NaNoWriMo - Day 14 - part 2 - Dear Mary

5:12. At work. Still. I'm cool. Just got off the phone with a good friend of mine who is living in Georgia. Who do you call friend, Mary? Anyone? Who loves you and is looking forward to seeing you, hearing from you, knowing your stories? Who remembers when you cried and who reliably makes you laugh? I suppose I will always have questions.

There is something about catching up with friends. Something delicious about someone way across the country stopping to share words and thoughts and memories. I am getting older, Mary. Maybe you know what that means. Maybe not. It takes energy wrapping my head around what getting older means. What it means to me. How my body, my mind, my energy is changing. Truthfully, most days are better than others. That's what my friend Mika and I were talking about. This getting older thing.

There is a new way I have to learn to love myself. A new way I have to look in the mirror and love this woman I don't always recognize staring back at me. Every day she is changing. That woman in the mirror with my names and face. That woman is beautiful too. Lovely with her crooked smile and dark eyes. Her graying temples and thicker flesh. She is fleshy and lose and her breasts hang where they didn't before. I know I am the she in the mirror. I know. Sometimes I don't though. There are moments I have no clue who she is. Now I know I am that woman.

O Mary, me and my free thinking, free writing. Free writing is never free. Never. It always costs me something. It costs me remembering and letting go. Costs me feeling and accepting. Bare with me please. Be patient with how I go on.