I went to fetch you from the train
I wore a smile,
A dress,
And my own last name.

My hair was blonde
And my dress was blue.
I stood on the platform
And I waited for you.

I looked to the clock,
It was only noon.
Not a doubt in my mind,
You’d be arriving soon.

The first train came
Could this be yours?
I watched and I waited,
My eyes searched through the scores

Of love drunk couples
Here and there,
My eyes searched faster
Everywhere.

But the train emptied out
And then it was gone.
I glanced at the clock:
Now a quarter ‘til one.

A second train came
It was this one… I was sure!
But the passengers rushed out
And all was a blur.

I watched in confusion
As girls just like me
Swept past me so quickly
Some, brides and mothers to be…

A third train came
From it you did not emerge
And behind tear flooded eyes
I could feel the surge…

Memories, memories
All my heart and mind could hold
The promises, promises
I had been sold!

A fourth train, a fifth train,
A sixth train still…
My hopes were dashed
Unfulfilled

My knees grew weak
And my stomach churned
What a foolish girl!
What a lesson learned…

I turned toward the clock
Though I cared not for the time
How long had I waited
Without reason or rhyme?

At some point or another
I stopped counting trains
I now knew counting
Left me nothing to gain

Trains passed by
And with them years flew
All the time I sat waiting
Waiting for you

And then one day…
My heart it leapt!
My eyes couldn’t believe it!
From a train you stepped!

You stood in front of me
Clear as day
The image I remembered
Not one bit had time washed away

But as I rushed towards you
My heart filled with glee
I suddenly realized…
You weren’t looking at me

Her hair was brown
And her dress was green
And I watched you embrace
A final, heartbreaking scene

You left the platform
Hand in hand
I only wanted to be your girl
And now you were her man

The last train pulled away
And in its windows I saw
My own sad reflection…
I dropped my jaw

My hair was gray
And my dress was too…
Oh how much beloved time had been wasted

…Waiting on you.

Better yet, will someone just wake me up in March?

Your alarm goes off and you decide to get out of bed that moment rather than hit the snooze just one more time. You make a dozen more decisions before you brush your teeth. After you brush your teeth you ponder whether to buy a coffee on your way to work or to brew coffee at home. Buying coffee is easier but requires leaving at least ten minutes earlier and obviously, spending money. You decide to make your own. From there: enough for 1 cup or 2? milk or half and half? Should you put it in the to-go cup in case you don’t finish or drink from your favorite, hand painted ceramic mug?

You decide to wear the black shoes over the blue shoes, wear your hair up instead of down, and take a sandwich for lunch over a microwave meal.

On the way to work you take the back roads and avoid the highway, you listen to country, not rock, and you choose to wait until a stop light to answer your ringing phone. You make a hundred decisions on your route to work alone.

At work you have an important decision to make: you can be nice to the coworker who doesn’t like you, or you can treat her the same way she treats you. By noon your tongue is sore from biting it so much.

More decisions.

Smile at everyone who walks in or check Craigslist just one more time? Pass these customers on to a coworker or wait another half an hour to eat lunch? When you finally get a lunch break at 3:30 you choose to wait until you’re off to eat at home rather than spend money you don’t have on a lunch you will have to practically inhale anyway. Thirty minutes is hardly enough time to drive somewhere, buy food, enjoy your lunch, and get back to work on time. It is however enough time to find the fastest fast food within a one mile radius, devour it within a couple minutes, and get back to work to clock in three minutes late… with a stomach ache. So instead of going through that hassle, you get a Pepsi from the vending machine, maybe a bag of chips, and you spend 11 minutes winding down from the stress of work, 16 minutes relaxing, and 3 minutes staring at the time clock and preparing to go back to work.

By the time you clock out for the day and are walking to your car you are exhausted. More choices. Buy cat food tonight, or make a trip out in the morning on your day off? Take the highway or the back roads home? Windows down or AC on?

And then your phone buzzes inside your pocket. The text is simple and harmless enough. “Hope you had a nice day.” Suddenly every small decision you made today seems just that – small. Your heart pounds and you feel flushed. The next choice is much bigger than “Reply” or “Ignore.” The choice is to feel. Or not to. Open yourself – and your heart – to the idea of someone new or build another wall? Take a leap or stay dry on the shore?

So you are standing at a crossroads and you have no idea which path to follow. It seems so simple, the answer so obvious. Respond and see where it goes. But one choice to “see where it goes” can have so many implications. Open one door, close five others. If you take this road, will you have to backtrack to find the path you were on again? And will you lose sight of the roads you didn’t take completely?

It is simple, and the answer really is obvious. Make the choice to see where it goes, or don’t. But don’t paralyze yourself. Because if you don’t open this door, will you ever open another?

Today my kitten met the spray bottle for the first time. She is none too thrilled.

Today I am enamored with the iPhone 4. It is so hot I think I blushed a little when I first laid eyes on it.

Today I’m a little peeved with Twitter being “overcapacity” every time I login to share something.

Today I’m bummed that I have three kinds of cereal in the cupboard, none of which is the cereal I’m craving this morning.

Today I’m looking forward to work, for silly reasons I will not be sharing here.

