Spicy Dragons & Dinosaurs

I read a few pages of Joan Didion's The year of Magical Thinking, somewhere in the beginning, and I brim over with tears. It is all the same. Completely different but exactly the same. Yes, I count this year from what went on last year. Our waiting for a heart year. Our first year of having therapists in the house all the time and our getting used to it. It is cold today, spitting with rain. All day dark and rather dismal. The rain with a few fewer degrees of warmth would be snow, flecks of ice. And it will be soon. Why is the changing of seasons especially hard for me? David would want to have a fire tonight. Maybe we would eat chili or soup, something warm. The sadness wells up and subsides. Didion went on. I go on.

I was turning an idea over in my mind last night. When we came back -- Julia and I -- from England, I wondered and asked dozens a times a day, "when would I be happy?" Last night, walking the dog, I wondered, why should I be happy? Why should I expect that the world will turn once again, or a hundred times and find some way to tease me into happiness? There is no reason why I should or will. When I was younger I thought that everyone ought to be happy. I was not always so but I expected that one day I would be. Now, I see the gray of late November and feel it deep inside my soul. I am not sorry for myself -- well, a bit, yes, -- but sorry or not, I see no reason to assume happiness. And know, know for sure, that there are a lot of people who walk around without happiness. Could I really become one of those?

I do not believe that I am owed happiness. I know for sure that there is so much that I experience, that I do or have done to me that is not for me. That "not for me" is from the voice that I perceived awhile ago when my old friend decided to stop writing to me. It had nothing to do with me -- I mean, that our correspondence was not intended to ease my pain and hurt. It was not a gift to me to make be feel happy. It was not for me.

Having a partner for a long time made me . . . not selfish exactly, but self assured that there was at least one person in the world who was there for me. For me. And no one else in the same way.

If everything that I am writing is muddled, that is all that I mean. That once there was someone whose life circled mine as my life circled his. I was sure of that. And it gave my life such meaning.