Doesn't Mean You Ain't Been On My Mind

It's been a while. I'm sorry about that. I got invested in loving where I am instead of constantly moping about how I wasn't elsewhere, and while I still miss Cleveland, and Pants, and all that, I'm also feeling a lot more rooted down here.

I also had to get over someone, or at least get back to the "partially/mostly/maybe over" place I was before I took up with this guy again. It was much easier than I thought--I don't know if it was the complete and utter assholishness with which that ended, or just the fact that his magic has declined since I was 19 and convinced I'd never love anyone else, but where last time it took a year, this time it took a month. And no crying when I passed our restaurant. I may even go there with someone else, someday. As soon as I'm dating someone I'm comfortable having ridiculously expensive dinners with.

As far as dating goes, it's amazing how many men are attracted to a girl who doesn't particularly want a boyfriend.

The other thing going on is that my grandmother is sick. With pancreatic cancer. This is one area where my line of work doesn't offer a lot of hope. We get all the incredibly depressing stats (five year survival rate: hovering around 2%) with none of the anecdotal "beating the odds" stories. People keep telling me she's going to be fine, and I keep wanting to throw shit at them. They know just as well as I do that she's going to die, definitely, at some point, and probably within the next year since she's refusing treatment. Don't fucking lie to me, I'm not stupid and neither are you.

When my grandfather died, and my mom went batshit crazy because apparently it had never occurred to her before that her parents, like everyone else on the planet, were mortal, I decided to just think about the fact that everyone I knew and loved was going to die someday. And that thought? It's not a bad one.

My grandmother's faith is strong; she believes she's going to Heaven and that she'll get to keep her eye on us from up there. She'd been so depressed before the diagnosis and has been in reasonably good spirits since that I would be selfish and foolish to encourage her to seek treatment. She's ready to go. I'm never going to be ready for her to go, but it's not my call. It's hers. I'd hope that someday my family would respect my decisions as well, and enjoy the time they have with me instead of borrowing grief from the future. She's not dead yet. Someday soon, she will be. I'll be sad then.

My grandmother, she's fond of saying "Well, I only have so much time, you know." To which my dad always replies, "Wait, I didn't know there was another option." We all only have so much time. Knowing how her death is (probably) going to arrive doesn't make the rest of her life meaningless, only to be passed in pre-emptive mourning.