Posts Tagged ‘story’

I don’t often get the opportunity to write during the day anymore. Unfortunately, having a job where the bosses are (almost) literally sitting in your lap all day long kinda makes that next to impossible. Perhaps if they didn’t do that all day, every day, they would have staff that didn’t basically do as little as possible when we don’t have any babysitters.

But I digress.
Or maybe I don’t.

This morning, I woke up in a rather sappy and girlie and ever-so-slightly loveycuddly mood. By slightly, I mean that if I could have, I would have cuddled in bed all day long. And, as if I need to say it, loveycuddly IS a word, no matter what spell-check has to say on the matter.

After waking up in such a mindset, I came to work and found out that all boss-type activity would be happening far, far away. That suited me just fine, as my body was at the office, but my mind was still tucked warmly and snuggled in bed.

As if that weren’t enough to make a good day better, a short while after arriving at the office, I was handed a picture that seemed to sum up the exact mood that I am in today.

The picture was handed to me by a friend. A kindred spirit who happened into my life the way most kindred spirits do; by chance. The photo she handed me was of a woman that I had met just as serendipitously.

One day, finding myself without lunch because I had forgotten it at home, I ventured out into ‘town’ to forage for food. I popped into the deli/diner to order something, turned around and saw my friend seated in the diner. She beckoned me over and introduced me to the remarkable lady that she was dining with.

I spent only fifteen or so minutes there while I waited on my order. But in those minutes, this woman made me feel like I was not only welcome, but that I had known her for years. What an incredible spark. Sense of humour, sharpness of mind and spirit. Something in her demeanor captured me and held me in rapt attention as she spoke.

There was nothing about this woman that didn’t whispershout happiness and love.

As I looked at her picture this morning, I realized why.

She has lived in love and with love for so long, that she has become love.

The photo of her and her husband took my breath away. I looked at it for a long time. I looked at his smile, and the way his arm wrapped comfortably around her shoulder as if it had always had a place there. I looked at her smile, at her hand wrapped around his as if it had always belonged there.

I looked into their eyes and mine teared up because this…
THIS is life.
This is joy.

This is, simply and unconditionally and purely, love.

As I write this, he is no longer beside her.
My heart breaks a little because of that.

But here’s the thing… I met her after he had already passed on. Before I even knew that he had gone. And I felt that remarkable love pouring out of her. In every breath, in every movement, every smile; from her core.

Love lives on.

And on, and on…

Thank you H & L, for loving each other.

I can’t wait to have my picture taken in fifty years and have a smile like yours.

Once upon a time, there was a woman.

This woman was in a relationship. It wasn’t a great relationship. In fact, over a number of years, the relationship just kept getting worse and worse, to the point where she didn’t even feel like she was in a relationship at all. She felt more like furniture.

No more important than a chair.
Far less important than the TV.

She faded into the background of the world she knew, kept to herself, and stayed very quiet.

The time passed, and she kept telling herself that things would change. She told herself over and over again that this was a good relationship. That things could get better if she just tried harder. She tried to speak, but was drowned out by the sound of silence.

She started to stay quiet for long periods of time, preferring to own the silence rather than be drowned out by it. It was only a little lie, one that seemed to help her deal with the growing pain.

She started to wish that she was furniture, because inanimate objects don’t feel pain.
The woman then decided that feeling nothing was better than feeling pain.
For a long time, she felt nothing.

Then one day, she walked into the bathroom after he had taken a shower. She stopped to pick up the towel that was on the bathroom floor. It wasn’t his towel; it was never his towel. As she bent to pick her towel off of the bathroom floor, she saw his hanging up and something painful clicked into her head and her towel slipped to the floor once again.

She realized that she never put his towel on the floor. When she showered, she placed his towel safely on the bathroom counter. Even after all this time and all of the numbness, she still took care to not let his towel drop.

And he had always just tossed her towel to the floor.

In that moment, she knew that her towel would always be on the floor.

So, she took her towel someplace where it would never be on the floor again.

The end.

Today’s list was “The most important turning points in your life.”

My deepest gratitude goes to those that I know I can count on, forever.

The 50-50 Challenge is an idea that Chrissa from A Little Wicked and I came up with. It is based on a list of 50 Lists to Write to Lift Your Spirits, which can be found at Demanding Joy. We were inspired to make it a blog challenge. If you’d like to participate, please do. Be as inspired as we were.

Laughter is an orgasm triggered by the intercourse of sense and nonsense.

~Author Unknown

I love to laugh!
HA HA HA HA!

(Points if you know which movie that is from. Queue theme from Jeopardy now.)

Now that the quiz portion of the post is over with, I can say that I really do love to laugh. And when something makes me laugh so hard that I actually have tears streaming down my face, chances are good that I’m going to remember it. Funnily enough, this has happened to me more than once.

The Ass Comment.
The first thing that comes to my mind is one of my favourite memories of my best friend. I don’t remember the exact details, but for some reason, I was driving with Laurie and my brother. I believe that we were dropping off my brother back to my parents house for whatever reason. My brother is very hard person to make laugh. He makes everyone else laugh, but to get him to laugh out loud… kind of difficult. Well, Brother J went to get out of the car and it was slippery. We told him to be careful. He replied that he would be, because he didn’t want to fall and break his ass.

My best friend – who has a great sense of humour, no matter what she thinks – said, without missing a beat, “Yeah, you’ve already got a crack in it.” My brother fucking near fell over laughing. I had tears streaming down my face. And it ranks as one of Laurie’s all time proudest moments that she made my brother laugh until he cried.

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.  ~Victor Borge

You never call, you never write.
Laurie and I, driving to Hell. Music is playing. For some reason, the subject of Neil Daimond comes up. Maybe it was because one of his songs started playing, I really have no idea. But, anyhow… Laurie takes a quiet moment of contemplation, and then says to me, “I wonder where Neil is these days. I hardly ever hear from him any more.” I almost drove the car off the road I was laughing so hard. Laurie? She just looked confused. So I said, “Really? You mean he hasn’t called you in a while? Or did he just stop writing?” She soon joined in the laughter. And to this day, we still laugh about it. Because if you can’t laugh at your friends, who can you laugh at?

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.  ~e.e. cummings

Teamwork.
One day at work, my co-worker and I were enjoying a quiet cup of 6am coffee when our boss came into the office. Our boss was kind of a moody guy. By ‘moody’, I mean that he was fond of flying off the handle for no particular reason. Or should I say for good reason, but misdirected. So, there we were, getting in shit for something that a) we were not responsible for, b) could not change and c) was something that had pissed him off before he ever saw us.

So, we sat there and got ranted on for about ten full minutes before our boss finally just turned and stormed out of the office.

It was at this point that my coworker, a very calm individual, stood up and walked to the door. As our boss was driving away, my co-worker stood at the door and screamed “GO TEAM!!!” and pumped his arm like he’d just won the Superbowl.

It’s a good thing I was already sitting down, because I couldn’t stand up for about ten minutes. And until the day I left, we started each morning by greeting each other not with a ‘good morning’, but with a fist pump and a very sarcastic “GO TEAM!!”

The 50-50 Challenge is an idea that Chrissa from A Little Wicked and I came up with. It is based on a list of 50 Lists to Write to Lift Your Spirits, which can be found at Demanding Joy. We were inspired to make it a blog challenge. If you’d like to participate, please do. Be as inspired as we were.

Thank you again, Sylak