I wasn't thinking of Daisy and Gatsby anymore, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal skepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired."

love it will not betray you, dismay or enslave you, it will set you free

Got home to a broken water main outside my house and my water shut off until 10 while they do emergency services. I was angry, because I had been looking forward to cooking tonight, and then I remembered that I--yes, me, this foolish, helpless girl--am the same girl who has made a white wine reduction and roasted butternut squash soup on a campfire, the same girl who has assembled and cooked kabobs in the pouring rain on a literal lake rising around. No running water is hardly a setback, and it won't kill me to have an unwashed dish in the sink for 4 hours.

I have been in a strange place the last two weeks or so. I had been living in the kind of delusional optimism that can only end in crash or let down. Optimism is my natural state; I had almost forgotten that over the last year. (Maybe that's why Josh always says I handle disappointment so catastrophically.)

I'm tired this week. I'm not sad, I'm not angry, I'm just so tired. At work today, a woman from another department was having her last day. She and I had been part of the big hiring push that came in last year all together and went through training together. While I was saying goodbye to her, one of her coworkers commented that he'd been watching the staff list, and now I was the last person of the 30 or so I was hired with to remain in my company. I'm always that person, aren't I? The one still hanging in, still caring about a thing, when everyone else has moved on.

I lay on a leafless poison ivy vine over the weekend, and now my back and sides are wrapped and lashed in strange designs. All told so far, I'm thinking my Elkhorn scars will be less impressive than last years, but perhaps more symmetrical.

but even in those days I knew I was no Lancelot