"…those winter flies suddenly slow and loud in a house
whose doors and windows have been long closed and locked.
When the owners return, in spring, the small, dark bodies remain – 
evidence that something always happens.
Even when there is nothing, something happens.

As with love. “Not here, not now,” the heart protests.
Then the evidence: irrefutable, the low buzzing."

JANE HIRSHFIELD 

There were orchid blooms on my desk this morning. Some are still holding on, limp purple fairy skirts hung out to dry. Probably they’ll be collected soon, it being May and there being, I imagine, a lot of dancing. I saw the petals on my desk when I came in, I made a mental note of their presence being Something To Attend To. I thought about fairies for a while and I drank coffee and some juice and ate a protein bar and pushed some papers around idly in the name of work and chatted for a long time. One of the people that floated by also saw the petals, and she picked them up with capable fingers and placed them gently into the garbage (don’t say “waste bin,” who says that? Who says “waste bin” out loud in the real world? No you don’t. No, you really don’t) without even pausing in conversation. It’s something I notice in people and admire and wish to be able to do, to just notice a thing and handle it lovingly with slender fingers and no hysteria. To notice a thing, and handle it. To notice a thing.

I couldn’t sleep for a long time so I went to see an acupuncturist. My physical body is sabotaging my attempts at healing my thoughts, I told her. No. Really I just said, Hi I am profoundly tired. And I ought not to be. And she said, well, transition can be exhausting. And I said I don’t live in a war-torn country, I am steps away from water wherever I go. And she sold me a tiny bottle of brandy and poked me in the neck and I’m still tired, but I’m sleeping again. I go back this week.

Mostly I have the resources to grasp, now, is why I have been. I never did quite get the hang of driving an actual car (in spite of that fact not one but two states now have granted me license to drive which lessens my already tenuous belief in the systems supposedly separating us from chaos), but I’m finally comfortable enough driving my metaphorical station wagon to risk taking one hand off the wheel. If I still smoked, now would be when I could smoke on the road instead of pulling into a parking lot to light cigarettes and listen to mix CDs. Which is what I did when I did drive myself places in a real vehicle, about fifteen whole times, many years ago now.

I’ve made it to a place where the baseline isn’t desperate, gasping-like-a-cartoon-fish NEED, where there is more (slightly more) than a missed shift separating me from Have and Have Not. Sometimes it feels like I have crawled to this place, this time of relative safety, dragging with bloodied fingernails my bloated body over a parched earth. And other times I say, Wow Lindsay, you are being really dramatic right now, and you’re making everybody uncomfortable. Please, help yourself to a chill pill. And still other times I feel like I’ve been placed gently here, and I am undeserving of any earthly comforts I have within reach, and soon the gods will hear of this and it will all be taken away.

None of that’s true, really. Except maybe the part about the chill pill. That part probably is true.