I went grocery shopping on Thursday. I had been doing fine. I guess it was all the excitement of Disneyland and staying busy, but that's neither here nor there. Anyhow, I wanted to go shopping alone one last time before the girls were home for the summer and I was speeding through to get it done before I needed to pick them up. I figured if I went fast enough I could even put the groceries away before I picked them up and needed to give them attention and snacks and do homework....you get the idea. So I'm cruising through the produce section and I was planning to make sushi so I grabbed three avocados and put them in one of those clear produce bags and walked to my cart and started pushing it towards the bananas. Of course as I was pushing it, I realized that I was the only one left in the house that liked avocados and it dawned on me that I was all alone. I didn't need three avocados, but I wanted to be able to buy three avocados...
In April when Kelly was living with us I would have been able to buy three avocados and we would have made yummy things and sat around the table like one big family and enjoyed them, but Kels wasn't with me and Hoss wasn't here and, in that moment, all I wanted was to have everyone back. I wanted to be able to buy three and not have them go bad. I didn't want to be all alone. It just made me miss the way things were so much. I missed Kels and I missed Hoss and I suddenly became acutely aware of the empty spot they left behind. I was sad when Kelly left, but I still had Hoss and the girls. Then Hoss left too. In that moment it was all too much for me.
I walked back to avocados and tore open my bag and surrendered to the fact that I no longer needed three darn avocados. I only needed one. I re-bagged it and hurried through the rest of the store to the checkout stand before I lost it. It was all I could do to make it out to the car. Once I got there I left myself feel sad and hid behind my sunglasses. I sure do hate to be the one left behind. I'm so thankful to have the girls; I just miss the people who aren't here too.
It's not the everyday things that are hard. It's the moments between breaths. I happy exist in the routine of a regular, fast-paced life. We keep busy and I breath in and out and life keeps going. It's the pauses that kill me, the moments that catch me off guard. You just can't plan for the moments between breaths when you suddenly feel the ache of the things you can't change even though you so desperately want to. I think it's those moments that cause our exhale to be so long, as if the act of exhaling could somehow alter the way we feel. And yet, perhaps the exhale helps pull us back into the routine and past that moment. I don't know.
All I know is that I need to avoid the avocado section for the next little while;) Just kidding.
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