...phone a friend...

 Clarity, these days, seems hard to come by.

Whether it's the sleep deprivation or the 'crisis management mode'...or just the gears rusting in this brain of mine...the ability to step back and observe the whole has been lacking lately.
Tracking the unpredictable but perpetual motion of too many balls in the air has caused me to get stuck in laser-focus mode, and I've found myself floundering when it comes to big-picture planning.
Despite lists and calendars and planners and organization...I've been (poorly) jumping from one action task to another, with no attention for the outcome.  It's plugging one hole in a sieve, while the rest pour out unstopped.

Until right now. This very moment.

(Okay, truthfully, not THIS very moment...but a few moments ago, before I thought to write it out here.)

There's an annual phone call I make, to an old...friend.  Weird, that. Not sure what the label is.  Former boyfriend.  Of eons ago.  Long-distance by phone alone...but somehow, connection...to a previous iteration of me, to a shared past, to parts of my experience that only he could understand.  
Ugh...I digress...

(As I do...)

Every year, the birthday calls.  Mine, outgoing, at the end of May. Returned a week or so later when it's my turn to celebrate.  Always a moment of startle in my mind when he picks up and the voice is both familiar and stranger.
Every year a rushed recap...a few laughs...perhaps some insight shared in one direction or the other.
A feeling of normalcy, because so much of what formed me...he was present for.

~~~

The call was a few days late this year.  Belated...my doing.  The birthday fell on a Saturday. I didn't want to interrupt.  And then it was a holiday weekend, and...  So I called today.  And had that moment of familiar but strange all over again.  Always marveling at who we carry along with us.  Forever navigating the momentary discomfiture of...is it muscle memory...or auditory memory that stirs up emotion long passed...

Our conversation the standard sort of catch-up.  His successes and health.  My children.

And in the middle of all that back and forth, there it was:

A reminder of what I already know...but daily forget.

An outside voice...outside perspective...

An acknowledgement by someone so very far out of my focus...that my feelings of alone...solitary...at a loss...are, in their own way, both valid and not.  An understanding of the different path....different timeline...my eldest is on.  And the gift of encouragement by way of his experiential knowledge and singular path to success.  

I'm over here marveling at the 'weirdness' of that.  Once upon a time, I was in love.  Once upon a time, I was deeply hurt.  And here, in the present, we're...friends...of the genuine sort...  And of all the people who could have set me back on my feet in 'this moment in time'...

Weird.  Just...weird.

Thank goodness for the weirdness.

I'd almost called him, months ago, when life took an unexpected turn and the past 'knocked on the door'.  I almost picked up the phone then.  Because he alone knew the players of this particular game...he alone knew how I'd been changed in meeting them.  

But I didn't.

It felt...unfair to unload that particular emotional baggage on a once-a-year phone-a-friend.

I wanted insight...or, guidance...a pointed 'yes...throw in' or 'no, back away slowly'.

What I wanted in those early moments was to pull from the past and have a friend beside me who knew how emotionally attached I was to the idea of birth family...to feeling a part of something... and who knew equally how it nearly broke me. 

There she is...the me of that part of the timeline.  Gosh, she was young and naive.

But that isn't fair, is it?

To dredge up the old.

To call on a shared moment in the past as reason for interrupting the present.

So, I didn't call.

But it came up today.  Unfiltered.  Stream of consciousness...much like I write here.

And in me...a perceptible shift...a sigh of relief to hear a familiar-to-the-original-experience voice remark on the present.  A flickering of 'not alone' in this, too.

~~~

I isolate.

Not news...certainly not new news.

I batten the hatches and shore up the barriers.

I lockdown and work at the problems in solitary confinement...coming up to breathe only once I've found resolution or solution.

No one would accuse me of having healthy coping mechanisms.

I've always had this sense of needing to handle things on my own.

Not be a burden.

A disruption.

An interruption.

Not to cause worry to anyone else over what I might be struggling with.

~~~

But...

This year...

I'm working on healing...

And today, that meant a phone call to an old friend...and opening up...at a comfortable distance of both miles and years...just enough to receive a sprinkling of clarity atop a tangled mess of crises.