Measurements.

Your tape measure still smells like you, and it’s devastating.  I miss you, Nan.  But also, I’m trying not to use it to measure my body and it’s progress, whatever that means.  I keep wanting to, but I can picture your disapproval and I stop my hands and just keep rolling it up tighter instead.

I literally just talk to it like it’s some kind of portal to you.  It’s the smell and the way that it rolls up just right, I can picture you rolling it just right so it would fit perfectly in your yellow sewing kit.  You still blow my mind.  And I wish you were here, so much… if only to laugh at Georgia’s dance moves and Bear’s killer smiles.  And arrange the flowers, because there’s so many left.

We are heading to the beach in a few weeks, whether or not that’s the smartest move, I can’t say.  But I remember seeing those old pictures of you on the beach with Poppy and man.  I want my grandkids to look at pictures of me on this beach someday in some similar way, in awe and with goals.  Goals is the name of my game right now.  Goals, game, gratitude, and going forward.  Those G words, no promises, and definitely no Guarantees.  Just grateful to have greatness and goals.  

2020 will do that to a girl.  Not all bad, I guess.  Perspective is a bitch when it slaps you in the face every 5 minutes.  Not mad about it, just want to preserve that shock.  Because even though you know it’s coming?  It still stings and triggers and blurs my vision. Every fucking news alert, every single fucking time.  All day, every day.  They say the shock dulls over time, like long-term PTSD and trauma survivors but that phase is not here yet. I’m not sure it’s the goal. But anyway.

Today: I just found a whole bunch of my old nonsense, including, but not limited to:

• One purple iPad shuffle that someday I’ll write about the decision to buy it that one time.
• The charger for said shuffle, despite it being from 2007, and guess what?  Still Works.
• The music it contains- which is basically an angry-angsty time capsule that I FUCKING LOVE RIGHT NOW.
• Subnote: Yes Alanis, we will fast-forward to a few years later, where no one knows except the both of us… and I have honored your request for silence. And you’ve washed your hands clean of this.  
• Sub-subnote: Reading this? If you think it could be about you, it just might be.  And if you had to wonder?  You can fuck entirely off.  Facts.
• Journals, if you can call them that.
• Scribbles, poems, madness. From a former life.  Or four.
• Post-it notes… always.
• Keys to an entire school I don’t work for anymore.

Do what you will with this information, it just seemed important to mention.  

Heavy shit, these old baggage claim tags.  What to do with them…?  Measure? Smell them? Listen? Judge that girl?  Judge the woman reading them now?  Give Grace?  Grateful?  Sure.  

Goals.