Seven.

It's the number of the month she was born, and the number of places she's lived. It's the number of diseases she has, and the number of times she's dodged death. It's the number of deep down desires she still nurtures, and the number of times her heart's been deep down broken. And today, it's the number of years she's spent learning how to live without her father.

She forgets sometimes that things have changed, and that practicality is an imperative. Seven years ago, she had sold off many of her possessions, made good on all her debts, planned a move. Deep South. Home. A few acres near her family, room for a pair of small houses (because she knew her parents would have probably followed her eventually), a horse like the one her cousin used to let her pretend was hers over long hot summers. Simple life, hard work, socking money away so she could travel to every corner of the earth. Now, she thinks it's funny how easily dreams die when the people you never knew were a part of them die first.

She still wakes most mornings with images of days spent in strange new places, air saturated with words in foreign languages, breathing so deep she can taste history on her tongue. It's not even the slow, steady arrival of pain, the dawning realization of her disability, that clears that fog; at times, she feels as though her mother's smile is all that tethers her to this place. When nothing much matters, her mother's smile matters the most.

It makes her own lips heavier to move.

Because, she sometimes lives in a world where feelings don't hurt. Hearts don't break. No one ever loses anything, because no one belongs to anyone. It makes her so very tired, vacillating between that chasm of impenetrability and feeling so much she's near to drowning. He was always her grounding wire, her lightning rod. Things moved through her, and they didn't stick. She was less singed.

He made things make sense, and made her feel all right about herself when they didn't. He gave her space, but hooked her tight to reel her in when she came undone. She realizes now that he gave her too much space, seas of water and stars, but what else could she really expect? They were the same. She thinks he was the only person who ever really understood her. The air is so much harder to breathe away these days.

Seven is the number of years he's been gone.

She's still not sure if anything works right without him.

She loves the changing seasons, the smell of Fall and Spring.

She wishes she loved Spring more; Spring is an era of promise, of things waking and coming alive. It is new, and beautiful, and something concrete she can point to when the drudgery of a compromised life seems a little too much to bear. Spring is a world in motion, unrepentantly obstinate and, ultimately, redeemable.

She used to think she was a little like Spring.

But the reality is that nothing moves her quite as much as Fall. Keep her in the dark, tell her it's June, and she'd still know the truth; she could feel it in her bones. She knows the desperate edge of inevitability that saturates the air, the kaleidoscoping colors, the very light -- a sun setting before it's fully risen, a world whispering, lulling itself to sleep. It's cold, and it's haunting, and it's so goddamned glorious, it makes her heart ache. Because, for a time, she feels like she's part of something again, part of something that comes easy.

There are some days when she does absolutely nothing at all, and she still thinks she's not done it right. It confuses her and it makes her pensive, and as transcendentally apropos as that would be this time of year, she doesn't wear it well. There are things she thinks that, after thirty pretty good years, she should be able to understand.

Mostly, she thinks she should be able to understand herself.

Melancholy hits her like vertigo lately. Laughter, singing, then sudden, inexplicable sadness. Her rooms are littered with relics: her father's wedding band, pictures and scrapbooks, awards, movies and music from her youth; they all radiate a life she remembers, but too vaguely. But that's not even the point. There are new lives to spend; mornings are afternoons that bleed into nights, and she's lived a year, a turning of the seasons, in every day.

She doesn't get it, what's changed after all this time. She hates that she hates that, that she can't let it go as easily as she's let go of more important things, like family and friends and the prospect of love. So, she just vibrates in the Fall, barely held together by her skin, and she waits for all the sleeping and the cover of snow. She knows she won't feel at home again for awhile.

And she thinks she would hate the world so much if it weren't just so beautiful.

Time passes in her periphery, vaguely realized like REM dreams and reflections in foggy mirrors and those first few days after a heartbreak. It's something so many overlook in favor of what they think are even bigger, more important things: pain and atrophy, loss of dignity and a sense of uselessness, anger and frustration and redemption there from (never let anyone tell you that that isn't a constant, cyclical journey, an ebb and tide).

Maybe they understand it on a broader spectrum, how we're so easily able to lose track, as if what little time we're given isn't just the most important thing in this world (next to love, of course). People can space out, five or ten minutes at a time, half an hour, a day or a weekend, but then they can snap out of it, and get out of it, and make up for it all in the next stretch of time.

She has years to make up, and they don't come cheap.

On bad days, she's just tired of it being the largest part of who she is, of what she'll always be. On good days, it's much easier to accept. Then, it isn't too difficult to pretend she has a choice in the matter, because there are things she can do, things she does (all she does), that many wish they had the time to do, too.

