Freaked out

This song came on, just after taking a call from my mom as she followed an ambulance to hospital with my grandmother in the back.

I know that my grandmother does everything right--eating well, walking with her dog twice day, and has barely been sick a day in her life. This situation should have a positive outcome. But I'm still waiting on pins and needles. Please think positive thoughts for my grandmother.

While you're sharing those positive thoughts, please spare some for F's grandmother and R's father who are both having surgery or preparing for surgery today.

Good news: my grandmother's appendix ruptured but it has been removed and she seems to be doing well in recovery. F's grandmother is also out of surgery and doing well so far. Ironically they'll be recovering in the same hospital for the next week.

Please keep R's father in your thoughts while he's under the knife today.

Wisdom

R is coming back in January. Less than six months in Florida and she hates her job and the climate. She was home for Christmas and I met her for lunch yesterday. One of our former coworkers came along with her four-year-old son Noah. As R described why she hated her job in Florida, Noah said, “Everyone makes mistakes.”

Out of the mouths of babes.

Fall

Last night I left the office and shivered from the fall chill I felt through my fleece jacket. When I felt that fall chill in the air, as is my habit, I tipped my face toward the sky and smiled. I love fall.

There are two kinds of fall days in Colorado: days that make you long to stay in and days that make you long to go out. Yesterday was a day that would have been better spent curled under a blanket on the couch at home. A cozy grey sky always reminds me of a blanket and makes me yearn to shut off my alarm clock and burrow deeper into my bed. Every sound is muted, even the rustle of dry, yellowing leaves as the wind caresses the trees. The office even seems quieter on a day like that.

Most fall days here make me nostalgic for my college freedom—I can barely stand to be cooped up in the office when the sunshine is so golden and clear. The mountains look close enough to touch and the breeze is just pure calming energy. Days like that give me boundless hope for the future. It is those days I want to spend outside—whether that is sitting under a tree reading or walking through downtown with a friend.

Today R emailed me from Florida and mentioned she was going to try and make it to the beach this weekend. Coastal residents might have the beach, but I have warm sunlight stroking my face and neck when I run errands in the middle of day under a sun so bright that everything seems touched with gold. I love fall in Colorado.

Fade away

I was curled up on my bed laughing with my friends T and P when my phone rang. Although we were all clustered there, far be it from a 20-year-old girl to ignore a ringing phone, so I grabbed the handset and answered it. It was my ex-boyfriend D. After humoring him for a couple minutes, I started to end the long-distance call and he countered by revealing the purpose for his call. My stomach was suddenly a knot, my hand clenched around the phone and I started to imperceptibly tremble. My smile faded and the laughter died in my chest. I shooed my friends out of my room and focused on the man in Nebraska who wanted to say goodbye to the world forever.

After spending an hour trying to highlight the positive aspects of his life, my tension eased somewhat when I heard one of my roommates come home. While my two guy friends had hung around in my common room, now there was a girl I could trust to calmly help me. Without breaking our phone connection I sketched out the situation for her and gave her his parents phone number.

I can't imagine what it was like for his mother to get a call from a girl she'd never met informing her that her son, one state from both her and I, was threatening to end his life. Aside from an affirmative report from my roommate, I didn't know whether my effort had succeeded until I heard a knock on his door on the other end of the line. I took my first deep breath in hours after he broke our connection to talk with the friend at his door.

After his follow-up phone call, letting me know that his friend had calmed him down and he would be seeing his doctor the next day, I was finally able to emerge from my bedroom. Sweaty and shaken, I got hugs from my roommate and a couple friends and joined the crowd watching TV. Being a silent member of that group, I could feel the tension drain out of me slowly and as the group broke up I followed T and couple others across the hall to have a drink and relax a little longer before I could sleep.

I dropped in at our campus mental health services office the next day and spoke with a counselor who had some time free. I related my story to him and we discussed my feelings and how I was coping with the aftermath of that phone call; I took pride in his compliment that I was very self-aware and coping well. Once I knew it was a problem with his medication, my ex-boyfriend withdrew from me for a while and I let this memory fade away... until today when I had a coworker call and ask me how to handle finding her boyfriend's suicide notes last night and going to rescue him in the dark of night. Expressing my support for her in two phone calls today, I discovered this memory was still lurking in the recesses of my mind, like D, unwilling to fade away.