Gertrude 🎧

I’m procrastinating.

I have about four hours (or more, depending on my focus level) of homework that I could have spaced out between today and yesterday, but instead, I spent yesterday lying in the sunshine, doing laundry, and fake-reluctantly agreeing to a delivery from our favorite vegan restaurant in Tampa.

This is supposedly my nineteenth post since declaring a goal of 100 for the year, but what about all my personal journal writing and the drafts I never publish? Now we’re getting closer to forty. But that’s fine.

This post is about gratitude because that’s what keeps coming up for me. The temperatures here are still relatively cool, and there’s a breeze outside today. The before-sunrise sky is an intoxicating gray-blue color. Gigi is (at this exact moment) stealthily creeping over my forearms to sit in the center of my lap as I type, like a cat might.

I find myself continually thinking about the women in my life. Toward the end of February, my cousin asked me what I had been writing about lately. I told her nothing was really coming up for me, but I had a small urge to start a series where each post was dedicated to one woman in my life. It would be easy to fill the entire month of March, and isn’t that a reason to feel grateful?

I wrote about my Grandmom Gert once on my old WordPress site. I think I named the post after the cigarette brand she smoked—Winston. I wish I could recover it.

She died when I was nineteen. My easy commute to work has me regularly driving past the place where I pulled over to park when she called to tell me she was sick. I don’t notice it every day, but when I do, I feel that same wave of dread and hollowness. And I don’t know why I invite that feeling back. Am I addicted to pangs, whether they’re good or bad?!

She was, hands down, the best storyteller. I’d be on knife’s edge listening to her, completely hooked by the way she told a story. She was funny as hell (“I’ve been thrown out of nicer places than this.”) and real as hell. I was all-in when I was around her. She was the kind of storyteller where, instead of dreading a repeat, you ask them to tell it again. When she would visit, I can remember intentionally delaying my time with her outside while she smoked, so I could savor it more.

I owe her some writing because I’ve been talking to her a lot lately. I asked her to do something for me—and she did it. Do I believe she actually did it? I don’t know. But I could hear her sarcastic voice in my head, reminding me that I made a promise. I told her I’d talk to her every day.

The thing about talking to loved ones when you don’t necessarily believe in an afterlife (but you believe in their energy / presence because you need to) is… it’s emotional as hell. But I guess, in a way, it’s like meditating? Maybe the first ten times you do it, it feels uncomfortable. But the more you check in with yourself (or the idea of them), the more centered you start to feel. When the emotions come up, you don’t fight them as hard.

I wish I could sit with my Grandmom now and experience her with my thirty-eight-year-old brain. She would be ninety-one next month. I have a client who is ninety-two, who reads her statements with a sharpness that some forty-year-olds don’t even have, so I know she might have stayed sharp, too.

I bet I could have told her anything about where life has taken me, and she would have had something brilliant, funny, or deeply human to say—something that would make me see things differently, or at the very least, make me laugh.

^{(Daily Writing 019)}