But now there's a part of her that isn't part of her.

She can feel her skin stretch across it with each breath, during every move she makes. She can see it through thin t-shirts and peeking out from buttoned flannels, and even though she knows that's really only because she's so very aware of it, it doesn't stop her from walking around sometimes with her hand over her chest.

(She says it's because it's still sore, but that's only half the truth.)

In the grander scheme of things, it really means very little; she has an offshore drilling rig buried in her chest, that's all. It's a length of tube and a docking platform, and her arms and all their worn out veins are grateful to have it aboard. But, it's another reminder, and when she already has so many, it feels a little mean. Her body is picking on her, and it's as juvenile as the temper tantrum she still wants to throw at times.

She thinks that's probably the wrong way to go about handling this.

This is the way Kim's World works (specifically, the same World as everyone else's, but that's moot, in the purely academic sense of the word): Things happen as they must, but on and according to an agenda only they understand. Usually, the agenda appears to be sequential, One After Another, rather than All At Once. (Appears, in this case, because she knows that these things, all of them, or at least the possibility of them all, have been with her for a Very Long Time. Some since birth, and them all possibly then, too, because, really, wasn't that an ordeal, and an almost nonevent?)

And a sequence is horrible. That is, logistically, All At Once seems worse, but it only ever really does at the time. One After Another is worse, because people need to breathe, and sometimes this means you can't; gasping for air becomes grasping at straws, and there's no real rest in sleeping, because what if you wake up to One More Thing?

(She usually does.)

Sometimes, I forget that what I have is just not normal until I'm out among the living and I catch a stare or a double-take. And, that's okay, the staring. But, I have to admit that I do sometimes tire of assuring people that I'm not contagious.

Let's twitter: #thisisnotleprosyfolks

It has always been said that she has a pretty great poker face. She suspects that, having spent much of her life composing her features on stage (and as often off, but that's a touchy subject), it comes naturally; it has always been as easy (easier) to show no emotion or a false one than to exhibit an authentic one.

But now, she's looking at the stubs where fingernails used to be, and she's wondering if she has more tells than she thought.


...little breakdowns in coastal towns,
they come suddenly crashing over you,
they come easily...


Her head is a jumble of medical textbook terms; she's a diligent armchair physician. That could pass as responsibility, but the real reason is far more pedestrian: When you've got 24 hours a day with little to do, Google becomes a better friend than that one guy in college you still wish you'd kissed.

Now, her mortality comes threaded through the letters of a word she can't quite pronounce easily just yet. It sounds more like a -phobia than an -itis, but, with a laugh that's a little more bitter than her mouth is accustomed to, she realizes that it's perfectly both; who isn't afraid of just kind of...wasting away?

Of course, it could be cancer (lymphoma is its favorite form), or pneumonia, or a heart attack -- her disease is nothing if not varietal. A handful of ways to kill her, 15 to 20 years to do it. It's a little like a prison term (and that's an analogy she's used a lot lately).

Maybe she'll get time off for good behavior.

Then again, it could just as easily take 50 years. She knows that. Even if her doctor hadn't lowered her eyes, nonplused, she wouldn't have believed her. She doesn't trust doctors. Not that she doesn't have confidence in her team, no... Just... She knows God has a way of making things happen; He never lets something as silly as a prognosis stand in His way.

And she thinks that there will come a time, maybe in a couple hours or days or weeks, when this will make sense to her the way it should, that she'll have to confront it and process it the way a normal person would. For right now, though, there's a disconnected calm. A poker face. She'd like to say it has something to do with being at peace with her fate, but it's probably more that she never had a chance to live her life the way she wanted, so it doesn't really feel like too big a thing to lose. She knows that will change. That has to change.

She can wait for fear patiently. Curiously. That, at least, is something new.

Also, she could get hit by a car tomorrow, so there's that.

Ogi, I miss you.

"Dreams have only one owner at a time; that's why dreamers are lonely."
--Erma Bombeck

"I'll take 'People Who Did Not Enjoy Their Day' for a thousand, Alex."
"Answer: 'She spent a full 24 hours horribly sick from new pain medication.'"
"Who is Kim Grier?"
"Correct. Choose again."

So, Verizon lost a customer today.

For the past two weeks, I've felt like I've been starring in a company instructional video on customer service. You know, the kind that show you the worst possible scenario so you know how not to handle it? Yeah, that kind. I don't use the term incompetent very often, but... There you go. Incompetent.

And, I'm in a bakery, pirating WiFi.

Not really; the WiFi is free.

This time.

Hope everyone has a blast for New Year's. Hopeful, I'll have internet before the Eve becomes the Day. We'll see.

Love.