Today

I drop off my father and drive home. It's a Monday night, so both my parents are off doing  empty nester parent things, even though both their children still live at home. As soon as I come in I leash up the dogs to go out for a short walk. They are all three of them assholes, just to varying degrees. They all crap in the yard. I take the opportunity to wheel in the freshly emptied garbage can and  desecrate it with a bag of old and new dog shit. I feel a little badly about this.

After that I practice pipes for about fifteen minutes before it reaches the altogether too late hour of 8pm. It's hard, and I feel winded rather quickly, but I do it anyway, because I'm terrible and I need to get better. I am monitoring a pain in my left lung. I'm trying to decide if it's my heart, my lung or my liver. None of those sound particularly good, but I will wait and see if anything about the pain changes, or if I am just fat as my doctor keeps insisting. I understand that I am fat and for that reason my "doctor" can go straight to Hell. I know what fat feels like, I'm actually pretty good at it after all this time. When I am winded and between sets I wheel in the recycling bin that is still sitting lonely on the side of the driveway. I thought that maybe they had yet to come for them, but all the neighbors have retrieved theirs and I feel foolish being the only one who has not.

After I have worn myself out and the various pains and mystery throbbing had beaten me down I come inside. I plug in my phone an listen to an audio book. I find that I really enjoy audio books, possibly because I am too lazy to get into reading, or perhaps I find having to devote all my energy to focusing on a book too trying. I wash dishes while listening to a Terry Pratchett novel read in a lovely English accent. I have decided that if I am ever to release an autobiography that is successful enough to merit an audiobook edition, I would like it to be read by a proper sounding English gentleman. This is not only because I would find it hilarious that the inner monologue of a vain teenage girl should be an old English fellow, much like Patrick Stewart being the inner voice of Susie Swanson on Family Guy, but also I think it best reflect the actual rhythm of my patterns of thought. I don't know though, it might just be me.

By this time I have started to cook something for dinner for my slightly older brother, which means all the dishes I have just washed are now dirty again. This speaks to the Buddhist practice of performing mundane tasks that have no end just for the doing of them, or if you would prefer, as I often do, the Sisyphus effect. I usually choose to remove myself from the cycle right about this time. After placing the tatertot casserole into the oven I am finally able to take moment to sit down. Which is when I receive a text from my father whom I was suppose to be picking up about five minutes ago. So after telling my brother to check on his own damn food in not so many words I jump in the car, speed only slightly to pick up my father and bring him home where he promptly goes upstairs and goes to bed.

It is about this point that I ease into a chair, finally able to relax and begin to type. Which brings us to now.

All of this is to say my period, after nearly three continuous months, appears to be over.

Stillness

I have been thinking on stillness of late. We don't seem to appreciate it. At practice today I came to the realization that stillness in music is where you really appreciate the music. It's what make the note, played one by one, a piece to move the soul. A split second on a single tone to make the music speak. Some people say that the music is in the silence, the places where the notes drop out all together. The places where the anticipation is greatest and create the most dramatic affect. That is untrue. The music is where every note sits and is appreciated next to the following. They work best together, appreciated individually in their own time. No matter how fast, or short, or fleeting, every note has value. Beautiful, meaningful value.

I am afraid often. Is the pain in my chest like that other pain? Is my bleeding normal or extreme? What did I do before that made it happen? Am I doing it again?

I have decided that Death is following me around, waiting for me to slip up again. I failed in someway that he wasn't ready for before, and now he's waiting for me to make that same mistake again. He's looking for me to be in that same place again. I don't want to be in that place again, but I have a tendency to wander in ways that I don't expect. I am easily lost.

I try to think back to what I saw when I was somewhere else, and trying to remember what it was I saw there. Someone spoke to me. Someone spoke to me in kind and familiar tones. He wasn't scared. It was loud there and bright, and when I was back here, for a moment it was still.