Work is slow today, which is convenient because I feel terrible. I’m on day three of some sort of awful face congestion, and I could barely sleep last night because laying down in bed made the pressure under my eyes almost unbearable. I feel like something has crawled up into my sinuses and died. When my bloody alarm woke me up this morning all I could think about was how everyone I know was probably still sleeping. They were all snuggled up, I was sure, with someone that they loved, experiencing the sluggish, Sunday morning bliss of not having anywhere to be. The women I know would stay in bed, all warm skin and soft sheets, while the men who love them would eventually pad quietly to the kitchen, start the coffee maker and pop some bread into the toaster. I would be on my way to work, sneezing and gurgling and breathing heroically through my mouth, while all of these couples giggled together in bed, sipping coffee from a shared mug and passing the morning paper back and forth. I will admit to the possibility that this is not a common scenario in the lives of the people I know, but when I am sick and feeling sorry for myself it’s the only thing I can think about. And then I curse them. Damn those couples and their love! And I curse my clients. Damn their selfish cosmetic needs! When I do finally write that book you guys have been badgering me about (Divorce: The Things No One Tells You), this will be the subject of chapter two: No One Is Going To Give A Shit If You’re Sick.

Yesterday (day two of this plague) I was finishing up with my last client of the day, rinsing the little bits of hair out after his haircut. He was tipped back into the shampoo bowl, eyes closed and completely relaxed, as I hovered over him praying to god that the snot I could feel gathering at the corners of my nostrils wouldn’t choose that moment to jump ship and land on this poor man’s face. And then I started to think about the terrible career consequences of accidentally throwing up on his face and I started to quietly panic inside. I sat him up, threw a towel over his head, and told him I would meet him back at my chair in just a few minutes. I can only imagine what he was thinking when I returned from blowing my nose in the back room, eyes red-rimmed and puffy, sniffling uncontrollably. I’m not going to tip well today, I’m sure he thought. I refuse to support this pathetic creature’s self-destructive coke habit.

I met a man yesterday who said that the secret of being a grown-up is realizing that everyone is faking it. Remember when you were a kid, he said, and nothing was a big deal because you knew all the adults in your life would take care of everything? Secretly, none of them knew what they were doing, and they were just hoping you would grow up and move away before you figured that out. I find this thought extremely comforting. I spend quite a bit of energy trying to figure things out, trying to catch up to everyone else who all seem to know what they’re doing. This is exhausting on a normal day, but when I am this sick it’s practically debilitating. I have no energy left over to try to understand things when I am using all of my mental powers to silently sweet talk the snot back up into my head, away from my client’s face. Pretty much all I can handle is faking my way from one confusing situation to the next. Searching and seeking, puzzle-piecing bits of my life together to try and see the bigger picture is proving to be completely useless. A friend of mine had a tiny baby girl recently, and she was telling me this trick she found to get her baby to sleep longer at night, by placing her near a heating pad. Maybe life isn’t meant to be understood and gotten the hang of. Maybe finding those little tricks to make something work isn’t cheating, maybe that’s actually what this is all about.

Or maybe I am just sick and foggy and upset. Who knows, really.

Whatever it was, it smelled awful and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. I thought something might be rotting down in the drain, so I spent a week treating the sink with bouts of Draino and baking soda and vinegar. It wasn’t helping, I kept getting whiffs of this acrid, rancid smell, especially at night when I was brushing my teeth. Finally, the other night, I accidentally knocked over the cup that holds our toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste and a puddle of rotten, gelatinous toothpaste goo spilled out across the bathroom counter. And this is something no one ever tells you about divorce: when you live alone, one of the things you will miss about being married is being able to call someone into the room when something like this happens and say to them, “Oh, my god. Smell this.”

Now that the terrible smell in the bathroom has been identified and dealt with, I’ve been noticing this mysterious musty mold smell in the rest of the house. I thought it might be the plant in the kitchen, the one in the windowsill that recently sprouted these strange yellow mushrooms in the soil surrounding the failing Creeping Charlie. I cleared those out, changed the cat litter, took out the garbage, and dug through the fridge to make sure nothing had gone bad, but I still smell it and it’s driving me crazy. I’m really just fed up with it all. I want my house to stop sending me on these smell-finding scavenger hunts, I want my hair to stop breaking off and clogging the shower drain, I want the dryer to stop taking an entire day to dry my clothes, and I want all those damn spiders to stop having babies on my back porch. This morning as I was clearing the breakfast plates, Babs told me, “Mom, you’re just like a waitress or something.” It took every ounce of self control I possessed to stay in that kitchen, to keep rinsing those plates instead of flinging the dishrag onto the counter and slamming the door on my way out. Also, my cat has been barfing again and I just find it so pathetic and hilarious that it has become normal for me to say, “Olive, stop eating your puke.”

I really just don’t understand why everything has to be so difficult. It seems like at some point things have to settle. But as soon as one terrible smell clears up, another one wafts in to replace it. When I am very old and visiting with my great-grandchildren, boring them with stories of the “Good Ol’ Days,” I am positive I will not be referring this period of my life. When I talk about my twenties, about raising young children and rental houses and new jobs, I’ll call it the “Smelly Days” or “The Decade When Everything Went Wrong But It Was Still Kind Of Funny At The Time.”

