Breathing Easy is Damn Hard

I can breathe.

I can breathe deeply and calmly for the first time in almost half a century, and it feels foreign and dangerous.

I was able to stop worrying about my own physical and mental safety the moment I met Gomez, but then we were plunged into his health issues almost immediately, and they plagued him/us till the day he died. For almost three decades, I fought every single day to keep him safe, and well, and with us.

Losing Gomez was a physical and bloody rendering of my heart into two halves, and inside my chest crouches the jagged clump that I'm left with, almost a year and a half later still an open wound, but still beating, damn it. The other half is safe with Gomez, and he keeps it in his jacket pocket, calmly reaching in every so often to pet and comfort it like a bedraggled and lost duckling. 

He's taking very good care of it.

I had the farm and Air BnB's to take care of, and with that income and my job that I'd had for 30 years, I was financially afloat with some stability to balance on.

When I lost that job, I wasn't even emotionally hurt. Honestly, I haven't missed it one single minute, and felt zero pangs of sadness or regret unsubscribing to every organization and newsletter and feed that fleshed out who I was professionally. 

As I told my boss the day he fired me, I'd lost Gomez. Unless something happens to someone I gave birth to or their progeny, nothing else can hurt me. It was, after all, just a fucking job.

After realizing that no one wants to hire a 60+ pear-shaped old lady for...any position that would still allow me to run my Air BnB's, I changed up my marketing and pricing for those and was able to tenuously make enough to get by, along with my social security check. 

I could, however, be even more secure with some updates to the property that would make my place even more desirable to book. If I had the money to do it. And the aforementioned "tenuously" does not allow for that.

Over Christmas, my mom* offered to throw in to do the above improvements. Now. Our relationship has been fractious at best ever since my rebellious teen years, so this came as a thunderbolt out of the sky. I asked Gomez if he had appeared to her as three ghosts on Christmas Eve, and he's not saying anything either way, but I will forever believe that he did. 

He would move Heaven and Earth to make sure I'm OK.

*Yes. My mom. I'm 64 and my mom is still very much alive and teaching quilt classes. Women on both sides of our family tree live to be at least 100, then something pisses them off and they die mad about it.

So, the things I never thought in a million years would get done are being done. The old century barn full of junk and cobwebs that I promised would be a gathering place someday is becoming a gathering place with tables and chairs and a conversation area and electricity, with a big firepit and grills and picnic tables out in front of it. Rental of these areas will work in tandem with the guest cottages.

Guests will be able to use them at no extra charge.

People who want to have a private event will need to rent both cottages for the duration of their event, and there will be allowed tent camping, so long as their group doesn't exceed a dozen people, as that's the maximum amount of people the barn will comfortably hold and the maximum amount of activity the two bathrooms in the cottages can handle. All in, a group holding an event from Friday night thru Sunday morning will spend about $300, still a pretty good deal. 

Repairs are also being made for the safety and comfort of all the farm's residents and guests. 

For instance, I now have a dryer, inside my house, for the first time in over two years, and I don't have to do laundry between guests, running it over to whichever cottage is momentarily empty. It's a small thing that's really a big fucking deal. 

With my last expected tax return, the Cavy Cabana got a renovation, in a nod to my creeping decrepitude and all. 

When I decided that the Air BnB's would be my main income, I made a promise that I would write more (at all), and I wasn't doing too badly until the whole farm project was thankfully dropped into my lap. That's all almost done, so there will come a day, I so decree, when I will be able to burrow down into large chunks of time, and just...write. 

But for now, I watch and direct these improvements that will be further life-changing (in a good way for once), knowing that Gomez is watching them, too, and in the down time, 

I can breathe.

The barn, which will be known as The Treehouse, about 2/3 finished. There are two tree sentinels; one at the front door and one at the back door, helping support the 100-year-old structure on their equally aged shoulders. 

Afternoons With Gomez

 This afternoon, like many afternoons I'm at home, after chores were done and shower taken, I made lunch and Gomez and I have been watching paranormal shows on TV, just as we've done for years.

The fact that Gomez shed his terminally-flawed and failing human suit going on two years ago has nothing to do with how we spend our time.

It's taken me a while to own up to this in public, because to many people, it sounds at best like pathetic fantasy and at worst like fucking insanity, but hear me out.

I'm an atheist, and have been for a long time. The thought of a higher being who made everything and pays attention to how every single tiny human spends their time is ridiculous. It's not comforting to me, it's creepy as shit. Even worse, if the tiny humans piss off the higher being, there's *another* higher being in charge of eternal time out where the souls of the tiny humans suffer for eternity. And the very worst- it does fuck-all to make sure babies don't die of hunger and people don't die violent deaths that you'd think any higher being worth anything could have intercepted super-easily. There's your fucking insanity, right there. 

Apologies to my friends and family who take comfort in some form of the above set-up. If it works for you and helps give you strength in your life journey, I'm all for it. I'm not going to say you're living in a pathetic fantasy, because I'm an atheist, not an asshole.

So, I don't believe in the Universal Supernatural, but I do believe in small, mundane, local and personal Supernatural things. 

I believe in these because I believe in Science. Science says that there are things we cannot see with our eyes, but that are 100% there. Science says that energy (and that's what a "soul" is- the energy keeping our human suits motoring around) cannot be destroyed, it can only be displaced. 

Many societies believe that our ancestors or people we love who die, absolutely hang around to check up on us, try to protect us, try to warn us of things that could harm us, comfort us...basically all the shit they did while they were alive, out of love. 

That's what I can believe and what comforts me. Not some Universal being watching us like we're their ant farm, and keeping impartial scores of how we rate as ants using some arbitrary score card, but those who were invested in our lives and who care viscerally what happens to us.

My grandparents, great-grandparents, friends who have passed over, and 10,000% Gomez, are all still here, encouraging me when I need it, chastising me when I earn it, and just doing their best to keep me from fucking up as little as possible. Out of love. 

So, Gomez and I watch the paranormal shows. We laugh when the investigators demand that the spirits show them they are there...and then freak the hell out when they do exactly that. We get angry when people yell at the spirits who are just trying to go about their days in their own damn houses. 

Admittedly, if someone was a sadistic narcissistic jerk in their human suit, they're going to be a sadistic narcissistic jerk in the afterlife, and those bastards need to be told to move on, because that shit don't fly whether you can be seen or not.

Anyway, this is why I don't feel lonely, and although my grief at losing human-suit Gomez will never quite go away, he's still here, he's still my hero, he still helps me every single day, and now he's free of the limitations and short-circuits his human suit was riddled with- twitchy heart, diabetes, crushing anxiety, cancer-prone innards, fucking dementia. 

So, it's OK. 

I'm OK.

We're OK.