Something good happened. Very good; work of my life takes a step forward for the first time in a long time good. Less than one percent reach this point good, what I’ve been working towards for years good.

So obviously, all my insides have gone sparkling. I say that – and it’s true – both the meaning you interpret here and the meaning you might interpret when I say it another way. Here goes:

Everything in me is fizzing up and over.

Aw hey I see you, therapy girlies! You know what I mean.

I’ve never had a healthy relationship with luck. Going back to that very first dividing line, before my mom got sick, good things on the horizon were met with contempt. A sneer, an “about time,” at best. A “not good enough,” always. I lived in a little brick house in a neighborhood where the politics were horrible, but not about people like me. I could walk to the library and there was enough woods out back to feel wild. My yard was enormous, my mom was crazy, but banana-bread-style crazy, not terrible.

Nothing was terrible. What an injustice.

When luck marked her for insanity-then-death, everything took this great static inhale. Calm sucked deep from every corner of my world in one puff, and the adults around me were used to things like death. No one had told me how normal it was, to die.

Things got worse, and they could always get even more worse, and always would. I was terrified, and had nowhere to escape that fear. Without another option, I got used to it.

I got comfortable.

Life reinforced that. Luck, yeah, but also my own choices. It’s hard to be comfortable outside terror once you realize there’s space to curl up there. I spent my whole first pregnancy certain this would be taken back, it would be a sick joke, there was simply no way this baby wouldn’t die. When she almost did, there it was again: static.

Static, fizz, bubbles, sparkling. The same thing, but a different flavor each time. Sparkling water ain’t all good, you know. Fuck la croix.

She survived, I survived, husband survived, and the next baby we had survived, too. I’m summarizing, but you get it.

The whole time I waited, poised to try and catch that other shoe when it dropped. It hasn’t yet. Do you know how terrifying that is?

Instead I wrote books; plenty of them. They are all about loving and living and being so, so afraid. They are all about loving and living anyway. This ain’t a unique premise; uniqueness comes in there in other ways for mine. But fuck, I do want to relax sometimes, you know?

Peering down at her world, her safe haven as the world collapses around her, I know that she will survive. Type type type…. happy ending!

I am only just starting to believe maybe I didn’t make it all up in my head, that things are kind of going really good right now.

How terrifying would that be?