In the book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, one of the characters is an old man who can no longer speak and has a heart full of remorse. Towards the end of the book he laments, “I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.” I thought that was so very sad. Truthfully, what is life but a constant search for that awful smell? We find it, fix it, things get better for a minute, and then something else starts to stink. It’s always something, and when I am very old and visiting with my great-grandchildren that is one thing I will be sure to tell them. “It’s always something, my dears. Something always smells bad and it takes time and patience and a sense of humor in order to clear the air again.” I’ll start telling this to them when they are very young, I’ll whisper it in their ears while they lie sleeping in their cradles, and I’ll also tell them the most important thing they can ever learn: I’ll tell them that you don’t have to love everyone, and not everyone has to love you. I will tell them the only people they need in their lives are the ones who will come into the room when you call, and when you say, “Oh, my god. Smell this,” they will. That’s what love is. That, right there.

It’s been a “barely” couple of weeks. Barely faking my way through at work, barely holding down the fort at home, barely keeping my sanity. You know, the usual. But the biggest “barely” happened a little over a week ago. If you’re in the Seattle area, you probably heard about the huge tie up on I-5 when a motorcyclist slammed into the back of a parked ambulance. The guy on the motorcycle was a good friend of mine, and somehow he ended up making it out ok. Barely. Many parts of him are broken, but the really important parts are just fine. I don’t know how he managed to avoid serious or life-threatening injuries, but I’m glad. Cody has a super goofy, infectious laugh and some really nice tattoos and I wouldn’t mind keeping him around for a bit longer.

A few days ago they transferred him from the big, scary hospital to a mellow, slightly pungent rehab facility. Since I had the day off, and since I was in desperate need of an outing after watching 27 Dresses last night and plunging into a deep depression because there will never be a sexy, disheveled journalist who tells me I deserve to be taken care of and who brings me coffee after a night of crazy drunk sex in a broken down car, I decided I’d drop in for a visit. Both of Cody’s arms and one of his legs are in casts, so we spent most of the afternoon in his room (I didn’t want to venture far for fear of accidentally losing him or encountering some sort of runaway wheelchair situation). I fed him grapes and read to him from I Feel Bad About My Neck. We had a lovely visit. My favorite part of the facility was the signboard in the recreation room that listed everything you need to know about the present moment:

The date is: June 11th.
The year is: 2009
Today is: Thursday
The weather outside is: Sunny

Clearly, updating the board isn’t on the staff’s list of top priorities, but I choose to think that they’re secretly conducting some sort of psychological experiment. The next time I visit, I’m hoping the sign will say:

The date is: January 13th.
The year is: 1981
Today is: Tuesday
The weather outside is: Cloudy

and that all the residents will be gathered in the rec room discussing last night’s Dynasty premiere and also their deep devotion to Jell-O Pudding Pops.

My other favorite part was the old man whose wheelchair was parked in the hallway. He was clad in sweats and maybe drooling a little bit and he gave me a hearty applause as I walked past. He’s no disheveled journalist, but I’ll still take it.

Anyway. All this is to say that somehow (despite a faint undercurrent of insanity and the occasional horrific traffic accident) I and everyone I know are still standing and fighting the good fight and that will never cease to amaze me. I don’t know how we do it, but we do. Barely.

It has been hot here the last few days, which is strange for this time of year- usually it rains in June. Maybe it’s this unexpected heat that has been making me feel so strange. This happens to me sometimes. I get this odd feeling in my head like there are a thousand flies caught inside a jar. If you touched a finger to the side of the jar you could feel how their restlessness makes the glass vibrate. My brain is buzzing, an incoherent hum so distracting that the other day I purchased a thin, palm-sized booklet to keep in my purse. On the cover I wrote, “Things to remember.”

Every day there are so many precious little moments, and I feel like I should- I must- remember them all. Days are strung together by the hundreds of pretty things that happen; small, inconsequential things that don’t matter to anyone else in the world but me. But to me, they matter so very much because it’s these moments upon which my life is built. If I lose one, if I forget and let go of the string, it feels like everything could unravel in an instant. They’re nothing-things, but they are incredibly, incredibly important. Today it was the dimple in my client’s left cheek that turned his whole face lopsided every time I made him smile, and it was the damp skin on my friend Brian’s neck that pressed against my forehead when he hugged me goodbye. Yesterday it was a rumpled white t-shirt, a smilie-face balloon in a hospital room, and a stranger noticing my blue eyes.

The other day I had coffee with one of my high school teachers. We’ve kept in touch over the years and his wisdom is as important to me now as it was when I was fifteen. We were talking about my grandmother and he told me that he had read a book about exiled monks from Tibet. He said that the monks believe you can send messages to those who have died by burning a letter and letting the ashes carry your words to the person you love. Every time I think about this I cry, and every time I feel the tears on my cheek I remember how much I love and respect this man, and every time I remember him I realize how flat and sad my life would be if he never taught me that the only thing that matters in life is connecting with another human being. Things like this must be remembered, I must think about them to keep myself from losing direction. I remember hearing once that if you get caught underwater, it’s possible to panic so thoroughly that you end up swimming deeper and drowning yourself. You’re supposed to stop, breathe out, and watch which way the bubbles go. Follow the bubbles to the surface.

It’s hard to stop and think when the air is so hot and the flies are buzzing so loudly inside this jar. I jot down notes in my booklet and then I write about them here because I don’t trust myself to remember. And remembering is vital. These moments, these nothing-things, are the bubbles that show me which way to swim.