Today I’m thinking that the word “today” looks a little funny after you write it so many times.

Today I do not miss you anymore. Huh, they said it would happen sometime. I just didn’t know sometime would be…

… today

Having been in the Emergency Room four times over the past week, I now feel like I have a better grasp on the situation.

So, when is the best time to go to the ER?

Well, for starters, if you are currently experiencing an emergency requiring immediate attention such as loss of limb or werewolf bite, for example, you should put away your computer and dial 911.

If, however, your “emergency” is somewhat flexible, I have this to say:

Go in the morning. Early enough to avoid most of the daily commute accidents, but late enough to barely miss the night–before–crowd, although I can’t imagine what they are doing there anyway.

At 7:30 am this morning when I went to get my Day 7 shot for the rabies vaccine, there was barely anyone else there. I was in and out in a relatively awesome amount of time considering the last three afternoon visits. This leads me to believe one of two things is true.

1. Less emergencies happen in the morning.

–or–

2. Emergencies seem a whole lot less important when you have to drag yourself out of bed.

So if you are planning a trip to the Emergency Room anytime soon, please keep in mind the following:

• The order in which you are seen has nothing to do with the fact the you are now homeschooling your children out of room number 9. Instead, it has more to do with the severity of your condition as opposed to your neighbor’s. For instance, both the guy in the room next to you having a heart attack and the girl who submerged her hair dryer in water and then attempted to dry her hair will probably fall ahead of you in line. Unfortunately it is a system determined by both severity and time of arrival, not severity, time of arrival, and level of stupidity involved.
• Take a book. This is for a couple of reasons. First of all, any magazines they have in the waiting room are all going to be editions from Spring of last year with various tips on how to creatively dye an Easter egg. There will be one magazine that does interest you and they will have several under that title spread across the waiting room. Unfortunately, it will only be multiple copies of the same issue over and over. What can I say? Some people are just cruel. The second reason for bringing a book with you to the ER is because it just so happens that the one time you actually remember to bring a book will inevitably be your shortest visit.
• Don’t drink hot coffee or ice water right before or during your stay. Apparently, this really throws the thermometer off when the nurse is trying to take your vitals. Apparently.

In short, if you can help it the best time to visit the ER is, in my experience, the morning. In fact, if you take a book to read and a coffee to drink (AFTER the nurse takes your temperature) it can actually be quite a comfortable spot to get some reading done..

Yeah, it was one of those days.

I love my job. I really, really do. I just wanted to clear that up now so there is no confusion as you read the following. So when you get to the end, just remember: I love my job.

Today, I had a guy ask me what the process was to adopt staff members.

A lady called me, then asked me to call her back in three minutes.

I had yet another person call and ask if we had any “Pit Bull dogs” for sale.

I spent my lunch break reading Cat Fancy because I forgot to bring a book.

I had to move 200 pounds (literally) of kitty litter.

I had a solid metal door slammed against my head by a very excited, very energetic black lab and I now have a nice size lump on the side of my skull.

Not to mention tomorrow I get to go back to the ER for Day 7 of my post-exposure rabies shots.

Oh, and finally, to no one’s real surprise, Mr. Right did not come into my work to sweep me off my feet. Again!

Yeah, one of those days.

I remember my head on my pillow and yours on your own. I remember morning light coming through the windows and highlighting every freckle, every line, your eyelashes, your hair, the specks in your eyes. I remember staring at each other, our faces no more than a foot apart, and laughing in an otherwise silent world about nothing at all. Smiling and staring. Staring and smiling. And laughing. One moment, or thousands of little moments, who knows? A smile. A laugh. A kiss. And then… “Good morning.” But we’d already spoken a million scripts, a thousand dialogues, every one of Shakespeare’s plays. There was so much said before “Good morning.”

We had conversations without speaking.

One of my best friends and I went out the other night and boy, when you get us together there is hardly a second without a word said, whispered, screamed. To an outsider we would sound like teenage girls again, though both of us are twenty four. We can gush about anything over cocktails, during the commercials of our favorite shows, or in the car on our way to dinner. We can have serious, long discussions or we can throw random one liners at each other and spend the next ten minutes laughing until our stomachs hurt. But somewhere in all that talking, all those sounds and syllables, there is an underlying thread that pulls everything together and makes sense of our crazy babble. In one sentence I can baffle the world and she will understand that it is not completely random that I suddenly want Gelato at 10 o’clock on a Sunday night, even though I just ate way too much theater popcorn and half a second ago we were talking about something completely unrelated.

We can have conversations without speaking.

We no longer see each other, nor do we speak. We are, essentially, cut off and out of touch. We feel as separated as you possibly can feel in a situation like ours. It is unnatural and bizarre and continues to make no sense to me from day to day but there are so many things to overcome and right now the mountain is just far too high and we are both far too unprepared to make the climb. In the meantime we keep a foothold, a small piece of reassurance that the other is still on the opposite side. There is a mountain between us but sometimes I feel like it is only seconds since we talked last.

We have conversations without speaking.

