It's not chocolate

This seems to be the thing that matters:

It's not really about love, or compatability. It's about not rousing your demons. Not pissing them off.

Everyone has something. This morning I spoke to a friend, a man I adore, a seemingly normal man, a good father, a sweet person, funny, well-adjusted, brave, and he told me that he needs to barricade his bedroom door at night in case of intruders and that he cannot sleep in a house alone. As a child growing up in Ireland in the midst of the IRA troubles, his mother had done the same thing to the childrens' room, as she was terrified that men would come in the night and do harm to them. He had not remembered this until a couple of weeks ago and yet his barricading had become a lifelong habit.

I admire -- or, to be completely honest, I am somewhat jealous of -- people who don't feel much, or who appear to be happy living a life of dating and fucking. It's easy that, isn't it? Lots of dating lots of people, lots of dinner and lots of meaningless sex. Wouldn't it be delicious to not give a flying fuck? Wouldn't it be delicious not to get attached? Would it be utterly delightful to live in a world where your feelings didn't get in the way?

But you live in the what if. You live in a little silver bubble of mercury. You batten down the hatches and prepare yourself for a new way of looking at the world. You think, it's me and you against the world, babe, and all will be well in this little sailing boat of ours. You laugh and you give and you try to get better at life. You eat properly. You do yoga. You forgive. You breathe deeply and try to do it every hour. You get mad at your children and then you apologize, sometimes tearfully. You fill your days with work, the busier the better. You read Chekhov, you scour the internet for Zelda Fitzgerald quotes, because she's just a little bit mad, like you, and you understand what that feels like. And you attach even though you don't want to. And you feel it all so acutely. And you sleep and dream and imagine that your life will be different, and that somehow you will be loved as ferociously as your are able to love, and that there will be apricots in the summer and that the signs of spring are as real as the rain which is about to come down on this parched California soil. And every day you will yourself to be better, to be stronger, to be happier. There are lovely things like dogs and gardenias and girlfriends who say "what would I do without you?" But in your heart you just want to relax and stop trying and be enough and be loved for what you are, and you want to stop trying to achieve everything, and you remember lines from hymns that made you feel better as a child because it meant someone was watching over you.

Mercury is in retrograde. The Farmer's Almanac says it's so, so I believe it. And I'm sure Mercury is to blame for much of this. But, I know what I'm giving up for Lent, and it's not chocolate.