Puzzling
2 min readMar 26, 2023
What if life happens through me, and not to me? What if I picked my own battles? What if I’ve chosen the spot, the time, the hill that I will die on? What if I knew, ahead of time, the pattern of my life, the puzzled pieces missing, the yearning searching looking nearly everywhere. So exhausted, I no longer want to play this game. I was wrong, I am wrong, it’s all wrong and I give up. Here, on this hill. I am finished.
And yet I wasn’t. Not even half finished (as my mother was, at 41). The wrong hill, the wrong time, the puzzle pieced together, the life I’d discarded given back to me and the choosing to work it better, to learn what I couldn’t understand, what no one ever told me, and not be too stubborn to ask for help, too stubborn to refuse direction, too stubborn to admit my ignorance (it’s not stupid to not know. No one ever showed you! But if you know and act poorly by choice, that’s stupid. I explained this to Scott, as a boy, pointing out there’s a difference).
Won’t you be bored, when all the pieces fit? Not really. There are plenty of interesting things to do, without the melodrama, the addiction to the adrenalin rush of becoming perpetually unglued (just yesterday I went combustible over Firefox, the day so early, Doug, poor Doug, witness, thinking, surely, “Who are you, and what have you done with my wife?” I’m who I’ve always been, with up-
dates. Important ones, not like this asinine computer’s.
I’ve come to learn I prefer being calm, prefer being around calm people, steer clear of mayhem. I’m driving my own bus. It’s unwieldy at times but I’ve become a good driver; careful and considerate, and every now and then, you might not want to cross in front of me . . .
LBM 3/26/2023
