exhale

"I'm not good at failure!" I sobbed. Greg kept rubbing my back, giving me space for my abject, snotty misery.
"It's not your failure."
"I'm not that good at other people's failure, either. In case you hadn't noticed." There was a hiccup, and then we both started laughing, and I got up to get a kleenex, and now, my belly full of reassurances and the pasta that Lizbeth made for dinner, I can finally breathe again, air this time and not the stale sense of disappointment in myself I was suffocating on all day.

I'll be glad when the Christmas season is over this year. It is not going well. I can hardly get my bearings for bailing out the boat. What is going well, though, is that there seems to always be someone there to pick me up and put me on my feet again, and I am very grateful.