My Gravity

I love really good talks with friends. I know you know what I mean, or, at least, I hope you know what I mean. I hope that the very fact you read this site at all is because you think it's like sitting down with me over a cup of coffee or tea, getting out a little whine, laughing until tears roll down our cheeks, looking for a moment at another face and thinking, "Yeah, she/he gets it."

I spend so much time these days talking to people I will never meet in person. I answer the phone, listen to their trouble, offer help, try for a laugh. But most of them, I will never see face to face. I won't know what their year is like, how the rest of their days and purchases will play out - all I've got are a handful, if that, of phone calls in which to impress a feeling of being cared for, worried about, important. Because when I think about it, some of the best parts of a good talk are the times when you feel important, when what you say, feel, and think is worth it to somebody else. I can't completely solve a lot of the problems that come my way in a day. I can help, and offer a fix, but a fix is not necessarily a solve, and a solve, to many, many people, is a very important thing.

Last night was Friday and we looked for our own "solve" to a very long week with raspberry and fresh basil ice cream dripping down a waffle cone and stove top popcorn. We laughed away the heavy sighs of work days with television show that never gets old. Today we walked, winding through a busy Saturday morning in the city for a bag of tomatoes and a loaf of bread, a handshake with a kind farmer, and a shared doughnut topped with fresh strawberries and cream. Every place we've been, every transaction we've made, when someone asks how we are, and I do the same in return, I listen. I really listen when someone answers because those great talks, the ones I love so much, they don't come around every day, but people are still talking, and those voices still need to feel important.

If you were here, and if we were having coffee or tea again like we have before, I'd want to hear about what's important to you right now, because I suspect it might surprise me - people have a fantastic way of doing that at times. If you asked me, I'd tell you the pink plastic spoon I use for ice cream, the amazing bag my mother made and sent me replete with enough inside and outside pockets for everything to have it's place, the new books I'll spend my night with, the promise of most the day with Andrew tomorrow, the fact that I am always saying things without thinking and getting myself into awkward but endlessly entertaining situations including words like blow, salty, and nuts, that have nothing to do with where your mind just went, the end of the work day when the office is weary but we laugh anyway, big, hard laughs because we cannot not. If you were here, I'd tell you that the most important thing to me right now is make things more so- because we've got enough of the mundane, enough of the casual. What we need is the necessary and the important, and we need to allow them to be small and plentiful.