Someday I’m really going to write about something other than hotline training, really. It’s eating up a major chunk of my life right now, but there are other things going on in my life. I’m seeing a ton of Emily lately, which is excellent, and introducing Merewyn to Firefly which continues to be excellent, and for about three seconds I was going to go back to school except that I missed the registration deadline so now I have to see whether my motivation holds until October rolls around for spring registration. And I have developed a major obsession with hard cider, and also with this amazing pomegranate beer that Len stumbled across by accident and that I must have more of or I will die. And Mo is going to get polydactyl kittens, which completely destroys me with cuteness.

Only tangentially related to training is the fact that I now have this regular bus routine two nights a week, and I know the people who get on and off at different stops, and I know the people who are at the ice cream store if I stop off for a snack on the way home, and occasionally I stop and boggle at the notion of all these different lives going about their routines and intersecting in these very specific ways every week. I sit at the bus stop and make up little stories about the old lady with the painted-on eyebrows and the hipster Japanese guy and the blind man and the goth teenager, and I wonder what they do with the other 167 hours of the week when we’re not all waiting for or riding these buses together. Apparently I have made it to the age of 25 without ever entirely getting it through my head that the world does not revolve around me, because my mind can still be blown by the idea of all these other lives that have only this one very specific, tiny thing to do with me.

But I don’t think any of that will be happening tonight, because I have started and erased two or three different journal entries so far and they’ve all wound up being about training even if they didn’t start that way. It is really amazing and important to me right now, but I suspect I am driving everyone in my life crazy talking about it, and I think I should not do that tonight. Because tonight is my night off. This week has been pretty crazy in terms of work, training, and an unusual degree of social life, such that I have had basically no time alone to decompress. And I was starting to slip into a really ridiculous crazy state that I get into when I haven’t been careful to have enough alone time, so I declared tonight my night off. No having anyone over, no answering phones, no take-home reading for training, no housework, no work work. I talked Len into bringing home takeout pizza from the really good pizza place that doesn’t deliver, and had a couple of drinks, and just relaxed. Len has gone to bed early so the house is all mine, and I am drinking hard cider and listening to Ella Fitzgerald. I’ve got the window next to my desk open so I get a gentle summer breeze, and I can hear crickets, and sometimes if I look out at just the right time I can see quick bright flashes of fireflies in the back yard. I think I can actually feel the tensed-up muscles in my shoulders relaxing.

I’m really enjoying all the other stuff going on in my life right now, but I need to remember to take some time off and just let myself unwind like this. This is the life.

Sometimes, because I am a slightly morbid creature, I think about who I would die for. The list of people for whom I would take a bullet any day to keep them safe from harm. It’s a very short list, but the people on it are people I love fiercely and unreservedly. And each of those people is hurting right now in some way, and there’s nothing I can do.

These are not situations where I can say “take me instead,” jump in front of the bullet, devise a brilliant escape plan, cut the right wire at the last moment, say something wise and soothing and perfect. These are not situations where there is anything I can do at all, because of distance or because it is just the nature of the world that I cannot fix everything that is painful in the lives of the people I love. And I don’t like that. I don’t like that the world is this way, that there are obstacles and trials and changes and wounds that all my love cannot conquer and solve and ease and heal. I don’t like that there are distances I can’t cross and wishes I can’t grant. For all that time I spent in therapy realizing that not everything in the world is my fault, or within my ability to fix, you would really think that I should not hurt all over again every time I come face to face with that reality. But it still hurts every time.

I think perhaps I should have been a fairy godmother. I wonder if there’s a career path one can follow for that?