I’ve struggled a lot with my migraines the past few months.  I’ve been thinking a lot about how I have to change the pace of my life and my own expectations for myself.  Several years ago, a wonderful friend of mine sent me a book written by a woman with lupus.  I wasn’t about having lupus.  It was about having relationships while her body betrayed and abused her.  Jennifer Clare Burke’s A Life Less Convenient: Letters to My Ex isn’t very comforting.  Things often end badly.  But there is beauty and happiness and, most importantly, she keeps going, which seems absolutely impossible to me sometimes.  I’ve been going back to this book a lot lately.  Somewhere between keeping up with school and work and being miserably ill, relationships escape me.

Your smile grew by another inch, and you came toward me from your chair.  I wanted to be just as happy to find you.  I wanted you.  But I reached for the pain pills.