Wine

I just sent an email to a dear friend who has been attacking me for my voting choice. I have thrown in the towel and asked for the conversation to end (even when I asked her to not write me until after the election she wrote right back and said, but have you considered this??). I may have lost this friend. I hope my words were soft enough that I could eat them if I had to, but I am exhausted. This was the third and final attempt at words that might not make her see fire. I didn't want to lash out at her the way I felt lashed out at, but as I said in (was it only the last post?) the last post, it is so hard to get tone when you are writing on a screen.

I found this in a compilation of Madeleine L'Engle's writings. It's from the poem "Crazy Jane talks with the Bishop" by W.B. Yeats.

Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

Well, I feel like, in my earlier angry thoughts at this friend, my exasperation, that I was in the place in excrement. And that maybe the only place to get out of there, if she is not going to honor boundaries, is to break boundaries and possibly "rent" (as in, rip) the relationship.

Maybe I can sleep now--what's done is done, and only in the morning or the next morning or the next will I either get a white flag or another diatribe on why I am wrong. Or maybe she will wait until after the election. Time will only tell.

In other news, my apartment is a mess. Nothing new there. But the new thing is that I have decided to have my birthday party at a restaurant. Because then I won't have to worry about buying too much or too little food and drink. And because I'd rather work systematically at the mess here, instead of just moving mess from room to room. I am exhausted. Oh, did I say that already?

This summer I moved the back room into the front room so that the sofa could go down the stairs. Then I moved the contents of the bathroom out into the kitchen so the plumber could unplug the bathtub. Then I moved the contents of my car into the basement so that I could carpool to the retreat. So now I still have things from the back room in the front room. I still have the contents of my bathroom in the front room. And while my car is pretty clean, I have no idea where my umbrellas are. (In that big plastic container that holds most of the contents from my car?)

I need to do laundry. I need to do dishes. I need to call the Student Loan folks and say, um, we need to reduce the payments. I need to see if I can get an absentee ballot (if we're as busy as we hope to be, I may not be able to slip away and vote at my own polling place, which is not the same polling place as the one where I'll be working on Election day.)

Ugh.

But, on the bright side, I have a roof over my head, a reliable car (and a full tank of gas) and maybe one pair of clean underwear. That's a big maybe.

I'll try to see if I can get some sleep.