The Strange Days Have Come

This is a sketch from my sketchbook which I am using to illustrate the "Strange Days" theme of my post... It was a strange day when I drew this, and only I will ever know what made it so strange... but I digress...

Strange days indeed. Being back at the old job has been really weird. It honestly feels like I never left, and that the deplorable job was some sort of nightmare. It's not as though I love the old/present job, but the people are so great (most of them) and it's really like I'm home. It's all come back to me and it's just... WEIRD... I love the smiling faces, people coming to my desk and stopping to talk for ten minutes, phone calls to say "welcome back", people begging me to join the social committee again (heehee)... it is so, so good and so very different from the deplorable job. And the mortgage papers will be signed tomorrow and I take possession September 1st and THAT's exciting too! But the days do get stranger...

Tonight I was looking through a bunch of quotes that I like, because I really want to stencil an inspiring quote on my bedroom wall to wake up to every morning. I can't narrow it down to one, but most of the ones I like have to do with love, so I thought maybe a FEW quotes.... anyway, while reading quotes I got a strange message from a friend out of nowhere... a friend who has been behaving oddly lately... and it turns out that he and the love of his life broke up. It's one of those things where you feel it coming, but it's still shocking to hear. So I asked him "what now?" and he said he didn't know. So I've been thinking about that this evening. For the past three years I've been dealing with my own "I don't know" in the grand life change, fresh out of what I thought was a "forever" thing... and I've been watching my friends build their lives with "forever" people, and it has left me dumbfounded that I somehow went awry on that path. Honestly, DUMBFOUNDED. For three years, people. And I know that my dear friend, I want to just wrap him in quilts to shelter him from the pain. I know my friends wanted to do that for me too. And I feel like only now, three years later, am I digging myself out of the dumbfoundedness. I want to do something but there's nothing I can do, is there? I guess not. There was nothing anyone could do for me except be patient with me and love me, and only the truest of hearts could do that.

So I know you're wondering "how does this all go together?" so here it is:
The days are strange because I'm waking up to certain realities, and seeing that I have quite a few things to be proud of, and quite a few things to look forward to. The days are strange because it hurts to see someone you've cared about for 14 years hurt from losing a "forever"love. The days are strange because it's just impossible to look back and see the waves you've made sometimes, and the days are strange because we don't say or hear this stuff enough: "you've impacted me" or "now I understand who you are/how you feel/why you did what you did." So I'll leave you with one of the quotes I'm contemplating:

"There is no remedy for love but to love more."
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Keep making waves, darlings. You've impacted me.
~g~