Someone that broke me up with a corner of her smile

Dear friends,

Spent most of last night alternating between crying (reading Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield) and snickering (American Idol, oh lordy the delusion!) and trying to will my two day strong migraine away by rubbing my temples in a modified wax on/wax off manner. No dice.

I'll tell you more about the book tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll babble about a tangentially related dishwashing incident. Not a major incident by any stretch; not even a dent, really. I was home, feeling miserable. I have a chronic disease and every time I settle into thinking that I'm normal, that my body works like everyone else's, it sneaks up on me, taps me on the shoulder and hits me in the face with a tennis racket. Then I sit there in the dark and think about how I'll never, ever leave the house again.

My partner in non-crime has become particularly adept at either ignoring or navigating around these days. He comes home, hangs up his coat and goes about the business of becoming his nighttime self. I hear him turning off his ipod in the other room; leafing through the catalogs we receive and feel a million miles away in my little dark corner of grump. One such night, he inserted a CD into our crappy stereo, selected a song and turned the water on to do the dishes. It was Sway by The Rolling Stones. Hearing it from the other room, I felt like I was hearing it for the first time, not in a clichéd, I finally heard the words to the song, it's so meaningful! sorta way. Nah. Something hazier, less formed. In the kind of way where it feels like your HAIR is listening to the song or the kind of way that you look at someone you've known for a while and you realize that you love them deeply and it's so startling because you had no control over it. It just happened when you weren't looking.

Took me a song or two before I got up. Can't You Hear Me Knocking was ending. He was still working on the dishes. He might've said our dishwashing mantra, which is "Next place we live in HAS to have a dishwasher," but he didn't. Perhaps he thought it. I put my arms around him for a bit, and then I helped dry.

Song to seek:

Sway/The Rolling Stones (mp3)

Buy Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones.

Love, D