Moment of Peace

I've decided to participate in Gwen Bell's Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. You can read about it here. As per usual, I started late, and I'm already behind, but c'est la vie.

Day 8 Prompt: Moment of Peace. An hour or a day or a week of solitude. What was the quality of your breath? The state of your mind? How did you get there?

ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a 34-year-old woman who had to live with her mom. Had to? She'd had an apartment of her own, many apartments of her own, yet the last one was subterranean, dank, depressing. And finally, symbolically, it flooded, so we moved to higher ground.

But it wasn't really higher ground of her own. She took on a housesitting gig from mid-January through mid-July, and lived on a farm between near Colfax, Washington. She planned to find another apartment after that, but time and money ran out. She'd spent most of her money on car repairs and the expenses related to visiting her Prince Charming, who was living and going to school in a far, far land (well, actually two hours away...).

She consoled herself with the mantra: only for a semester, only for a semester, only for a semester. But it is the second week in December, and her prospects don't look good. No fairy god mother came and made things right. Instead, there were more car troubles, student loan payments, bills, and a heart that was too big for her body (damn heart on damn sleeve and damn those who plucked heart from sleeve and then decided said heart was not suitable). So she's revising her thoughts on Prince Charmings and is not sure she believes in Happily Ever After.

This realization means she cries a lot and bides her time and talks to mirrors and herself. She gets lost between stacks of books. She gets lost between the sheets. She thinks it is strange that she hasn't lived with her mother since the age of 7. And yet there she is, sleeping on a twin-sized bed with an 80-pound dog and a blue-eyed cat.

If one didn't know any better, you might think that mattress an island. An oasis. In the morning when she swings her feet over the side, there is only ocean. Danger. But in the small space of that mattress, among the blankets and warm sighing bodies of those creatures, there is peace, one evening at a time.