Oh, Audrey, I'll miss you.

Thank you all for your kind words of late. There is no doubt that, for various reasons, I am in a challenging time. Lots of good things and good times have happened to me and around me since I last wrote, and yet it seems as though I only turn to this blog when I have the least coping skills.

My bike was stolen two days ago. Remember my bike? The red one with a bell and a Detroit Red Wings sticker? The fastest bike in the world? MY bike. I have imbued the bicycle with too much meaning. I am mourning it for serious and couldn't figure out why until I realized that I have come to rely on it as a very pet or family member. That it represents to me an unconditional love, a trust, and all the things I have been working on and towards this year. Everything I have accomplished was revealed to me anew each time I got on that bike. Audrey was her name.

I just talked to my mum for 20 minutes, curled up on the bench seat at the coffee shop where I am writing this. Fetal positioned. I'm sitting back up now and my mum kind of cheered me up, even in the face of all this mourning going on around me. Not just me for my bike, but a lovely local woman died this week in a plane crash in Thailand and many of my loved ones are feeling the loss very deeply. My empathic ways are such that I absorb all this from the atmosphere around me and take it into my heart. I do not know how not to do that. I do not know how to keep myself for myself and not give myself away so much that I have nothing left to answer my own questions. I am currently seeking some kind of therapy and healing, some guidance so I don't have to feel like I have to make everything happen myself. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be pleased to hear them.

Last night I dreamed I was back in the hospital and it really brings into sharp relief how scared I am of the winter darkness and rain. How scared I am, really, of feeling anything, lest it undo me completely and I find myself somewhere I can not get back from. I am going to go walk on the seawall in the frigid, windy, sunshiny day with my friend's dog and see if that helps.

If anyone out there wants to just quietly hold me for a while, that would probably help, too.

xo
r.