These past couple of weeks were difficult in a few ways. Miriam's parents were for a week. Her dad is pretty conservative in a lot of ways and I got kind of upset with him a few times. I got sick about halfway through their visit. My best guess is I caught something while at the dentist without a mask while people were in close vicinity of my open mouth for an hour or more. Today, I finally feel like the symptoms are just ghosts of their former selves.

I reaggravated my neck and shoulder in the same place that I hurt it while I was in Wisconsin. I think it's because of all the coughing I was doing while sick. That started around when her parents left on the 15th, got really bad on the 16th, and is still giving me twinges as I move around today, but it's finally mostly better after a week of pain meds and a heating pad. I need to be careful not to type too much or do other things with that arm though, or it gets worse again.

Five days ago, I wrote:

"I think I've aggravated whatever was giving me pain in my neck and shoulder while I was in Wisconsin. (Maybe related to all the coughing I'm doing?) There, it was some of the worst pain in my life: far worse than when I broke my wrist. It's not as bad now: I am functional and able to write. But it's around a 7 when lying down and is keeping me from sleeping. I can get in a position while sitting up where it's more like a 4-5. That's while on several painkillers.

I'm also still dealing with symptoms from being ill and trying to manage all of that on like four hours of sleep. And when I did sleep last night, I had a dream where my dad told me that if I needed him he's a phone call away, and obviously he is not, so I kind of don't want to sleep anyway, except I'm exhausted. So I'm basically a mess right now. Sorry for not being communicative."

So yeah, there's some grief too that's keeping me down. That was exacerbated today by going to CostCo to pick up prescriptions and seeing Christmas decorations. I've been expecting some kind of holiday grief to come along, and today was the first big wave of it. I managed to not cry in the store at least.

On the way home, between grief, loneliness, and isolation, I ate a bunch of cake bites. I bought some after deciding that I was not likely to binge-eat them all too quickly. I was wrong. I ate half the CostCo sized container on the way home. I was feeling pretty disappointed and upset with myself while I ate them and thoughts of self-harm were in my mind, but then I thought of the inner-child work I've been doing with myself. If I was taking care of Little Meghan, and someone wanted to hurt her, I would fuck them up. And I am Little Meghan, and sometimes she eats too much because she is really sad and hurting, and that does not mean she is bad. It means she is a human being who hurts and deserves love.

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My birthday was nice, if kind of lonely. At least Miriam and her parents were there. We ordered tasty Regina style pizza and pretty unremarkable cheesecake from a local place, Western Pizza.

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I've been having some one-person girls' nights on the couch, snuggled up with my dog and my stuffed animals under a warm blanket and watching sapphic media. Those really help get me away from my thoughts sometimes. Miriam helps a lot too: I was feeling particularly bad on the morning of the 11th after my attempts to reach out in a few places online didn't get anywhere. We were at a grocery store to get something her parents needed and while she was inside she bought me a bouquet of flowers. I cried sad, happy, and deep tears against her in the car, feeling loved, and thought of, and cared for, and validated. I would be lost without her.

I stayed outside with my parents as my mother packed the car. When she was done, we all hugged and I told them how grateful I am for their love and acceptance. When I went back inside to have some food, they were still finishing getting things arranged.

The dog just barked at someone outside the window. I got up to close the shade to stop her from making noise, and saw that their car is no longer in the space. That particular thing triggered an emotional comprehension of the reality.

After most of my life either living with them on multiple occasions or seeing them every few weeks for board games with Danae, I hadn't seen them in something like three years. I'm having a hard time with them being gone again right now.

I hope it won't be another three years before I can see them again.

My parents are about halfway through their road trip to see Danae and I and should be arriving tomorrow. They made it from Kenosha, Wisconsin past Minneapolis, Minnesota last night before they realized they forgot to pack the power cord for my dad's dialysis machine. They were pretty anxious. Fortunately, Baxter, who had already shipped all the liquids he needs to us also shipped us a power cord.

It just got here today and it's a regular ferret-face computer cord. We have extras already.

I guess I shouldn't have assumed they had already looked at the socket, but I was assuming it must have some stupid proprietary connector on it, or have a built in transformer.

Nope. Just a regular computer power cord. Which Baxter overnighted to us. I opened up the package to look at it and just didn't even know what to say.

After a week or so of spending a great deal of time on the couch, sleeping next to Danae, hugging stuffed animals, or eating chocolate and ice cream, I'm back to real life today. Which is good, because half my jeans are getting too tight at this point. It's definitely time to get back to following my daily task list and monitoring my food again.

Plus, this weekend is going to be full of adventure! I think I'm in a good enough state of mind to be ready for it.

On Saturday, I'm riding in World Naked Bike Ride: Chicago for the third time. Miriam is going to do body paint for me again, assuming it doesn't look like rain. I'm going to bike to downtown from Evanston, do the ride, and then bike back. Then, on Sunday, I'm riding a forty mile route for Tour de Cure, as a fundraiser to fight diabetes and find a cure! (You still have time to donate!) I expect to get five or six hours of sleep that night because check in is at 8:30 AM in Aurora.

