Page 5 of Divorced from Number Thirty-Eight
But there’s no one to share this moment with.
No lover, no friend I’m close enough with to call and celebrate with.
My neighbors are nice enough to include me in their monthly Book Club, but that’s mostly just an excuse to drink wine and shit talk men.
Since I don’t have one of those, I usually stick to drinking wine.
My editor—speaking of whom, is waiting on the manuscript so I take the opportunity to email it to her—and I are in different countries and frankly, neither of us are the type to sit on the phone and chitchat.
So…it’s just me.
Me to celebrate.
Me to find peace.
Me to do something that isn’t sitting in front of my computer for another second.
I exhale and shove my chair back, pushing up to my feet and stretching out my sore back and shoulders.
My hands and wrists ache, my neck is tight.
Though I try my best to use all the ergonomic tools I’ve acquired in the years since I became a full-time writer, I regularly find myself hunched over my keyboard like a gremlin, jabbing away at the keys, trying to keep up with the rapid-fire way my characters talk to me.
My aching body at least gives me something to do.
I go to my closet, pull out my yoga mat, foam rollers, and massage balls.
Then I spend the next hour stretching and rolling out the sore spots, using my massage gun as necessary.
It’s exhausting, just stretching and rolling and massaging…or maybe it’s that sitting in my chair for six or eight or ten hours a day isn’t conducive to a well-conditioned body.
I should take up some sort of exercise that’s good for me.
Like walking.
I wrinkle my nose. Yeah, that’s not going to happen.
Or I could exercise by lifting my wine glass up to my mouth repeatedly.
Yeah, that sounds a lot more fun.
Grinning, I keep stretching and rolling and massage-gunning until my sore spots are no longer sore and my arms are crying out for a wine-glass-filled workout.
I stow my stuff, head down to the kitchen, sniffing slightly when I make it there. It smells almost like my heater has turned on for the first time during cold season—the faint odor of burning dust or whatever—and even though it’s spring, it hasn’t been what I would call cold. Not for weeks now.
Definitely not cold enough to warrant the heater kicking on.
In fact, the flowers are blooming and the sky has been clear.
The fog we sometimes get in the South Bay not even clinging to the early mornings like it can in the fall and summer.
It’s just…pleasant.
So pleasant, I take my wine into my back yard, staring up at the clear sky, watching the clouds float by, listening to the wind rustling through the trees shading my deck, lining my fence.
Pretty flowers. Old-growth trees. A narrow patch of grass. A tiny pond that used to be filled with koi fish when my grandpa was alive but is now just a water feature.
But a pleasant one.