I still cry ever now and then. I get choked up on a sunny day on my way to work and I turn up the volume and drown out my own thoughts. I see your picture on my dresser and I try hard not to look too long and refocus my mind somewhere else. I avoid saying your name in conversation because I don’t like the sound of myself saying it. But there are moments when you sneak up on me. You catch me off guard and you come in, causally sit down and make yourself comfortable in my mind. You strike up a casual conversation and you make me laugh before I have the time to realize you’re there and shake it off. It’s usually in a quiet place, like when I’m in the river gathering stones to place on the bank, or trying to read a book in the silence of my room at the end of a long day. By the time I notice your presence, you’ve made yourself comfortable and will be too stubborn to leave so eventually I give in and I talk back. In these moments you calm me, remind me that you’re never really gone, and bring me a little closer to acceptance. Even if acceptance is a destination I will never reach.

We will always have conversations without speaking.

Some of the most important and meaningful conversations I’ve ever had were spoken without words.

Could it be that all of mine have flown away?

The first round of shots post-exposure (I’m not talking about your regular preventative rabies vaccine, these are the shots you get AFTER you have been bitten by or had other physical contact with a rabid animal)… anyway, the first round of shots are actually something called rabies immunoglobulin. The amount you are given is dependent on your weight and for me at roughly 113 it was appx. two and a half GIANT syringes. Okay, I admit I say appx. because when I saw the size of the syringes I tried not to look at them again so I have no clue how much was in the third.

The good news: post-exposure rabies shots are no longer a series of eight shots given in the stomach! Hooray!

The bad news: the series is just as long and they still hurt a whole heck of a lot.

Keep in mind now that if you are scared of needles, you should know you have no reason to be afraid of getting these shots! That’s right! All you aichmophobes and belonephobes should seriously consider changing your titles to “trypanophobe.” Unless of course sewing makes you anxious or when the nurse enters the room with a syringe you legitimately believe the needle is going to jump off the tray and attack you. In those cases you could rightly call yourself aichmophobic or belonephobic. However, if you are like most, then you fear the actual injection, making you trypanophobic. In this case, aichmophobes and belonephobes can rest easy. But trypanophobes beware! The reason being of course that the needle itself is not the cause of the pain, rather the actual injection is what makes your eyes well up like an eight–year–old girl. With the rabies immunoglobulin, that is a lot of liquid being injected into your body and trust me, you can feel every bit of it going in. In my case, like I said before, I had three shots of the immunoglobulin: one in each thigh and one in my left arm. The two completely full syringes went into my thighs and luckily there were two nurses who did those shots simultaneously.

OuCh! oUCh! OucH!

Now usually, rabies immunoglobulin is given at the site of exposure (usually in the form of a bite or a scratch). Since my exposure was “non-bite” they were able to spread the shots out, which is great because instead of having one really, really sore arm I have four fairly sore limbs. Four? But I only received three immunoglobulin shots, right? Right. Now let’s talk about the vaccine.

After you are given the rabies immunoglobulin, you receive your FIRST injection of the rabies vaccine. Yay! Four shots in one day! All four limbs! And the best part is… for me, at least, the rabies vaccine injection was the one that hurt the most. It could have been the injection site, or various other factors I suppose, but this shot stung, burned, then tingled. Once the tingling wore off, my whole right arm became very sore. So sore in fact that I grimace while changing out of a t–shirt. Even writing with a pencil or pen hurts. But oh, it gets better: I get four more of the rabies vaccine over the next month!

Here is how the whole process works starting from Day 0 (as soon as possible after exposure). Please keep in mind that I didn’t include the amount of time you spend in the emergency room waiting to get each shot, nor did I include Day -1, the day where you spend an hour in the waiting room and over an hour in the exam room only to be told that the oh–so–important rabies immunoglobulin is nowhere to be found in your entire city and it had to be special ordered and shipped and would you please come back tomorrow? And by the way, you really should have expected this. After all, this is Day -1, not Day 0…sheash, pay attention! Anyway how the series is laid out:

Day 0: Rabies immunoglobulin and series one of the rabies vaccine

Day 3: Rabies vaccine

Day 7: Rabies vaccine

Day 14: Rabies vaccine

Day 28: Rabies vaccine

Again, keep in mind that wait times will vary depending on the intelligence of fellow accident–prone inhabitants of your city as well as the ability of the ER staff to not “misplace” a $2000 vaccine, or get you confused with someone else.

So in short: the shots hurt like hell yesterday and I have to go back four more times before I’m done with this. Also, please realize that this was in no way intended to scare you away from getting the vaccine if you need it. If you have been exposed to rabies or think you might have been, please contact your health department and get it taken care of as soon as possible. Also, if you have had a pre-exposure rabies vaccine you will still need to have post-exposure injections, a series consisting of two rabies vaccine injections but no immunoglobulin. Make sure you tell your doctor if you have had a pre-exposure vaccine.

Rabies is nothing to mess around with and after you start showing symptoms, there is no cure. Rabies is almost always fatal once symptoms begin which can be anywhere from a few days after exposure or even a year. So don’t wait! Better safe than sorry, right?

And on that note…. have a wonderful evening and if you were planning on snuggling with a rabid animal, I would consider canceling!