5/8
i'm thankful that d forgave me last night when she and i were reading in bed and i turned to her and started making a face i thought was a funny face and then, when she didn't turn to look at me, started making a small clicking sound with my tongue while still holding the face until she turned to me and then immediately screamed out in terror and i realized immediately that it was not really a funny face but a scary face, or rather that the lines between funny face and scary face are blurred and that anything, when it is suddenly divergent from what our brains expect to see in a given space and placed in our proximity, can be scary (the concept of the "jump scare", the haunted house). i'm thankful to have embraced her and apologized many times for my mistake and that she forgave me and went back to her book.
i'm thankful that i like to surprise d (in a good way) and that part of what makes me a good partner, i think, is the amount of energy i put into doing things that i think will delight her—jokes, pulling faces, silly gestures, odd statements. i'm thankful to know that there is a blurred line, too, between the things we do in the name of other people's happiness and the things we do for our own happiness (but tell ourselves is for other people), but to hope that most of the time, the things i do in our life come out on the right side of the line, even though i know that is often a self-justification that man-children give themselves as license to behave as they want, because they're doing it "for their partner."
i'm thankful to have stayed up late last night to finish reading the book i was reading in bed, the book of strange new things. i'm thankful for the book, about a christian missionary who leaves his wife to go off-world and minister to aliens, though i do not think of it as "genre-defying," as david mitchell blurbed it to be, except in the most obvious sense that it engages with sci-fi tropes without being a sci-fi novel, since it otherwise feels fairly conventional formally. i'm thankful that form is not the only thing, though, and i'm thankful that within its conventional form it tells a story about people in a marriage that i found rich and compelling and moving and full of resonant and complex ideas about religious faith, selfish- and selfless-ness, how work relates to life, the effects of distance on empathy, and what things relationships can and can't bear. i'm thankful that though the book was written as his wife was dying, which is a context that informs it and one that scared me off of it for a long time, since thinking about d dying is the worst thing in my life, and though the book is in many ways about suffering and death, it is also, beautifully, about life.
i'm thankful to have stayed up late last night to finish reading the book i was reading in bed, the book of strange new things. i'm thankful for the book, about a christian missionary who leaves his wife to go off-world and minister to aliens, though i do not think of it as "genre-defying," as david mitchell blurbed it to be, except in the most obvious sense that it engages with sci-fi tropes without being a sci-fi novel, since it otherwise feels fairly conventional formally. i'm thankful that form is not the only thing, though, and i'm thankful that within its conventional form it tells a story about people in a marriage that i found rich and compelling and moving and full of resonant and complex ideas about religious faith, selfish- and selfless-ness, how work relates to life, the effects of distance on empathy, and what things relationships can and can't bear. i'm thankful that though the book was written as his wife was dying, which is a context that informs it and one that scared me off of it for a long time, since thinking about d dying is the worst thing in my life, and though the book is in many ways about suffering and death, it is also, beautifully, about life.
i'm thankful that d is a heavy sleeper, such that when i am up late because i can't fall asleep (as was the case last night, where staying up to read the book threw me off my patterns and (probably) the withdrawal from the SNRI i am weaning off kicked in this weird oceanic tinnitus in my head for a while), i don't really have to worry too much about waking her up as i shift positions or get up to go to the bathroom or dig under the bed to find the headband with embedded headphones i use when trying to listen myself to sleep with a dull podcast. i'm thankful to listen to the changes her breath makes when she is sleeping, for all the variety, how at some points, in some positions, the breath moves through the nose with a certain sound and in others another. i'm thankful that during my more hypochondriac days i would worry a lot over these variations in sound, sure that one meant something bad, but i'm thankful that now i am better at just taking them as evidence that she is continuing to breathe as she dreams and she will keep continuing, hopefully for a very long time.
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