Figments and such

The out of sorts feeling continues, but I am keeping it as under wraps as I can, sometimes less successfully than at other times. Does anyone else ever get this dull weariness of self, this longing to tweak reality by turning up the color and intensity the way you can do in a photograph? What about smoothing out the rough edges of human interaction in the day to day? I don't understand why I feel so deeply sad at my core, tender to the touch, gray and glued together, but poorly. Anything can feel like a sling or arrow, even when not meant as such.

Why can't I let the hard moments just roll over and off me like the figments of interpretation I suspect they are. It is me, after all, who decides what is difficult, and what to let go. Is it grief from the death of my mother just surfacing? That's odd, because what I am aware of is an experience of peace when I think of her now. I feel relief that she is no longer suffering. I imagine her laughing with beloveds on the other side, and I am grateful that I had her for as long as I did. But now the tears are flowing so I must be on to something.

Summer has begun to feel long and drawn out. At the beginning, I was glad to have no plans after traveling back and forth to the Caribbean six times last year to be with my mom and attend to her business, but now, I just want to escape my life for a bit. I fantasize about jetting off to Paris on a dime, setting myself up in a charming Airbnb studio and writing my book while taking in the view, going out only at dusk to sit in a sidewalk cafe, and maybe pick up a few things for the next morning.

My husband, sensing my mood, walked with me around the gardens where we live over the weekend. We sat on a bench and chatted, then strolled and took pictures. I held his hand over the uneven ground where my bone-on-bone hip joint doesn't swivel as needed, and we laughed remembering when we were engaged but not yet married, seeing an old couple holding hands at the airport in Antigua. We were upstairs on the waving gallery with family and friends to see someone off. In those days, you still gathered up there and waved at the plane until it was out of sight. And this old couple was also on the waving gallery, walking slowly and holding hands, and my love and I remarked on how sweet they were.

"I hope we're holding hands like that at their age," I said out loud, to which our Uncle Al, the godfather of our relationship, guffawed. He was in his early sixties then; he is in his high eighties now. He patted us both on the shoulder and he said, "Trust me, you will be holding hands. You will need to hold each other up!" So yeah, we held hands as we walked. Don't take this sadness inside me as the whole truth.

Here are some of the photos I took of our wild and overgrown garden. I posted them on Insta but I like to see them writ large here. How lucky we are to be able to stroll among plants and trees while living in this cacophonous city.