i've had this open in my browser for weeks.

i went to DC and came back. i went to the DRC and came back. i went to visit my sister and her family and came back. i go back and forth between R's and my parents. It's been a long time since i slept in one place for more than a week. I am, in a word, destabilized.

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the supreme court decision came down while i was in kinshasa, a supercity of about 17 million people in a country where on average women have 6.6 children. I was quite.. triggered by all of it. I didnt expect it but suddenly hearing/reading the word "abortion" nonstop left me feeling completely overwhelmed with grief and i DID NOT WANT IT. Talked to E about it later and she reminded me that grief just kind of circles around and you process it differently every time but you just have to accept that you carry it with you for life.

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my dad is drinking again. it's like we didn't go through one year of insane cancer treatments and miraculously come out the other side with him still alive. Hard to be around it. Feels like a weight I am carrying around in my chest. He is so unpredictable. It unbalances me on a fundamental level that must go back to infancy.

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the city is so noisy. a constant drone of construction, starting from 6am. These stupid high rises and then the rest of the city is low density. Gah. It's hard not to just feel so hopeless at all the stupid decisions that are piling up all around.

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It helped to spend time with my sister and her kids over the weekend. The kids are so amazing. I felt so keenly how i was in my almost-life, the life i wanted, the life i thought i was building in my thirties. It is dangerous to live in fantasyland ... i have got to stay in reality. I would never trade my life with R - we are in The Love. I trust him. I want to keep building a life with him, even i have no idea what I want that to look like. I do not long to go back to my life with BT. I hated the uncertainty and the helpless feeling of being stuck and always focused on his problems and never ever able to think about the "our" or the "we".

But god, there was this fantasy life that seemed so possible and i wanted it so much: a house near my sister and her kids, and our own kids, and our friends and community all around. I loved BT too, and often we were so happy, and that life felt so within our grasp... just this with little caveat that i was constructing it all in my own head and BT would have had to be a completely different person for it to have happened. ha! Stupid fantasyland, go away.

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i was so close to work burnout. took some time, inching back. Been trying to write and trying to dream but finding it hard to take time and space to do it.

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Did a couple of 75km bike rides and hoping to do more. Would like to be a jock, I always like myself better when I'm trying to be a jock.

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i think i need to make a new friend. How do I do that?

11:47 a.m. - 2022-06-30