Yesterday, March the 27th, 2022, was a truly magical day, at least for me.

I didn’t realize until yesterday that, since last year and the passing of my parents in the collapse of Champlain Towers South on June 24th, that I’ve been in a sort of mental fog.

I suppose I knew this to some degree. Things that usually gave me joy didn’t. I was doing the things I needed to do to get through each day but I did so on a sort of autopilot rather than with any pleasure.

I worked on my new novel during this time, but it too was done in such a piecemeal fashion and without the mix of love and frustration (truly, writing a novel is usually a combination of extreme pleasure and frustration!) I normally have for my works. Not that what revisions I was doing were bad, mind you, only that the emotions behind it weren’t there like before.

And this went for pretty much most of the activities in my life this past nearly a year.

Unless there was no good relationship between offspring and parents, the loss of one’s parents is a traumatic event. And for me, for my family, the shocking way they died made the situation all the worse. From the collapse itself to waiting for their bodies to be found to dealing with all the lawyers and trying to settle their estate (not only did I lose them, but all the paperwork they had in their home) to running their businesses… its a lot to take one and find the time to properly grieve as well.

But yesterday, for whatever reason, I found myself a little after twelve noon feeling extremely exhausted and needing to take a nap. This is not totally unusual for me, there are days here and there where my body simply reaches the point I need to rest.

Only this time, when I lay down and took a deep thirty minute or so nap and woke up, I felt… different.

I felt incredibly refreshed and, for the first time in far too long, alive like I hadn’t been in too long.

Perhaps for me the extreme sadness which came from the trauma of the building’s collapse and their deaths has finally crested, though it certainly isn’t anywhere near gone. I still miss my parents tremendously, but it felt like after that nap I was energized and for the first time in a very long time I felt I was past that emotional fog.

I picked up my new novel, which printed out runs to 195 single spaced pages and of which I had the last 1/4th of the book, some 50 pages or so, left to revise and, in the course of yesterday afternoon, I did that revision.

I read through it and made my red ink notations and it was such a freaking joy to do so.

Time eventually heals all and while I don’t feel like I’m fully healed yet, at least as of yesterday and for the first time in too long a time I felt like I was a little bit back to my old self.

Let’s see if it lasts.