and she's back

You know how there are certain friends that you can never seem to reach, and then when you do reach them, there's never enough time to catch up, so that eventually talking to them seems almost like too much work? I had that feeling about the blog this morning. How can I ever catch the blog up? And my devoted readers--how shall they ever recover from an entire week without lyings or tirades or fears or Belly?

S. and I went to North Carolina (just outside Raleigh) to visit his dad and stepmom, both of whom I like very much--and they seem to like me, too. Sometimes S. was feeling like they liked me better than they liked him. Poor S. As an only child, he never had to compete with siblings for attention. Have I ever mentioned how desperately I wanted to be an only child when I was a kid? But that's a whole other story, as they say.

On Friday night we took in a Durham Bulls game, one that began and ended with a home run. We visited with family, shopped, ate a whole whole lot (and I've only gained 2 pounds, it seems, unless my scale is feeling sorry for me and is thus lying), saw The Waitress. Holy shit. This deserves its own sentence.

Shit, it deserves its own paragraph.

I loved The Waitress. I didn't realize until after the movie was over that Adrienne Shelly was in the movie, and knowing about her horrible death before seeing the movie made the last scene that much more poignant. What I appreciated most about the movie was how scarily real Shelly portrays domestic abuse. Like an essay brought to screen, the movie implicates all of us who have ever said "Why doesn't she just leave?" Amazingly, the movie is playing here in Bloomington, too. And I thought I was so smart by seeing it in Raleigh, sure that it wouldn't get here until DVD.

This trip constituted the longest amount of unbroken time S. and I have spent together. We did good. We did real good. One small disagreement that we worked through in a very adult manner--look at us go. One thing I'll never ever ever get used to (okay, maybe I will, but it will always carry a hint of the strange) is family members who actually want to be in the same room together, who go out of their way to see one another. Who love each other. Who enjoy spending time with one another. I envy that.

Belly was mostly a good girl while I was gone. Oh, how good it was to see her yesterday, to take in that black doggie scent. To hug her and snuggle her and brush her. It seems like every time I leave, I miss her even more.

S. discovered coffee on this trip. He's mighty proud of himself. Don't ask me why it took him this long to figure out that coffee'll give ya an extra little bounce in your step. I'm just happy he did.

The exhaustion I'm feeling is unlike anything I can remember recently. I wish I was one of those people for whom sleep wasn't so crucial. One night of not sleeping well throws everything off. That's what Monday is for: catching up on my Zs. Can't wait.