alone

Yesterday I felt like giving up.  It can feel like swimming upstream, maintaining a good attitude about how weird I am.  It can be hard having different needs and getting misunderstood all the time.  Misread motivations.  I felt done with people.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a hermit.  I daydreamed about living alone on a green hill in a small wooden shack.  I think in this daydream I was kind of a man--I had never heard of a lady hermit.

I really wanted to be alone.  Later I saw part of a kung fu movie and saw a man living alone in a shack, and it seemed deliciously familiar to me, although I am not a kung fu master.  A simple life, quiet, me and the wind.

Where did my fantasy disappear to?  I have too many friends now, spread thin, and people come and go all the time.  But secretly I have another life inside me, the imagined life.

We picked someone up last night.  We were given the wrong address.  I knew it was wrong too because I told Ming googlemaps was showing the dot in the middle of the street.  The address did not exist.

When we finally found him, the guy smelled strongly of weed, and I was annoyed.  If you're too high to txt your correct address or have a proper conversation with Ming about directions to your apartment, maybe you shouldn't get so high.

Being lost and all that added a lot of time to our trip.  So this morning, up at 4, I would ask my body to do things, and it wouldn't obey.  "You haven't taken care of me, so I won't do what you say," my body told me.

Luckily helpers came at 9.  They did a lot of work, making vegan sandwiches, dicing avocados, carrying stuff, washing celery and carrots. 

I entrusted some cute little pink scissors to my friend K and asked her to snip open the packages right before lunchtime.  I also entrusted her with the gluten-free bread.

I still feel like giving up.  But I never give up.  I'll rest.  Later when Ming returns, we need to shop again with the donated Walmart cards, ingredients for the vegan risotto a new walker is cooking tomorrow in the Goddess Temple guesthouse.

"Just bear with me, about this," I told Ming.  I'm single-minded about replenishing the snack boxes.  In past years I didn't do well with that, so I'm obsessed with doing well now.  And bringing out toilet paper for the portapotties.  And do they have enough whatever.

"I'm done being a person," I told Ming.  "I tried really hard for 42 years, and it didn't work out."  He was falling asleep.  But when I woke up in the morning, I was still a person.