Thankful.

I live for the miniscule moments of recognized accomplishment.  The super quick, picture perfect moments where you take a deep breath and realize you have single handedly created all the little and huge things you’ve silently, or out loud told to yourself you wanted.

Every time I walk up to Jess and Mike’s house, I get a brief twinge of a memory.  A memory you’d think would be a sour memory, but for me it’s sweet.

I was in my car outside their house, some wacky night in July.  I had been texting Jess for a couple hours already, and the most recent of texts I had received she was urging me, “You need to get out of there.  Get in the car right now and come over.  We will be home in an hour.”
My head was exploding with every throb of my tear-driven headache.  I was in my pajamas, smelly and sticky with a bottle of corona that had been poured over my head just an hour or two prior.
I saw their SUV pull up, and I dragged myself, half-alive, from the driver seat of my car onto their front lawn, and trailed behind them into their house.  They’d just returned home from a Giants game in San Francisco, and were just as exhausted as me. “Do you want a drink?” Jess asked me, as Mikey disappeared to bed.
I laughed before I replied: “Just a shower and a blanket would be awesome ‘til morning.”

The next morning, was a Saturday morning.  Gracie had a vet appointment at 7am that I had to call and cancel.  I sat on the couch with Jessica in the dark.  “What are you going to do?” She asked me, over the brim of her coffee mug. “I don’t know,” I told her with welled up eyes. “Obviously there’s no going back, though.”  I set my phone down on the arm of the couch between us; a listing of apartment rentals staring up at the ceiling.

In this moment I didn’t know what was going to happen next, or where I was going to go. In that moment, the only thing I knew was that I couldn’t keep doing what I had been doing.

“Sooo, thanks for that reminder,” I told Mikey last week, as we sat back in camping chairs watching a stranger strum a guitar to a small crowd of drunken campers.  There were two empty chairs in between us, our other halves had left for just a moment. I pulled my sunglasses from the top of my head back onto my face, “I will forever appreciate the small reminders that I did the right thing.”
“Yep.” Mikey sighed, as he tossed a mushroom cap onto my lap. “Love you girl!”

So here I stood on the front steps of this same house, hungover in yoga pants and my neighborhood bar’s hoodie.  Mike and Jess had just backed the RV in, but obviously not unpacked it yet.  “You didn’t have to drive this all the way over!” Jess laughed at me, as I handed over the mask Mikey had left in the backseat earlier that day.  “We went to the farm to check on the goats after we left the campsite.  It’s on the way!”
We each hollered I love you, and I turned to walk back down the steps of their house, back to Nick’s truck, pulling the trailer that’s been stamped with our names on the back window.
Another camping trip, that I’d always wished I was going on with Mike and Jess. After leaving the farm I had always said I wanted, after checking on the goats I always wanted to have.

And I smiled to myself, in this miniscule moment of recognized accomplishment.
I had no idea that morning in July what was going to happen next, or where I was going to go… But I am so thankful every day that I didn’t keep doing what I had been.