Henry asked tonight if Ben missed his glue stick guitars.

It only took me a minute to figure out what he meant. He went on to tell me he likes it best when Ben plays glue stick songs after dinner at the table...instead of plugging in the electric ones. The electric guitars are so much louder. The acoustic guitars are better for dining rooms.

Sometimes I agree. :)

But only sometimes.

Sold.

It was a beautiful letdown
When you found me here
For once in a rare blue moon
I see everything clear

I'll be a beautiful letdown
That's what I'll forever be
And though it may cost my soul
I'll sing for free

The house.

It sold.

Time moved so slowly and suddenly it's moving so fast and the grass is greener already, because it must have been so simple to mindlessly sing along to the radio while I painted and scraped and plastered and cooked and cleaned and now suddenly I'm trying to coordinate a cross county move with children and pets and Ben flying in and flying out and moving trucks and utilities and I don't have an address and I need an address don't I? and things are going to move so fast I can already hear the wind rushing in my ears so it makes it very hard to catch the actual words and I still need to do our taxes and my laptop is failing because fourteen months is the charm curse and did I tell you about when my barely a year old car broke down earlier this week and had to be towed away and and it was the straw that broke everything? but I didn't write about it, I just tried to go through the steps to make it better and I put layer after layer of tape and glue and then more tape and then paper with more glue and then some tape and prayers too and I held it together and I forced myself to eat a little and sleep a little and hug the children and I made a bravery-mask to wear when I talk to Ben and to my parents and it only failed a little when I spoke with the car dealership and the poor tow truck driver who wow, got an earful and I'm sorry but he didn't seem to mind all that much and now I have my car back and someone is so very excited to have their own castle now and I have put aside a stack of papers that go with each of the new appliances I chose for this house and a ring full of skeleton keys and deadbolt keys and maybe I will have some flowers in the kitchen on their closing day so they will have a house that starts them off in the most positive light I can manage.

And we will be gone and it's a good thing because even though I weathered that storm there are still miles to go, yes, Mr. Frost.

And right now I still have a backpack with family pictures on DVDs and our very-valuable stuff that can't be packed and Jacob's letters. It's sitting by the door and I have the children's coats ready and the kennels for the animals and I've got my mask ready to put back if I need it but really it's so nice out today and I'm really really hoping that with my split and bleeding fingers crossed, dried from the cold and scraped raw from the effort, that Bridget is through the hard part and onto the glory now.

Steady.

Hi internet, bye internet. I needed my bravery song today. See you tomorrow.

Welcome to the planet
Welcome to existence
Everyone's here
Everyone's here
Everybody's watching you now
Everybody waits for you now
What happens next
What happens next

Welcome to the fallout
Welcome to resistance
The tension is here
Tension is here
Between who you are and who you could be
Between how it is and how it should be

Maybe redemption has stories to tell
Maybe forgiveness is right where you fell
Where can you run to escape from yourself?
Where you gonna go?
Where you gonna go?
Salvation is here

I dare you to move
I dare you to move
I dare you to lift yourself up off the floor
I dare you to move
I dare you to move
Like today never happened
Today never happened
Today never happened
Today never happened before

Here, just take your schadenfreude. Maybe tomorrow something will go right. I've got nothing left here at all.

The other poet waits at stage left.

Hi, go away. I fell out of the wrong side of the bed and you're going to pay for it. My pockets are empty.

Monday morning brings balled-up fists, bottom lips wedged between teeth and bitten raw, and love letters from Lochlan. Ben's beautiful face is still in my mind from video calls and subsequent brief dreams last night, a day hellbent on taking place in spite of four hours sleep. I have coffee and cinnamon-sugared hot cereal in front of me and I have already crossed off most of today's list, which means with any luck I can do taxes later.

See what I did there? Mentioned luck again. I've been fresh out for years but old habits die hard.

Think positive, princess.

About what, Jake? The house? That course of action will jinx me a little more. I'm superstitious. Assume, and you're be made an ass of. Predict and you will ensure failure. By not preparing for the worst you will embark on a Pandora's box of alternate endings and curse yourself for the rest of your breathing days.

I don't want to get my hopes up if there are no hopes to be had. Better to steel myself for the possibility that I may be here right through my birthday in May than to assume I won't and shoot karma in the head. Fucking bitch that she is to me, no matter how hard I try.

I'll walk the tracks in my proper black shoes, black tights and a black dress and I will sing sad songs under my breath as the dog walks along oblivious, sniffing at the thistles, head up into the wind. I'll let my hair blow around my face in a halo of tangles and I'll stop talking again.

