I took a long drink of water and, like, started crying. I was sitting in the bathtub. It was late afternoon, evening really, and I thought I’d take a quick bath before dinner. But when I raised the sports jug to my mouth and started drinking it was like, I don’t know, everything hit full stop and it all came flooding out.
It was a lovely bath. Maybe a bit too hot. But I needed it because it’d been a long week and I had three hours till Doug got home from work and I figured I’d make dinner and eat and take the dog for a walk and maybe just drink wine and watch stupid TV. A perfect evening, right?
But you know how that happens sometimes? Like, you just walk out of a building and the sun hits you and suddenly it’s like you’re a whole different person. Or you’re waking up from a dream, only the dream lasted five years, or ten, or longer. That’s what it felt like. Suddenly I’d woken up from a dream, a blur of the past however-many years, and only 20 minutes ago I’d been … what? See, that’s the thing. It was this detached sort of regret, or something.
I remembered a line from my Latin that always haunted me. The line goes, Si animus infirmus est, non poterit bonam fortunam tolerare. I can’t remember who wrote it. In English, it’s like, “If the spirit is weak, it will not be able to tolerate good fortune.” I remember having translated that at my kitchen table and just sitting there hearing my heart beat and freaking out. Outside the window I heard birds chirping, the sound of a lawnmower, some kids laughing.
The other day a name popped up on my Facebook friends’ requests. I thought, no, it couldn’t be. That’s too weird. How did he find me? Because I’ve changed my name from having gotten married, and moved, like, a million times. But it was him. There he was, grinning in his profile picture, and the message said, “Well well, look at you…” I didn’t know what to do. He’s just sitting there in my Facebook, vibrating.
I’m sorry if this is kind of all over the place. I just felt like I needed to do something. And the thread of what I needed to do was back there, just on the other side of the dream I’d woken up from when I sat there in the bath, drinking that water. But obviously I couldn’t just sit there forever, crying and drinking water. I saw that there was mold on the base of the toilet, and somehow that brought me back.
I pulled the drain on the tub even though the water was still nice and hot, and stood up in the tub. The water came up to my ankles. I stepped out and reached for the towel. And I thought about how I was going to move forward from here on out.
