In the Now…

I can’t sleep tonight. If you’re on Facebook, you already know that. I was up late and decided to go through my video files and see what I else I had of George. It was just too hard to go through them  for the memorials, though I sort of wish I had. Well, I’ve looked at everything, and it was sort of hard, but it was also sort of fun.

I really miss George, and I haven’t hung out with him in a long time. So I was glad to see him, hear him, and do what I always did when I was with him, which is laugh. He was such a corny guy. I was always laughing at his jokes, and he often said, “If you didn’t think I was funny, you’d have left me long ago.” I don’t know about that, but the laughing was a big part of our relationship, and one of the reasons we fit.

If you’ve been with me since the accident, you know that I’ve laughed more than I’ve cried these days. George brought me a lot of happiness, and its hard to think he wouldn’t want me to keep right on laughing. Life goes on, its true, and your true nature lives on after someone you love dies, I guess. It’s a little tattered and torn, yes, but essentially the same.

People say you find out what someone is made of when they are put under pressure. Do they fall apart? Become hysterical? A zombie?

Or, do you find inner strength? Or is what feels like strength simply numbness and disconnection? I’ve definitely been numb and disconnected these past couple of months, but I’ve moved forward, one foot in front of the other, sometimes running from friend to friend or family member to family member to keep the momentum. Biggest thing I’ve learned is to live in the now, even if now sucks. Live it, process it, wake up and do it again. Amen.

I do think about “the future” (here I mean farther ahead than my current commitments,) and it seems mysterious and cloudy, not a clear picture like I saw before George died. That’s okay, I know now that the clear picture of my future was just a dream, just like all of our ideas of the future are. It was easy to relax into the idea that things would just flow on as they were, maybe just a bit better than they were, and happiness and peace would be a byproduct of surviving the time between now and then. Yeah, right. It may be better in the future, but not just because you make it there. You’re going to have to work to have a good future, and you’re also going to have to be lucky.

So what do I look forward to? What am I walking toward, now that what I was walking toward, a future with George, has gone up in smoke, so to speak? Well, I’m excited about my new house. I should get a drawing from the architect this week. I’ve never lived in a home that I dreamed up before, and I know I’m going to love this house more than any other I’ve lived in. I just feel it.

I’m also looking forward to traveling. I have lots of friends to visit, in California, and Texas, Nashville, Chicago, good ol’ Atlanta, GA and even Copenhagen and Paris. I’m going to take Lily back to Disney World, though that one will be hard without George. She’s just too in love with Tinkerbelle not to take her there.

I’m looking forward to making new friends in Asheville, too. I’ll have to, I know virtually no one. I’ll have to figure out some sort of work, too. Don’t know what that will be yet, but it has to be something I enjoy. I’ll never, ever do something I don’t enjoy for a living again. I learned that one from George. He’d lost all enjoyment in his job long before the accident, and was just trudging along, hoping the opportunity to switch jobs would become realistic. He never got there, and its my only real regret, that he didn’t get to move on in his career to something that challenged and intrigued him. But there’s no point in harboring resentment about the job, its like the old saying, “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” As they say all the time at his office, it is what it is.

So I’ll keep on moving, laughing, changing, and growing, I hope. I’ll take my cues from Lily. She’s my wisest teacher these days. She thinks of George when she thinks of him, when he’s there with her naturally. We were getting out of the car tonight and the wind was blowing. It hit all three of us at once, and it was that feeling you get… nostalgia, just a little bit of sadness, but a positive change in the air too. And she just started talking. “Dad and I took a walk once,” she said, ” And we heard a frog.” She grabbed my hand. We stood there, in the chilly wind, and had a pure, real moment with George. The hair rose on the back of my neck. I took a breath to say something to her, but then I didn’t, and we walked into the house and resumed our evening, she to her homework, me to checking the messages, getting dinner on the plates, letting the dogs out. Just living in the now.