I'm rather sure it's inevitable. This is the kind of luck I have.

Lochlan thinks life would be less difficult if I would simply step further from the musician and closer to the artist again. If I would pick a permanent Dr. Jekyll over the inevitable Mr. Hyde even though cold shoulders come in all heights in this universe and selfishness rules the day. He would be here. He would be here.

Sure he would.

Lochlan is the fair-weather boyfriend and I'm not as young and naive as I once was the day he told me I was so impossible it would never work.

He was right, but not for those reasons. He is the impossible one. The hot and cold, knows-better, doesn't have time for bullshit logical Lochical pretty boy, the man who carries around Pink Floyd lyrics on the tip of his tongue and playing on his mental radio because the second you turn it off he becomes someone who just won't listen to reason and I don't know exactly what kind of defect that is but I suspect it's not a whole lot different from my rather insane set of useless self-soothing attempts.

Everyone has their problems. I'm not going to become one of his.

I'm happy with Ben. Yeah, that guy. The one so underground these days it's as if he's vanished altogether. Home for five days and gone for five days again and it feels like a thousand years and I still cry myself to sleep with his last-worn t-shirt clutched in my hands.

Two of you guessed properly this morning and that freaks me out. The other twenty-three guesses were so far off base I found it highly amusing to consider those possibilities while I laced my boots for the near-dawn walk I take with the dog. As long as the odds still favor me I'll keep writing about him, about us. If they tip I am done.

I don't run anymore.

I don't write anymore.

I don't eat or sleep.

I don't relax and I stopped taking deep breaths after I did something weird to my back and suddenly all through January I couldn't breathe properly. It hurt. I walked a very fine line and thankfully it has gone away a little but I would keep the pain if it meant I could just calm down for five whole minutes instead of a white-knuckle trip through everyday pedestrian things that everyone else blindly conducts as though they were entitled to it and more.

You're not, I'm so sorry. And as usual I deleted the dozens of emails that arrived while I slept because I don't entertain guesses for Ben and I don't care what you think of my words, my life or my boys. Nor do I care to read your reviews of my skills as a mother, wife, homeowner or journalist. I just don't. Save your breath and do what you do best: keep reading.

Just shut the fuck up. I really can't take anymore. Lochlan, that goes for you too.

The party line for the afternoon will be Bridget's just angry that I can't make it back today.

Indeed. Whatever helps you sleep at night, baby. I'll be on the tracks if you need me. In this fucking endless wind.

Not jinxing, just saying.

(Firstly, Lochlan didn't come home. He meant to. Things happen.)

It's been a busy couple of days. A busy couple of months, really, and I know I haven't given much to this place but no worries, my head is full. There just aren't enough hours in the day. I haven't stopped. It's been eight weeks. I have not stopped.

Just know that my hard work is paying off, and the luck of the boys is holding.

The feedback on the house is promising. I need some luck this time around.

The castle has had thirty-one showings so far, and we have DAYS left. DAYS. This is unreal. Keep your fingers and toes crossed.

We won the hockey game, the kids and I crashing through doors and collapsing on the living room couch in time to see the final period and all of the overtime. We cried when they played the anthem, just like the rest of the country.

Go Canada, indeed. We've set records in what we do best, conquering winter.

I have been here chipping ice away from my garage door, cleaning up vomit from a puppy that is surprisingly carsick and vomit from a child who just had enough yesterday and couldn't do anymore. I've been mopping floors and dusting like mad almost around the clock and have been living out of a tiny sportscar that I really don't like driving at all, let alone in winter. I don't even know how to drive through whole large sections of this city, you know that? It's not my thing.

And now we're going to make a pizza and eat on the couch and see if we can see the boys on the television, because they are at the closing ceremonies tonight (!) and they have snowglobes to bring home for us and funny things because when you go there is an audience participation kit that you are given. I am excited for them, and they feel guilty because of me.

And it's okay. Because you know what? I'm excited for me. I am trying to think positive and I'm getting really close to getting out of here for good. This week will tell me more and in the meantime, I will keep cleaning and hoping.

And maybe even writing a bit. If I am lucky.

Which...well, things can change, right?

Pretty-boy Floyd to the rescue.

Can you stand up?
I do believe it's working, good.
That'll keep you going through the show
Come on it's time to go.

Find a penny...and realize it's the one from your pocket from yesterday, came through the wash.

Jesus Christ.

Hi.

