On mail cookies.

I was unsettled today.  To be fair, I've been unsettled all week.  Nothing in particular, nothing severe.  Just the usual worries.  If I'm meshing in at work as well as I think I am.  If my confidence in my work is warranted, or if I'm just arrogant.  What the people in my life really think of me.  What people on the internet that I barely know really think of me.

And small and quiet as these worries are, they throw me off.  They wake me up with their little skitterings in the night, they dig trenches in the crepe batter on the stone.  They make me forget to get half and half at the store and only let myself remind me as I'm pulling away from the curb.

And they invite their friends.  Old thoughts and worries that have slept for months, years.  Turning away from a marriage to once more face the empty black void.  Poor decisions made, poor paths chosen.  Final words of my father.

And it's so easy to lose yourself in this state of dissonance, to never feel like you can find your footing.  You find yourself seeing what you could be if you could just get back into that groove, that better self you were just days ago.  And you get frustrated and angry, and it just makes it worse.

And then something happens.  Something big, something small, something kind, something beautiful, it doesn't really matter.  Today I got cookies in the mail.  Wrapped in plastic printed with little gingerbread men, twisty-tied shut in a little decorative box with an unassuming note.  And I know it was sent not knowing I was feeling wrong.  I know it wasn't meant to be a gesture of any grand magnitude.  But for the first time in days, my mind went blank as I smiled, and all those niggling little voices shut the fuck up.

And it won't last.  It's only a matter of time before I'm just a little bit off again, before my heart and fingers and tongue fuck up everything my brain tells them.  But today, I got cookies in the mail.

And I'm all right.