Just now at dinner I dropped and broke our optometrist cousins’ eyeball salt shaker and it shattered on the floor. For the first time since our fire experience started a few days ago, I just sobbed. The first part was just chagrin that we are in these lovely surroundings provided by our loving relatives as our refuge from fire homelessness, and I went and broke their shit. The second part is that I have a history of being clumsy and so I always feel chagrin when I break stuff, and my historical excuse (passed on by my mother, from whom I probably also inherited my clumsiness) has always been “I am a DANCER and I need open space in which to MOVE!” That started wearing thin a long time ago.
The third part is, well, we are already swimming in an element of unimaginable destruction, and we are homeless now, and we have lost ALL of our shit, and that little straw just broke this little camel’s back.
My dear friend Dee (middle school bestie) sent me this text today, which after sobbing earlier now makes me laugh: “I heard something recently about being overwhelmed with juggling life details, and the person said to decide which are the glass balls and which are the rubber ones that can drop right now and not break.” Not sure that’s going to work for me. Obviously I can’t be trusted with glass balls of any kind.
[Note: If this is the first fire-related post you have read, you might go back to read Fire Journal for some context. Fire-related posts will be in reverse chronological order starting with that one.]