Today, I drove up to my parents' place in Kenosha, where I picked up the MonkeyLectric lights from my other bike that I want with me for the naked ride. Since I was there, I did my laundry and took their dog, Wonka, on a walk to Lake Michigan and back. Then I brushed him out in the side yard. Drive-by dog grooming! I picked up a few staples at Woodman's, too. So many good reasons to go to Kenosha, even when I don't get to see people there I care about, which is the best reason of them all.

I'm finally settled into the hotel here in Fort Worth after a long, long drive from Evanston. My parents went out grocery shopping (we have a fridge and microwave here in the room). I was going to go with them, but on further consideration I decided that a little time to myself would be really beneficial. I had a better time on the trip than three people in a car for most of a day probably have a right to, but I was getting a bit grumpy and snippy as we unpacked bags. A little decompression time is good.

We stopped a few times on the way for interesting things. My parents indulged me by stopping for a photo-op at the world's largest ketchup bottle in Collinsville, IL. The ketchup company is out of business and the building and bottle are for sale. This felt odd to me in a way similar to the way I felt seeing an amazing historic public office building in Detroit, bedecked with marble and monumental sculpture, for sale. It's something so iconic, so embedded in history and place, that commodifying it seems bizarre. The town still has a ketchup bottle festival; signs indicated we'd only just missed it, sadly.

We stopped at the Pensacola Dam near Disney, Oklahoma. It's the mile-long dam that Lisa and I stopped at on our trip. She and I were there in the daylight. My parents and I saw it at three in the morning. We drove across the structure and parked in the gravel turnout alongside the spillway. We looked out at the dam and up at the stars, listening to the raucous screeching of insects.

To my surprise, most of my feelings about being there were subdued by a primary emotional response of sadness. This is a place I associate strongly with Lisa, and it was strange not to be there with her. I found myself preoccupied with thoughts of being far away from her, not being able to share new experiences and wonder with her. In a certain way, it's harder to move away from Lisa than from Danae; with Danae, I know we'll be together again in a few years. With Lisa, I don't know when or if I'm going to be back living in the same region. Nostalgia and some melancholy crowded other thoughts out of my brain as I stood listening to the quietly rushing water. I was glad to get back in the car and drive back across the dam.

On the way over, my mother suggested stopping on the dam at a point where we could see the sluices and generating equipment. At that time of day, there was essentially no traffic, and the idea was really appealing. We stopped and turned the blinkers on while I walked back and forth from one side of the narrow concrete dam to the other. We were still far from the generators at the west side, and looking down I could only see a tree-filled park-like area that Google Maps had told me was a nature preserve or golf course.

We got back in the car and parked at the far west end and, still feeling like exploring, walked a distance out along the pedestrian path on the north, upstream side. I hadn't done this while there with Lisa; I didn't think there'd be anything to see on the upstream side, and there were too many cars to safely look from the downstream edge. With no cars, I wanted to do the latter. As it turned out, the former was just as amazing.

I knew that there were large concrete semi-circles on the upstream side of the dam, holding water back. I didn't realize though, until I was standing above them and looking down, that they opened into cavernous spaces full of stairs and platforms above pipes of a size that made the human-scaled walkways look like toys. Looking down into the workings of the dam was like looking into an inexplicable cavern in the middle of the river, a void surrounded by huge volumes of water. The sight didn't seem to make logical sense; it was markedly disorienting in a way that reminded me of standing on a catwalk above the tremendous, pitch-black coal hoppers in an abandoned power plant. Looking down felt like staring into an otherworldly void. I had to lean over the dam in short spans to avoid a gut-wrenchingly immanent feeling of falling.

I loved it. And I regretted not having packed my tripod. A small part of me wants to come back with an A-frame ladder to compose more interesting views of these disconcerting spaces. Honestly though, I don't think I could overcome the vertigo and fear that would come with such a view.

As well as the upstream side, my mother and I got to see the downstream side from a vantage point I'd never had before. Leaning over from the edge of the roadway, we could watch the humming generating station, thrumming with powerful vibrations that I could feel in my feet and chest where the touched the concrete. Beyond the building, a wide torrent of water, paradoxically turbulent and orderly, rushed unendingly southward.

The whole set of experiences helped me accept and release the sadness over feeling Lisa's absence. Metaphorically, symbolically, I like the reminder that there are new things to be experienced and new ways to have those experiences, even in the context of a place that has strong existing associations. Nostalgia for an experience means that something made me feel strongly, and that's good as long as I continue to explore and feel strongly. There's so much life out there not to be open to new takes on old experiences.

Anyway, I drove most of the way to Oklahoma. Not quite as far as when I drove Lisa to Tulsa this past August, but it was a long way. I've known for a long time that I tend to want to be in control of things. I realized this trip that I had just a touch of anxiety about going to sleep in a car, late at night, with someone else driving, even when she'd had more recent sleep than I had.

Finally, around one o' clock today, we made it to my dad's sister's place in White Settlement. (This is, in fact, a holdover name from when this was a White settlement in, essentially, Indian Territory.) We spent a few hours talking to her. Or my parents did. After an hour or so, I gratefully fell asleep in her recliner. Around four, we said temporary goodbyes and drove over to the hotel.

I'm so glad we're here now. The weather is bad. As bad as I remember southern Mexico feeling in Winter. I may drive around and see a few things now that it's late. Or I may go to bed early and get a fresh start tomorrow. Regardless, once my parents are back from shopping, it'll be time to find some food.