long haul

A man followed me around in the grocery store tonight. I smiled at him. My smile said I know you are following me because you don't look like a man who is shopping for bobby pins. I didn't feel afraid of him. He seemed like a nice man who just wanted some company for a few minutes.

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I belong to another online community and it's about dogs. It seems like a weird kind of community to belong to but the people in it are really kind. They post pictures of their pets and say sweet things about how cute each other's dogs are. They ask for and give advice about training, feeding, health... all kinds of things. It's refreshing to belong to an online community like that.

One of the ladies there had a dog who died of stomach cancer. She'd been posting for a couple of months about how her dog was sick all the time and she didn't know what to do. Then she got the cancer diagnosis and was planning to pay for her dog to go through chemotherapy treatment which, apparently, dogs handle better than humans. But the dog didn't respond well and she had to make the decision to put her down. It was terribly sad - and I was so impressed with how beautifully the other people on the forum rallied around this woman and supported her and offered her advice for coping with her loss ... I decided to make an anonymous donation to forum as an "in memory of" for the sadly missed puppy. It's nothing much, but I liked how they added a little ribbon to her avatar. It's weird how people can be drawn together when the things they have in common are things they care about so deeply. No matter how different they really are.

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This morning I was out doing work for the university and I called home to ask Shawn if he wanted me to get anything for him while I was out. Shawn is still sick. When I called, he didn't answer the phone because he was still in bed. But it didn't really occur to me that he might just be sleeping and instead I started thinking about what would happen if he was so ill that he died while I was out and I came home to find him gone. It was the most neurotic irrational line of thinking I could take off on... but it got me really scared just imagining it, even as the rational brain started talking me down off the ledge. The rational brain told me to stop being a lunatic and calm down - but the crazy brain wouldn't stop imagining my life without him and was terrified by the prospect. That's really the only real problem with love. There's always the possibility that you'll have to relearn how to live again without it.

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