domestic bliss

how appropriate it is that the emblem of adulthood is owning a house.

adulthood is about finding the one. adulthood is about creating a family and home with that one. adulthood is about introducing new ones into the world. adulthood is about the process of segregating oneself. letting go of the party friends, letting go of the hierarchal social structure that dominated our energies and minds from middle school onward. the people on the peripheral who always could hand you a glass of wine but not the type to pick up the phone past 3:00 AM on a Tuesday night. it's about the drifting away and the moving forward, the desire for satiety and fulfillment on all fronts and the letting go of the frothy, the trivial, the fleeting.
as i get older, i realize that we might die alone but our fantasy is dying with the other holding our hand.

how appropriate it is that the emblem of young adulthood is renting an apartment.

there's always someone within the vicinity. the lack of the plan didn't always result in the death of a night. the nighttime was a blossoming opportunity, a malleable thing that could either result in your greatest triumph or monumental tragedy. you're in love with wanting to change the worst in people; correction- be the one that changes the worst in people. you get off on that period of transience. everything is now, everything is magnificent, everything is terrible, whyisthishappening, ohmygodthisfeelsfantastic, don'tstopdon'tstop.
when i was young, i realized the value of living in the present.

dissolving into a million pieces in a billion places

her own self is betraying her but she lets it.

what must it be like not to trust your own mind? what happens to a person when their memories so precise in chronological order are shaken up like a bingo wheel and you are left to sort through the broken pieces?

truthfully we've never been close. blood bonds us but little else. i'm too outspoken, too inappropriate, eating with my elbow on the table and knife raised almost like i'm ready for any unseen combat, an obtuse reminder of the schism between ladylike gentility of her time and the abhorrent modern rejection of those values.

yet we've always harbored an affection. i was the first grandchild, a boon to her good genes with her ski-jump nose leaping generations to my face and her translucent skin on my back. however, that deep-seated understanding between generations has eluded us for reasons i can only speculate.

seeing her now, during the only time of year that i have had in the past seven years, breaks my heart in ever increasing unique ways. only the disease crafted by the cruelest hand could possibly create one that lets the infected's mind crumble while those who love them watch the person they knew disintegrate.

of course now, at the likely end of her days, is the time when i want to know her most, to understand her. how typical of the human condition to only want that which is increasingly out of their reach. i'm going to interview her. to sit her down with a cup of herbal tea and some recording device and ask her questions not through the lens of the family member but as someone who just wants to know about her. i'm afraid if i don't do this, she's going to slip away through my fingertips like sand. i want her to be known. i want her to have an impact. i want her life to have meaning.