What Karen said

Karen reminded me today that when she first met me, she thought: I've been waiting my whole life to meet you. Yeah, I'm lucky like that. She feeds my soul.

I was on the phone with her, a bit overwhelmed with emotion from hearing the bulletin of her stuff, which unleashed the intensity of my own stuff. Which had, up till now, been showing itself mostly as night time heat.

To have someone who can not only catch your stuff, but see it and recognize it, makes being in your own skin so much easier And who you can be shaky with, saying things that are oddly unfamiliar, things you don't recognize yet because you haven't spoken those words...not even to yourself. And then finding yourselves bursting in laughter. (Grateful that you're being held far enough away form the precipice that you can look together, but be assured that you won't be going over.)

Writing this blog coincides with my living a life that doesn't involve daily interaction with multiple good friends. Face-to-face time. I am highly interpersonal. It is through talking and listening and being with friends that I learn and understand. And grow.

I haven't had enough of this kind of time since having two children in the span of seventeen months and enduring three moves in six years (the first of which occurred when our younger child was less than a year old). It was one of the doors that closed when we left Cambridge. Plympton remains an emotional blur. There was little time, space, energy and therefore a lack of clarity. It was in Sacramento that I started the blog.

The blog has been a way for me to speak my piece. And it has helped to release the pressure which builds when I go too long without having the chance to really talk to a good friend. Facebook has served a similar purpose in a short period of time with the added novelty of reconnecting me to friends from the past, some of whom I had lost touch with, and some who were acquaintances, but now have become fast friends.

Ah, I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I keep losing my train of thought. I guess one thing I'm wondering is whether this is it. Is there hope of reforming my life so that I can, once again, live a life that includes daily face-to-face time with good friends? Also, do I want things like blogging and Facebook to temporarily or nearly completely satiate my yearning and desire for the real thing with real friends?

There are benefits to making do. But, making do is anathema to a part of my personality. My longing for it all is strong. What Karen gave me this morning, I could have that every day.

(Yes, the title of this post is an (American) Office reference :-)