Molly had a grand mal seizure while at work stocking fingernail polish at Long’s this week. Waking up in an ambulance wasn’t her favorite thing, and speeding to the ER, again, wasn’t ours. All three of us felt our lives immediately contract, but I had planned four days of writing in Sea Ranch with my friend Wendy and I decided to go anyway.
At first there were flurries of phone calls, torrents of tears, guilty hand-wringing, and massive misgivings. Driving from our house in Sea Ranch to the one cafe in Gualala with wireless internet, Wendy said, “If you need to go home to deal with all this, honey, that’d be okay—you know that, right? I mean, I love it here and I love that the writing is going well, but you do what you need to do. Okay?”
“Here’s the thing,” I said, staring out the window at the ocean, “We’ve been dealing with crises like this for twenty-two years, Dan and I. More than that, actually. What I figured out not that long ago is, if we let shit like this derail us from the things we want for ourselves, when we don’t go ahead and do these things anyway, our lives get so...small. So narrow, you know? And bleak, filled with frustration and resentment.”
Wendy nodded. She has her own tsuris.
“Dan is handling things at home,” I said. “I trust him. It’s okay for me to be up here, I think, and it’s even okay for me to go ahead and feel happy.”
Hovering off shore, maybe ten miles out, was the same layer of marine fog I noticed the day we arrived when we first caught sight of the ocean. It doesn’t seem to roll in at night and clear off in the late morning the way you’d expect. Over us, it’s clear. The whole time we’ve been here, nothing but breezy sunshine.
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