Real Butter and Good Mayo

There are a few things I don’t skimp on at the grocery store, two of those are mayo and butter. I won’t even order a sandwich at a place I know uses budget mayo and I will eat toast dry rather than put a “spread” on it. Call me a snob, I’m ok with that. My friends understand.

Speaking of friends, I don’t have titanic ton of super close "call every day, about everything" ones but I do have a handful of damn good people who I’d feel pretty hopeful about being stranded on a semi-inhabitable island with, for no more than a month, during a mild summer. Personally, I believe that me having a gajillion besties is probably as empty as having no one at all.

There was at time not all that long ago, I believed every relationship, every entanglement, every bump into another for more than 3 seconds (especially if it resulted in a smile) should last forever. I held too tightly to things I needed to release and released too easily things I should’ve held closer, for longer. I lacked experience and wisdom, and there is a difference. Experience is what I live through, wisdom is what I learn from it. Something I’ve come to appreciate is life’s built-in friend filtration system. It seems very efficient, and I’ve learned to trust it. It’s removed me from people’s lives who are better off without my brand of crazy in it, and it’s filtered people out of my life for the same reason. No harm, no foul, we just move along and be grateful for the experience and that we didn’t waste more time in a futile or possibly poisonous situation, and I’m left with a perfect combination of amazing humans to learn from, love, grow alongside and travel this road with, for as long as life sees fit. (That’s on my saner days, other days I’m the angry one in the corner working through a fresh red-hot resentment until I get to that place of appreciation and trust again.) Life sure has gotten full.

Sometimes I sigh and say, “Where did the day go?” or some other whiney middle aged cliché to bemoan my plight of business and cares. Without fail, my brain flashes a scene across my mind’s eye. That scene is a woman, in a darkened bedroom sitting on the floor by a bed. Her phone ceased ringing long ago and no friends just “stop by” anymore. Her lip is cut and her body bruised. The drapes are drawn and only a faint bit of light reaches the dingy carpet. She cries and holds herself around her middle. Her heart feels as though if it weren’t for the pain making it hurt, it would cease beating because of the weight of hopelessness that is crushing it. She’s scared of dying and she is afraid of living. She dreads the night and avoids the dawn. She runs from her past and fears the future and the present feels like a curse. In that light eating room, she rocks and sobs the tears of a woman who has lost her way, lost her smile and lost her hope. She is trapped like a lightening bug in a jar whose light is fading, it’s mad beating against the jar getting weaker and weaker realizing that falling to the bottom would feel less like dying and more like resting. She raises her face, and that woman is me.

A friend of mine says “Today, we have a big, juicy life!” and I love that. Every day is an opportunity for me to take a big wet bite out of it and savor its flavor. To look at my calendar and catch myself when I begin to feel inconvenienced by all the lifey things I need to do and to recall that woman sitting on the dingy carpet in that sad room with that sad life and to thank her. Thank her for the price she paid for me to finally find the light switch, the door, and freedom. Thank her for living long enough to throw open those drapes and to let the sunshine in so we could find our way out into a world that is warm and big and golden with people who also appreciate the sunshine with the same madness of gratitude. People who love each other like people who have survived a plane crash. That’s deeper than being besties in an Instagram shot. That’s closer than anything I ever had before. We understand many were and are still lost and that each breath we take together is a gift and what a miracle we each are. Many of us even understand why it's so awesome for people like us to be able to have some of the little joys in life, like lunch after a meeting, a warm hug, a good joke, the ability to stay and leave at will, and even silly things like the real butter and the good mayo.

-NW

10.21.21