Diary #387

It was lovely to visit Grace and Chekhov up at Sunset for Thanksgiving; I drove up Wednesday evening, waiting until about 7:30 to avoid the hellish traffic on Tacoma, and stayed until late Friday (a day earlier than planned due to a slight emergency in Seattle which required my attention).  In the meantime, I slept on the mattress Matt & I shared in Oklahoma, on my favorite bedframe which had been in storage since sometime in 2003.  I prepared a holiday feast, smaller than the ones I used to make but still generous, and I poked through some of the things I haven’t seen since leaving for Seattle almost three years ago.  There was a strange, bittersweet quality to the experience; though my life in Seattle is in some ways better than my life in Oklahoma had been, there were many things I treasured about that old life, now gone forever.  I let my fingers play over objects, once familiar to me, which now seemed like the relics of a fallen empire from centuries past; I felt emotions, at once beautiful and sad, well up in me and come spilling out of my eyes in droplets of brine from the primordial sea we each carry in our bodies.  I cannot change the events of the past decade; I don’t think it would be wise to try even if I could.  And yet…surely it’s understandable that a woman weep quietly over memories of beloved things she has lost, even if losing them was necessary to gain others she loves at least as well.