Winterscape

Friday, before the snowstorm hit, I visted the supermarket and bought all of the ingredients to make a delicious rotini pasta and homemade meat sauce dinner, complete with garlic bread and all the makin’s for hot fudge sundaes for Jonathan and me. I hadn’t cooked for him, yet, in fact I regularly claimed that I didn’t know how to cook. I was scared.

One of the most difficult things to resume after Chris’ demise was cooking. We cooked for and with each other all the time, and the first time I made my meat sauce with Chris no longer here, I trembled the entire time, fighting to catch my breath and keep from submitting to the dizzying grief and anxiety that threatened to take me down. My cooking was for Chris and nobody else, so my snap decision to cook for Jonathan took me completely by pleasant surprise.

We’re growing together. Our relationship is happening. The growth is real, and the ever-strengthening, all-enveloping fibers are nice, comforting and welcome in my life.

I spent 24 hours with him this weekend, enjoying doing pretty much absolutely nothing together, a very pleasant way to share our time.

This morning, Boston is getting hit with another snowstorm, which is a beautiful and magical sight out my Charles Dickens, criss-cross window panes, and even though I’m painfully aware I will need to venture out later on and exhume my car from the snowy rubble, my “right now” is quite intoxicating. Heck, I have not yet let go of the possibility of taking a run around the winterscaped Charles River later this afternoon, however impractical. I’m nothing if I’m not completely insane. Well, perhaps “eccentric” is a kinder word, if I am even worthy of a term of such honor. I’m claiming it as my own. I’ll take eccentric over practical, any day.

My snowy weekend is not without thoughts of my Chris, feelings of sadness for his pain, and gratitude for the end of that pain and for having known and loved each other as deeply as we had.

Jonathan is going away to visit his family for the holiday, and even though I will miss him and I will wait, anxiously for his return, I’m feeling good about having the space to process missing my Chris, while simultaneously buildling a kind, caring, loving, sweet, healthy relationship with the next love of my life.

Shneed