Does mere repetition count as routine?

Rinse and repeat the at-home routine. It’s always cold when I land. Cozy, my body ready to rest. I melt into my mother and cradle the head of my dog. Sometimes it’s dark, sometimes there’s a sunrise. All the promise of a week. Like loving Friday night in high school because it was the most weekend you would ever have. 

Lay around. Decide to move more. Mountain bike, walk, throw the ball in the backyard. This time go to the woods and shoot guns, sometimes a hike. Good food and nostalgic food. Restaurants I’ve known longer than all my friends. Eat, fuel, talk. Never adjust to the time difference, so go to bed at 2am and wake up at 11am. The winter light in the kitchen is perfect. Help mom with tasks (hang art, rake the leaves, pick up poop, throw the Christmas tree over the fence). Read lots, go on phone more. Wish you did not go on phone more. 

The night before my flight I wished I’d got my one last Christmas gift, wished I’d made a Dr appt, but I asked my mom the things I wanted to know and we managed to hang the art and watch movies and go out to dinner. 

I got drunk and cried at the bar and then sobbed to my mom on the way home. I heaved tears, all bittersweet, and my mom held my hand. A cry has not felt that good in a very long time. 

My belongings splayed all over my floor and I think of my newborn onesie in the top left drawer of my mom’s dresser and I make note to take it out and take a photo of it laying on my chest. It’s likely I won’t do that at 7:30 in the morning but I hope. 

There is so much time in every day and every time we end the trip by saying “we ran out of time.” 

~ 

I get back to LA and get wrecked by the flu. I throw up and sleep and whine, and repeat. Is the city of Los Angeles making me ill? Everyone often jokes about things feeling like a fever dream. The dream I am about to tell you about actually was. 

I’m sitting criss-cross with my laptop in my lap. Infertility. I’m hunched over a little because I’m in the trunk of a car. Like an old one with no tinted windows and the bed of the car is the same height as the seats. I’m editing together archival videos of my childhood. Me as a young girl running at my grandmother’s. More videos of me as a child. Some with friends. Some with family. Then, a video of me with friends (but upon waking I don’t know who they are) where we were maybe eleven years old. A fight breaks out but I can’t tell if it’s real.

Later in my dream all of those videos play out as my real life. I am not seeing them on a computer, I am there and everyone around me is real. I am five years old again. I am ten again. I am eleven and get caught in the middle of a fight. I see one of my friends smiling and I can’t tell if the fight is real. All I know is that I was just wondering this.