The Good, The Bad, And The Uncertain

The good days…

I still exist within the mindset of my youth. Sometimes it is merely because I am simply able to wear that little black dress with my bold pearl necklace or because every now and then a stranger will “congratulate” me for looking younger than my years. Sometimes it is because I still laugh, think, and, yes, dance as if I was that very young Mother or that career woman, or even that college student. Sometimes, just the joy of planting roses, walking my dog, or reading a touching poem ignites energy and hope.

Such days I don’t even think about age. I am suspended in a timeless reality. I am what is imprinted in my soul…the optimist, the incurable romantic, the girl who believes in fairy tales. Everything flows as if nothing has or ever will change.  All is promising, all is fluid, all is accepting.

And then there are the bad days…

I look in the mirror and the lighting is just so that the wrinkles seem to scream unrecognizably back. There are moments when I walk down the street and I am invisible -- when once women would approach and men would smile. And there are even crueler days when younger people look up from their texts and throw buzzwords and “apps” du jour in my direction as if to condemn me as a social anomaly. And that job that I thought would be perfect is offered to a less qualified but more nubile candidate. And, ultimately, that man leaves for his pursuit of the 30 something girl who offers him the ability to deny.

On such darkened days, the scars of experience bring immobile vulnerability and sadness.  For there is no empathy for the once undaunted contender. There is no fascination for the woman who can still sing the lyrics to 60s music and can remember Paris in the 70s.  There is no patience for the passage of years.  Living in this reality of diminished possibilities, I must make sense of it all and dig deep in what seems to be an exhausting personal intervention of acceptance.

Such days are especially startling.

 And…Now there are the UNCERTAIN days…

I awaken these mornings to find myself in a different city, Sacramento.

No longer able to afford the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area that I once called my lifelong home, I have moved. I did not arrive here because of love…if that were the case I would be in New York City or in an Italian village. I am here because events, people (myself included) and circumstances compelled. I am trying to reinvent in hopes that I can figure out how to stay; in hopes that the new days will not be as challenging as the recent bad ones, and that the spirit of the good days will somehow reclaim.

So I find myself writing in search of clarity, consolation, and continuance. And…in this very moment, all I know is that there is only one certainty. My  story could not stop at the place and time that was. I could not write my last chapters where I no longer belonged; it was not my denouement. For when all the good and the bad have passed and the stories ultimately disappear, what compels in these uncertain days is simply this…doesn’t every hopeful dreamer deserve a happy ending?

New Days...