Yesterday brought the birth of a beautiful baby daughter for one of my dear friends from D.C.
Yesterday also brought the sudden death of a beautiful barely-turned-teenage daughter of one of my classmates in Pittsburgh.
You can tell me all you want about balance in the universe. But I still, after staying up all night arguing with the universe, don’t quite grasp everything yet.
After all my soul-searching, this may sound strange, but maybe there’s a reason to envy both.
I’ve spent my whole life married to my job, putting up walls and boldly declaring that the things “everyone else” wants don’t matter a whit to me.
I figure by saying I don’t want a husband or a family, the universe will give me one. Since it always seems to, when I say I “can’t take one more thing,” pile a whole bunch onto my just-about-to-break plate.
So, I envy them that they have something to love … something to lose. Something worth dropping everything for, to nurture and protect as their own. Something to worry about and, yes, sadly, something to grieve.
I do fall in love an awful lot. The timing is never right, whether it’s mutually shared at different times, or else they want me when I want someone else (or vice-versa). Never once have I felt I “had” anything worth fighting for.
And nobody feels sorry for me when I grieve things that, let’s face it, just weren’t real to anybody but me.
Anyway, please send love to Angie on her new baby girl, and to Cindi on losing Alyson in a car accident almost a decade after they lost Alyson’s dad in the same manner. And if you could spare some love for someone who’s never known any, well, I would appreciate that, too.