Too Many Apples

I ate too many apples. Really, I did. I started to feel bad, the way you do when you eat too many apples, but I kept eating them. The next day, too. I've been dreaming of apples since mid-August, when the first bland Jersey Macs come out, because I knew that I wasn't supposed to eat an apple until October 17, the one hundredth spin of the earth since my re-birthday. So on October 17, I went to the orchard and bought two bags of apples and ate them all the way home.

And here we are in the days of no counting. The dragon is an infant whose life has been counted in hours, in days, and now in months. The dragon sheds some more soft scales. I can eat almost anything I want now; my nascent immune system is functioning and I can be in some situations without a mask. (Not the farmer's market, though, and I got some pretty strange looks doing my shopping on Saturday morning in my mask and gloves. More for me. The crowd gives me plenty of space. I went to pick up Lysander at a birthday party and the birthday boy took one look at me and recoiled in terror.)

Winter is coming. It's kind of cold in here because I haven't gotten the okay to handle firewood yet, and I'm home alone. 100 days has been the goal for so long, it has taken a few days to accept that there's still more to do, still more waiting. And winter is coming. The time when everything closes in on itself a little, when there's a little less motivation to get out of bed, when everything starts a little slower. It's been winter for me for a while. I returned from North Carolina in early January, in the middle of a brutal cold snap, to go to the hospital and begin this journey. For most of a year, I've been a little more closed in on myself, working a little harder on finding the center, moving a little more slowly.

The problem with milestones is that life can become about the goals. The future can take my eyes off the present.  Having a point on the horizon to move towards can make the time pass, but it can't make the time be. What I struggle with most is seeing how I am exactly where I need to be, when where I am feels stuck. What if there is no other place to get to? What if I reach all my milestones and find out it's still just me, here, at the end of it all, and that doesn't feel like enough? What if it is up to me to actually do something about how I feel about my place in the universe?

I guess, while I'm working on that problem, I'll wait for the next milestone.