Driving Home

This exact time last week, I was driving home(we got out earlier tonight-Thank God. The glamorous life can absolutely kick your ass, no?)and as I explained to The Shish, I felt as if I had swallowed glitter.

I had just had my first official novel writing class-and it wasn't the baby class where you talk about elements-it was the big people class where you actually get to play with the Play-Dough (woohoo!) and I was driving home and, as I told Le Shish, it was at that point before I had officially noveled, that every possibility was wide open and the only thing I could possibly do in my mind was soar down Ashland in a blaze of green lights.

I was also looking forward to a date. Not just any date-not one of those ones that you park your car like a Catholic so you can make a quick getaway after mass(Mk.). Not one of those ones where you're about to find out some sort of alarming major life detail ("I didn't say I have 12 children? Really? I didn't?!?")that had to have been left out because the pre-conversation had been so brief. Nope this wasn't gonna be that at all. This was gonna be life altering.

I could just feel it.

Now it is almost one week later. I have written and been read aloud. I have dated and returned home. What I'm trying to hang on to or what I was twirling around in my head as I flew down Ashland toward the expressway tonight, is not the result of either activity (One thing was worth continuing, the other, apparently not, I guess.)what's really important is where I would go or what I would see in the days between last week and now.

For instance, yesterday I volunteered for pregnant women who are addicted. They didn't say addicted to what and I wasn't asking because I have lovely manners of course and naturally and really, does it make any difference at all? We made soothing bags of lavender-scented rice to be warmed in the microwave out of brand new powdery white tube socks. One woman draped hers around her neck and put her thumb in her mouth and began to stroke her nose with her other fingers like a napping child. 'It's nice, isn't it?' I said, thinking she was expressing just how soothing the cool sock felt on the back of her neck. She smiled and nodded. All was swell.

A few minutes later I watched as she sat in a group with her pregnant+addict peers and her hand lifted until she placed her thumb into her mouth and stroked her nose with her other fingers like a napping child. She was without the sock. She had to have been at least 35 years old and she had never found a better way to soothe herself.

Imagine that.

So where I was going tonight, when I thought about last weeks exciting internal glitter shower, aside from straight down Ashland like a rocket, was that the important thing in either case-the date or the writing-wasn't any little bit about the happily ever after, it was actually having failed to stay home where it's safe and to have attempted to live.

Nous devons vivre et pas seulement exister. Oui?