it's not me, it's you.when something bad happens to someone you love, you can pick up the phone, and you can open your arms, and you can take off of work early or buy the drinks or buy the plane ticket or do the couch sitting, quietly, in the dark, but . . . sometimes i'm quackified that at the very inside of it, the badness is currently happening to someone else. not that i'd want it to happen to me, but it's such a binary issue: happened to you, did not happen to you--that i'm sometimes afraid that any words of sympathy i offer will sound hollow, coming as they do from the garden of someone who didn't have the badness strike.
there isn't much i wouldn't do for the best one, i'll tell you that. and i know better than to think she'd ever judge my attempts to be a pal in times of need. i'm just struck by how clear the divide is in times of stress and terror: it's happening to you, or it's not. like my mom's lung spot. i guess you just stand by with a toolbox full of warm drinks and good thoughts and wait and wait and wait.
