god i'll never get back to writing if i don't just start.

1. in Toronto, at R's. Have a nice little routine now, where i come spend 2-4 days here and then head up to my parents' place out of the city and spend a few days there. Going to blow it all up in a month when i move back to the US. Don't know how I feel about it, just going to do it anyway. March 5, back in Washington. It's been 29 months. I've loved my time back in Canada and i'm scared to leave, but also I need to do things that are scary.

2. It's cold and I'm dehydrated. Drinking mugfuls of hot water, lime and honey. Resisting the urge to tip in a large slug of bourbon.

3. Nightmares all last week - one where i kept encountering situations that put my nieces on the brink of death and it was all my fault. Another where i am consumed with the helplessness of my father making implacable and infuriating and unfathomable choices. I guess we are unearthing the real stuff in therapy now.

4. Can't stop eating fennel. Started by adding raw fennel to the plates of celery sticks that I couldn't stop crunching on (today I have added sugar snap peas because R is fancy). But now the obsession has weirdly expanded to fennel seeds. Sometimes I grind in some fresh black pepper, directly onto a handful of fennel seeds in my palm. Then I add a sprinkle of sugar, like the bowl of coloured sugar-coated digestive seeds (pre-COVID) at an Indian restaurant.

5. Not to bury the lede but I'm trying to figure out how to plan a wedding and if i want a wedding and what it's all going to look like. But we told our families over Christmas and everyone was gratifyingly thrilled and teary, which surprised me since I thought it was kind of obvious that this relationship is serious. Guess people like it when people get married. Also it turns out that everyone has a lot of opinions on this stuff, and now I guess we need to make it all happen. I will be glad when it is over.

6. E came to visit and I took her to the spa east of the city where they just had a massive Staph outbreak... i figured it would be the safest possible time to go. We sat in the hot pools and the snow came down all around us in big wet clumps like we were in a snow globe. I keep thinking of the invigorating shock of the plunge in the cold pool, and how everyone was squealing and running out as fast as possible, and I just floated there feeling the blood pumping through my body as time slowed and everything looked clear and new.

11:38 a.m. - 2023-01-30