365

Desiree, today I passed on the baton.

You’ll know what I am talking about – the 2 x 3 inch magnet that has clung obediently to my refrigerator door, pinning up Tide coupons and Hair Cuttery business cards. For a year.

Initially, I’d glance at it every morning when I went to pour milk over my oatmeal. Sometimes, it would invigorate me -feed me a fighting-feminine vitamin boost - while other mornings it just made me chuckle. Mostly, it made me think of you, Desiree, and what a compassionate friend you were to me during my short time in Tucson. Admittedly, after a few months, I stopped noticing it. Occasionally, a visiting friend would point at it, wheeze with amusement, and I’d smile and say, “Yea, that’s on loan.”

Well, today I passed it on.

“Here, you need this more than I do now,” you had insisted, securing it inside the palm of my hand. “Keep it until you don’t need it anymore and unfortunately, discover someone who does.”

Desiree, I want you to know that it is going to Wichita. It is bound for Wichita with a childhood friend who found her way into my life this afternoon after a chance encounter at Gap among the khaki shorts. She is moving there in three weeks to start over. To live forward and mark each day as one sluggish step towards healing. It will reside on her fridge for a while or maybe on the file cabinet where she stashes her tax returns from the last five years. Either way, it has a new home and after hearing her story, she deserves it.

I told her what I think you advised me, but was too in shock to remember verbatim. I admitted that it won’t be easy - that the pain and anger is real and raw and eats at you for a long time. I told her your story and my story and that our club is not anything to envy, but the only thing positive about it being larger than anyone would ever want is the amount of support out there. And I asked her to pass it on – when she was ready – to peel it from her Wichita kitchen and seal it in the palm of someone just starting out on her journey.

It’s funny. I wondered quite frequently when and to whom I would give that magnet away. I somehow knew I would recognize the precise moment as vividly and surely as someone senses deja vous or exclaims out loud that they are in love. And it seems fitting that tomorrow is the first anniversary of the rest of my life. July 8th. Something eerily ritualistic, yet poetic about the timing of it all, but I have stopped being as surprised by how much life can surprise you.


Three hundred and sixty-five. 365 days and a lifetime of difference.

365 twilights ago I was on the other side of the country, tucked in bed under a desert moon, oblivious to the fact that dawn’s arrival would forever alter the course of my life. Oblivious to the fact that 365 nights later, I would be drifting off to sleep in my hometown, guiltily happy, thoroughly loved and at peace – having bid goodbye to a simple magnet that had zigzagged from DC to Tucson, to Chicago and now onto Wichita.

A simple magnet handed to me by someone who recognized my grief as her own: “It is better to have loved and lost than live the rest of your life with a psycho.”

Safe travels.