"We cannot relinquish butterflies and return to uninterrupted road." -A.L.

Birthday number twenty-eight.  And three days from taking the bar exam.  Not the most mixable of substances, but we're pulling it off anyway, nonetheless.  Not that time gives us much of an option in the matter.

Things like the essays in this book help: http://www.scribd.com/doc/93144782/Things-That-Are-Essays-by-Amy-Leach

As do sunset sailing trips, and celebratory supportive words, and demonstrative love coming from (almost) all directions of our life.  And books, too.  Lots of books.  (Books that aren't legal treatises.)  Promising themselves to us - in now less than five days and counting...

Counting down to being fully present again.  Maybe you'll notice when it happens.  Maybe you won't.  Maybe I can say the same about me.

And maybe we'll just have to wait and see.

-L (7/21/2012)

[640]

[One year and nine months later, and today I found myself faking an exam, taking a risk, and getting a re-taste of perspective.]

[I went to my sibling grief group tonight. And A, who doesn't say too much, said this - speaking of her brother, dead at 14: "He missed everything. Everything. All the milestones. So then you just live them alone..."]

[Her voice breaking, right alongside my heart. It fell/twisted/pumped with understanding. Long after his had stopped beating.]

[She was 16 at the time. Seven years later, and her oft-held back tears flowed now just as freely, knowing what she knew. What she wished she didn't. Like how to this day, she said, she'd never been able to picture him as an adult. Or how her parents' ugly divorce had just kept right on going, even right after...]

[The sun this afternoon felt like it had a hot bone to pick with someone, and ignited all who dared cross its crosshairs. Was it you there? There behind the heat? I'd like to think that only your rage would deserve to burn so brightly.]

[-L (7/10/12)]