Nine Years In, Nine Years Out

what I knew and what I know

I should be sleeping, but I can’t. I drove an hour in the steady rain to a funeral today. It was for the father of my close friend. She and I met something like 18 years ago when we taught in the same high school then became close and stayed close, even through all of the life that has happened since. I ache for her, of course, but also as I laid down to try and sleep tonight, I had that flash of all the important things we’d seen each other through– job changes and difficult births and small daily crises and big questions and parenting woes and divorce and deaths and now another one. And I ache for time that feels like a freight train sometimes and the way it’s rolled on since we met. The things I want to do over and the things I never want to do again.  

The service wasn’t close to home, so I took the day off to be there, and this morning I was on the road a little after 9am watching steady sheets of rain slide down my windshield and turning the music up to drown the rhythm of the wi…