An unrecoverable summer

Life upended around the first of May or so. At the briefest of moments since then, I have thought at times of how I might return here to capture the events and the strain of repeatedly stepping into breaches, how to describe the decisions I've made. I kept thinking things would level and then I'd tell that story. With each considering I pared the imagined story down to ways that wouldn't do it justice ever. Moments of living very close to the bone, of holding lives in my hands and making calm and rational decisions that destroyed me inside, of seeing the water start to clear above my head and suddenly being plunged into more cold shocks. It would be quite a ravaging story, so I'd punctuate it with photos of the comic relief that's occurred here and there - and maybe those parts will still get posted sometime.

A week ago my mother had a mild stroke, and everything from the moment I found her on the floor has seemed both blurry and painfully clear since. Tonight when cleaning out email I found messages from a month ago where I've apologized to people for the many obligations I was not meeting because of so many emergent weakening threads in the world. I've held together as many of them as I could.

The week ahead is an express train from hell, which in context of my life - or even the last week - is really saying something. The air is cold at night and the snow is coming over the tops of the east hills and slouching toward us. So I am burying this summer and all its moments and its million bits of broken glass, bright and unrecoverable tears.