Everyone loves looking at the underside of the stingrays. They have those goofy grins. They look like they’re gently smiling at the world, happily floating along the water. But they always look like that. Their faces are frozen in place like Wybie in Coraline. They look like that all the time. After all, the stingray that killed Steve Irwin was also smiling.
I lost patience for the inane conversations I used to be a part of and I’m way more judgmental of people who can’t handle the simplest situations. I wouldn’t call those lessons as much as I’d call them side effects.
Somewhere between closing the metaphorical door of any traumatic situation and getting sucked into the constant vortex of pain and victimhood, there’s a middle place of relative contentment. Of just understanding that it is what it is.
Facebook just shared some memories with me today. Not that I needed Facebook to tell me where I was two years ago and what my friends were tagging me in on their status updates that day.
If you would have asked me a few months ago if I could get out of bed at 5AM I would have laughed. I could go TO bed at 5AM. But waking up? Not a chance.
That was the moment, the moment when the roller coaster in his world started going up again, the moment that my 10 year old understood the personal power he had inside. He wasn’t passive, he was strong. He was confident. He could ride any coaster, figurative or literal, and come out triumphant.
The night before the procedure, I didn’t sleep. I googled my symptoms and like any decent Dr. Google consultation, confirmed the worst. At 3:30AM, though, annoyed with sitting around, I went into my closet and packed up my bag for the next day. A book. My phone charger. Socks. And then, right there, sitting on a shelf as if it somehow knew, was my long, lost cape.
