Up Early

I am almost over my intense ire about yesterday's pears. Mostly. When I drove home yesterday at sunset, a doe and her fawn were standing in my driveway, looking all innocent with their big eyes and big ears. "Wasn't us!" they seemed to be saying. Sure. Like I believe that. Humph.

I didn't sleep well last night, as the intense night sweats are back with a vengence. I awake every hour, soaked to the skin and feeling that I might just prove that human spontaneous combustion exists. My only consolation is that the heat proves that my body is starved for estrogen, meaning the anti-cancer tamoxifen is working, depriving any errant cells the fuel they need to grow again. That's good news, right? Pass the ice pack.

No news from the other side of the world about my hard-working husband. About this time in the process, when he's due home but isn't making any progress towards getting home, I start to wonder if he really exists at all. Maybe I'm a character in one of those movies where what you think is real is actually a figment of the character's imagination, where the plot twist at the end is when you discover that the character is crazy, delusional or dead. (I'm thinking A Beautiful Mind, or The Sixth Sense). Maybe I just think I'm married to this guy who is gone for long stretches of time, but actually he's just a well-scripted manifestation of my own insanity.

Okay, it's a stretch. But there's always a sense of unreality when he's been gone for four long months, there's nervousness in the anticipation of his coming home, and eventually, there is the relief that he's just as I remembered when he finally does show up. He is my constant, my North Star. I just start to get a little lost when he's not around.