In a mood

July 11, 2009

There are those days, those stinking, irritating days, where all we seem to do is just plain bug each other. Maybe it's the 100+ degree heat. Maybe it's that we hadn't spent any waking hours together in like a week, but whatever it was, it was frustrating me to no end.

"What's wrong?" he said with that concerned look on his face.

"It just seems that we're irritating each other a lot lately," I said a couple of days ago as we met in passing. We managed an obligatory kiss good-bye where we each turned our heads away quickly afterward. No extra long squeeze that brought Django to sit right in front of us and bark until we let go as sometimes happens (no joke).

And then yesterday: "I'm leaving for my doctor's appointment. Do you think you could be in a better mood when I get back?" I knew when I said it that it wasn't going to help improve his mood, but I felt the need to point out to him what was obvious to both of us, just to be a smart ass really. He half-sarcastically, half-seriously answered, "I'll try." And I was out the door without so much as a hand shake goodbye.

What is it that happens that shifts the energy? I really don't know. But it shifted for us. And I knew it would. It always does. Those aren't the majority of our moments. They are few and far between. But they're there nonetheless.

Maybe it was that we had the same expectations for the day ahead of us. Maybe it was our conversations from the previous night. I don't know. I offered to buy him a Starbucks as we went and ran errands this morning. As we waited in the drive-through to pick up our decaf iced mochas, he said, "I got a little weepy talking about you last night."

"Really?" I asked. I love knowing that he talks about me to other people. "What made you weepy?"

"I was with Michael and Danny last night and Michael was talking about what you have been through. He said every time he would get an e-mail update from us about something else that had gone wrong he would wonder how you could hold on. And then I read your blog about how shaky your hands were and it all came back to me." He got teary eyed as we talked about it.

"But I'm a fighter!" I said. I said it more to remind myself than to remind Jeremy. I didn't see myself as a fighter when I was in the midst of the tribulations, but now that I'm on the other side, I see how much of a fighter I was. And it's something I want to embrace and to acknowledge is true about me. I am a fighter. I've never thought of myself that way before. In fact, in the past I always thought that if I were faced with a tough situation, I would just give up. But I didn't. And it's reassuring for me to know that about myself. I'm a fighter.

He told me that reading my blog made him remember things that he had almost forgotten, but that there was a part of him that didn't want to forget. But we do forget. I think that's how we move on.

And then I started wondering, why didn't I die? Hm. I wonder if there's some reason. Some purpose for my life. I don't know . . . it just got me thinking though.