Homesick

It's my mom's birthday on Monday. As I knelt on my beige, mock-shag carpet, using my nightstand with the warped "wood" as a hard surface, I wrote her a card. The card itself is insubstantial: a picture of a guy at a gym on the front and when you open it up it asks you what color his gym bag was. But it was the note inside that brought to the surface a feeling I hadn't been able to place, though it's held over me for days. I thanked my mom for taking care of me, driving to Rochester and back over and over; seeing Tangled with me on Thanksgiving at a small theater near our motel the night before my monitoring started; sitting by my bed and feeding me when I was too weak; telling me made up stories to take my mind off the pain; putting cold washcloths on my face; slathering butter on apple cinnamon muffins to get more calories into my thin post-surgical body; playing Bananagrams with me; and all of the other things she did for me every single day. I'm homesick. I'm homesick for the time I spent with my parents in my "love cocoon", not worrying about life, not anxious about my future, just focusing on healing - both physically and emotionally.

I spent today looking for and applying to jobs. I found them on Career Builder, Job Finder, searching through the top employers and top companies to work for in Colorado. I networked, sending out emails and setting up meetings. I dealt with the IRS, which is auditing my 2009 taxes and says I owe them five thousand dollars in capital gains taxes even though I had a loss, not a gain. I feel like the sharp edges of life are coming forcefully into focus; right when I accepted blurry watercolors, they were gone.