Wish

I don’t know what’s going on lately, what’s in the air or in the water, but it’s been a little bit of a rough couple of weeks in my world. Not for me personally, you understand: I’m doing great. Work is settling down, I have some great friends, and I managed to light the fire in under twenty minutes this evening, thanks very much. I’m as privileged as always: more than many, more than most, and as (almost) always, grateful for what I have and what I do.

It’s just everyone else, lately, some of my favorite people, some of whom may be reading right now (hey girl!). There’s been quite a lot of upheaval in my various circles of friends in various hemispheres, lately, and I haven’t known quite what to do about it, other than just kind of be there in any of the ways I can—email, phone, text, sometimes actually by going out to dinner or something if they happen to be in Wellington, which, you know, very often they’re not–and that is the single worst part about being an immigrant, by the way, is not getting to be there the way you want to for your people who are hurting. I try to listen, and I try to talk, and I try to give what I can give. I don’t know if it’s enough; I don’t know what ‘enough’ means, most of the time.

There’s not much more to say about any of this, because it’s not my stuff and not for me to talk about, even though I’ve been thinking about it, all the various “its” quite a bit over the last days. I go back and forth between thinking that human beings can’t ever really help each other because ultimately everyone has a secret core that no one else can see or touch or otherwise sense, that breaks and reforms and breaks again of its own volition and responds only to the passage of time—and thinking, knowing that we can…not save each other exactly, but you know what I mean. That we can try to help each other out, that we can hold each others’ head up above the crashing waves, that we can love each other and somehow that will make everything work out for the best.

Wow, this is turning out to be way more portentous than I mean it to be—I mean, twenty minutes ago I was planning to write about this weird bump I have on my eyebrow that is a) either an ingrown hair from my ill-advised eyebrow wax a week ago or b) a plague buboe, plus about this conversation I had with some of my Italian friends over the weekend wherein one of the guys told me to stop joking, there’s no way anyone can live without sex for a year and I was all: I BEG TO DIFFER. Even though I’m feeling sad for some of my friends at the moment, I trust that they–all the people I’m thinking about right now as I sit in front of my fire with my empty pasta bowl in front of me, wondering if I have time to do a load of laundry and make my breakfast for tomorrow before I go to bed—are going to make it through whatever they have to make it through, just like everyone else.

Mostly what I think is not even a thought, but a wish, and I know it’s a little silly and a little naïve and a little childish and a little impossible, but it’s that we’ll all be okay–somehow, finally, eventually, that everyone will all be okay.