My head has been crowded this week. The kind of crowded that wakes me up in the middle of the night and keeps me awake.
This is the way my mind works: I go to the wedding of dear friends on the Oregon coast. The setting is a camp with a large lawn with flanking cabins and a big food hall that takes me back to being ten and piling my plate high, feeling like I could never get enough of anything. The energy is kickball team cheers and the kind of really delicious food and goodwill between old friends and strangers that is only possible because we are not 25 anymore. After the ceremony, the air fills with bubbles, and we all take a moment to look. We know they won’t last long. And I’m dancing too, all weekend long whether the music is on or not. All the while, a little song is playing in the back of my mind. There may never be another one, that melody goes. Not with friends who I love like this. So I’m trying my little tries everywhere to connect deeper and make feelings fuller. And every day since, I’ve thought of something I wish I would have said or done better. The ache and the good are so close together.
So there I was for two days in Oregon, smiling and smiling I thought, but maybe I wasn’t always, because at one point on the dance floor, a friend asked what’s wrong, and I stopped in my tracks. I had no words. I’ve spent this past week trying to find those words.
I see now that I was in two places at once. On the surface, I was delivering hugs like candy and trying to figure out (okay, making David figure out) the sound system and talking vows and cry smiling. Under the surface, I was sitting with so much else that everyone was holding:
It wasn’t cancer. My sister is here. My dad isn’t here. Should we have another. Can I have another. Should we have done this too or are we better off because we didn’t. Is yours as exhausting as mine. Is it helping. Do you feel better on the inside too. How can I fix this for you. (I know I can’t fix this for you.)
In the most honest pictures from the weekend, I am reaching my arm as wide as I can to pull my sister friends closer, trying to glue us together before the world pulled us apart again to our separate cities. But the weekend ended as they all do, and the unspoken things flooded me. After such a happy occasion, I was full to the brim with bittersweet.
Deep in the night last night and not sleeping, I had this thought: It’s never never never over as long as we are breathing. It will never be exactly this way again. But it will be a different way that can also be good. The things I didn’t say or do, the things I forgot to ask about, I can call and ask now. And I did. And if I think of more next week, I can call again.