Despite enjoying travel - even making the best out of a trip back to my family's home turf for a funeral - all of the coming and going has added to a kind of transitory vertigo I'm experiencing. And I think there are just times in your life when you feel off kilter, things changing and shifting around you to a degree that you can't help but be aware of it.
Loved ones, both family and friends, are having their fair share as well. Job searches, new homes, extensive travel, explosive career developments, death in the family, births, etc., there's a lot shifting around my tribe. Life's like that. Long periods of relative same and then somebody starts shaking your snow globe like their life depends on it.
Eh..more like this:
That's more like it.
This morning an expected perusal of social media memories led to the discovery that a friend I went to school with passed away.
Did you know there are now "legacy" & "memorial" settings you can enable for social media in the event you die? That's my something new I learned for today. A small but insistent pop-up window that totally shifted my headspace this morning.
We didn't have solid friends in common in school, though I was first-name-friendly with some of her usual crowd, and we certainly didn't have people in common as adults. But she is one of the few people from an area I didn't live in for more than a couple years that I'd call a friend. Talk about the future, babbling on the phone, share clothes with. So a social media pop-up hit me in the solar plexus and sent me on a web search to confirm what I hoped was a bad joke or wrong click.
She looked so happy in the wedding picture they used for her obituary.
Christ, that hurt to type out so much more than I expected.
When you're helping each other get ready for the Homecoming dance more than twenty years earlier, it doesn't cross your mind one of you won't make it to 40. Hell, 30 seemed far enough away to be impossible.
I was never so grateful for the distraction of DIY as I was today. An afternoon spent in the company of friends making a new & first house ready for it's occupant. I laughed, I joked, I sweat, I focused without unwelcome thoughts spearing into my brain.
Now I'm sat here, trying to sort through a strange set of emotions and listening to a playlist mixed with cheerful and thought-provoking songs. I have a visceral need to make a kind of meaning out of the loss of her, the life of her. For me. I'm not quite sure what that means yet.
For now, here's to the friends who got us through the weird realm of being a teenager. Here's to the people who as an adult can recall scattered memories about us we've long ago discarded with true affection. And here's to those valiant people we collect as adults, with our baggage and learned lessons, who prop us up and give us what we need when we can't even name what that is.
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