A long time gone.

I didn't come back. It's not that I don't have anything to write, I do.
Not sure if any of it fits here. I miss my daughter. I wonder how she is every minuet...I see progress in my life, she doesn't. I see a change, for the better...

But my life still doesn't look or sound right. It doesn't feel normal.

...This hasn't happened to me in a long time... When I was a child, dinnertime was a time for reflection on the days events, a time to fess-up to mistakes made, a time for groundings, punishment, discussion. I felt our family was normal...Until, I spent some time with my friends. I got to see a happiness my family didn't know, an ease with life that seemed like a fairy tale. I saw, time and time again, how out of step my life was with the people around me. I promised myself when I'm grown, my life is going to have meaning, ease, rhythm, flow, fun...I promised myself that my life would be normal.

Tonight, as I ate dinner alone, I cried.

Sometimes as a child, when my heartfelt yearnings, for all that we didn't have as a family failed yet again to materialize I would cry...While taking a shower, while laying in bed, while walking to the school bus, while sitting in class, and while eating.

That happened tonight.

I am out of step with life. I am out of step with my friends, my peer group.

For a long time, I've been able to hide. I don't attend reunions. I have a close handful of friends... I still make friends easy, but I've stayed away from anyone I knew in high school...If I don't measure up, it's much easier to breath knowing none of them can see my failure...my inability to keep time, stay in step- with time.

All that changed for me recently.

I've allowed someone in. Someone from then, came into the me I've become. I'm grateful for her presence. I can't help but notice she is grateful for mine as well.
I don't have the freedom to move at her pace. She gracefully slows down, once in a while, to rest in the space I occupy...
We are both reminded in that quiet, how capricious human existence is.

I went on facebook, and allowed many more "of them" to find me.
I look into their words and pictures hoping to see something that reveals a messy, unkempt, out of step life.
Something that looks like my life, my fears, my failures. I'm face to face with the fairy tales again.

I'm confronted with a simple normal- one that I can't have, can't make, can't fake.

...So the crying in my dinner, I don't really have words to write, that can illuminate the dark moon side of my heart, for the sweet normal that's never a part of my life.


Tomorrow morning I will make toast and green tea.
With perhaps a slice of cheese, or an egg.

I will pray for normal. Pray for time, ask for rhythm, beg to be useful.


Hope that my friends are a little out of step, like me.

... I really dislike soggy toast.


-Renee