chasing the sky

Now is not the time to be writing a new blog post.  From where I sit I can see the list of To Do's written in green ink on the whiteboard.  

Change sheets, clean out fridge (house sitter is Vegan), feed animals, take out trashes, sweep, mop, vacuum, make breakfast, pack with Beach to fly, pack car bag, pack BC, pack me, pay and mail bills, clean out car, make lunch, get eggs, feed turtles, prep dinner, pick up contacts, workout, shower, math, reading, laundry, clean bathrooms, walk the dog, work, gym, hand off Beach to her team, clean kitchen, set coffee pot, load and start dishwasher, set alarm for 3AM.

Yep. Tomorrow we drive 11+ hours and Beach will fly.  Her back is so bad this is where we are; buying one way plane tickets hoping it will give her some relief.  We need a huge head start to catch her.  Another 4AM of slipping off into the darkness and racing ourselves down I-15.

Her back is so bad right now her coaches are removing skills from her routines.  It will effect her start values and in a funny twist it could hurt OR improve her scores.  Gymnastics is part voodoo, part magic, the rest is a mix of physics, math, and pain.

We have done everything we can afford to do to help her.  The bad back is related to the injury she had last year in her hip/hamstring.  The time it took and the skills she avoided to heal the fracture left her so tight that her back is suffering.  Or she has a fracture in her back... only an MRI would be able to identify that.  However, we don't think it is.  She isn't in constant pain when not working out.  And her pain is worse after taking time off because she gets tighter.

She stretches, she rolls, she ices, she heats, she takes omega's, drinks smoothies, shoots black and sour cherry juice, takes supplements, and works on her core.

She is fifteen.  How insane this all seems.

But I don't have anymore time to think about it.

I already see Beach flying high through the blue while we drive along the black below her.  All of us chasing the sky in our own way.  

the day against the sky

It's hard to describe the dark.  Lying in bed eyes shut tight.  It is the weight of a day that is too like the one before it and the one after it.  A day that reoccurs as the middle sister in the middle seat of a car stopped in traffic.

My whole body hurts.  It's a nursing home of complaints: my foot, my back, my shoulder, my right side, my head, my lungs, my jaw.

I search the dark for a reason to get out of bed. I find a dozen good ones but none of them are mine.

The weeks between travel tend to do this to me.  Time is sliced and place between two bookends.  In that space I can never find myself.

There isn't time to slip off into the white of winter nor is there time to chase the cold, rosy light at the end of a snow bit trail.

Do you work today, he asks when I finally appear in the bedroom doorway.  Without knowing what day it is I answer yes.

There is News and coffee and the sound of a cat wanting to be let out. The house around me accepts the day as I wait.

If I could do anything, I ask myself... I search.  My mind drives the roads. It scans the valley.  I see groceries bought with a credit card.  Phone bills, electric bills, tuition, and school projects piling up.

If I could do anything today I would go back to bed.

Sometimes the dark is delicious like coffee and I can swim in it.
Sometimes it is thick and sticks like tar so that nothing gets done.

This darkness is like a sheet of thin plastic in the wind.  It billows around me. When I breathe it gets in my mouth.  When I try to see it covers my eyes.  It is noisy too.  A trap in the wind flapping.

Hidden beneath it I am a ghost.  I get up. I workout. I shower. I clean. We do school. I prep dinner. I leave for work. I work. I return. We eat dinner.  I go to bed.

In my dreams I stand in the doorway of an old white house.  The house is down a long dirt driveway. It faces west.  There are trees all around it.  Mountains shadow the sky.  It has a small kitchen and a cozy front room with a fireplace and big chair.  The walls hold nothing but windows and shelves of books. It is always 1:00 in the afternoon.  And it is silent minus the ticking of the clock.

SLC to Palm Springs and back