Remember me? I'm Bridget. And I could come in here and wipe my wet boots on the doormat and weave you a wonderfully funny stupid story about how five minutes into the very first showing of my first house I realized I couldn't do this repeatedly and so I signed the two cats up for a weekend sleepover with the vet.

On the way there the puppy barfed all over the front seat of the car.

On the upside? One down, and quite a few more to go.

The dog is going to hate my guts by the end of the weekend. I will hate his too. We'll be even!

(I still love him but he is way more work than a child so next time someone tells you that, know that they lie.)

Meh, and we're off again. But my house looks DAMN good and I'm even sick. So there! This is that moment where you stare into the face of adversity and scream,

IS THAT ALL YOU'VE GOT?

Indeed. It's enough. Fuck off now, bad luck.

It's that time again.

Dance, internet! (here, PJ, one for you!)

And little ones, sleepytime now.

Goodnight.

A beard and a macbook pro.

Ben has gone again, and my brief vacation from the anxiety of being without him has returned with a jolt of electricity so prolific I heard the snap when the doors closed behind him at Departures.

Fuck all of this.

Someone buy this house so we can leave.

I know I'm jumping the gun. Everything is ticking along nicely and such and it's far too early to worry but if you know Bridget you know she'll pick and choose her worries until they are gone and then move on to the next ones. So right now the worries are "sell house" and "ohmyfuck, you've gotten sick", since Ben brought a west-coast cold with him and left it for me to enjoy. I couldn't speak this morning and still I managed to dissolve into the helpless cries that probably make him feel like the biggest jerk in the universe for leaving and yet we are both fully aware that there isn't any better way we could have done this and now we just have to be patient. With any luck at all the longest stretch is past and now comes the rush. Soon, anyway. Eventually.

I have no date for the next trip home. I don't like that one bit. Again, there is no point in booking him home again until we see how the next week or two plays out.

The silver lining in this is perhaps I don't have to work so hard anymore. I can keep chipping away at cleaning, and buy healthy groceries and easy meals for the kids and I and continue to chase after the Himalayan cat with the scissors because she will be less work with less fur and walk the dog more because it will be warmer and hope and pray and fret and miss and cry and fear everything and okay...yeah, it will be like the last three times he was away.

On a hilarious and not even uniquely surprising note, he inspected my little sports car and found that my sort-of functioning block heater WASN'T WORKING AT ALL. There's character building for you. I spent the winter here in Extremecoldville plugging my car in dutifully and it wasn't doing a damned thing. Oh my FUCK!

It works now.

What a difference, too.

That will become part of the big story years from now when this is funny instead of a huge fucking tragedy of biblical proportions. I'm sorry, I call them as I see them and this blows from coast to coast. And I was a total shrew. I told Ben I would be spoiled when I get to the coast. That I'm never shoveling or painting again. That I'm going to sleep in on the weekends and have my nails painted by someone else and I won't lift things or put myself out for any reason at all.

He laughed and said yeah right, princess.

Because I was never the kind of girl to be able to understand how people can pay forty dollars to have someone else file their nails or how they could simply refuse to do things they can damn well do themselves and if they just would put out a little effort they could accomplish so much and now I see it's so much easier and lazier just to say no and for some reason they aren't judged for that.

I just do it. I get it done and then I am sort of amazed that I pulled it off and looking for a break that when it comes, I probably won't take it, although I am finding a lovely gift in reaching out with one finger and stopping the world every single day at three-thirty or four o'clock and pouring myself a cup of coffee to enjoy. Then I lift my finger off the world and it spools up to resume the previous speed of ohmyfuckgetonwiththings.

And yet, Ben promised me that I will be spoiled. He is keeping a list of places he will take us when we get out there. First sights and first meals, first evenings out, first day trips and first overnight trips away from the city. This from a man who can't remember to buy shampoo. It touches me that he wants us there so badly and it gives me hope that he misses me just as terribly and heartbreakingly as I miss him.

I've white-knuckled life through the better part of the last two months without him, and it's the one thing that I never wanted to experience. I've had enough. There's been enough misery and worry and stress and difficulties. There's been enough sad. I want to be excited about moving but currently I am held prisoner by the real estate market and until a shining angel of mercy signs on an offer I will wait, not all that patiently, for things to change. I will wait for him to come back and I will daydream and night-dream about him until that time.

Had I known how this would feel I wouldn't have entered into it at all but since I'm here what else can I do? Make lemonade. Whatever. I hate lemonade in the wintertime.

I miss him already. You really won't ever understand how much.