the stuff you forget about is often most worth remembering...

saturday evening jenn and i went to target (somehow, conditioner and cat litter and cat food turned into $70... goddamn target!), then got some dinner and came home and sat on the back porch with some specially-created jenn drinks. it's been really great staying with her and chris these past weeks. they're good friends, good people. mark was in the hospital over the weekend, having surgery on his wacky broken leg, and jenn and i were talking about hospital stays, and the conversation progressed to those oh-so-fun six days back in march of 2004 when i was in the hospital.

that experience is such a blur. i remember the particulars, but it was such an emotionally charged time, it's hard to piece it all back together in some spots. but what my saturday night talk with jenn brought to my mind (which maybe i wasn't aware of at the time, since i was so overwhelmed with what was going on in my own head -- and i mean that both figuratively and literally) was that i had this amazing support system of friends who were all really concerned. she told me that she always thinks of the night after my first full day in the hospital, when she and joe and jessie and stean went to tangier on lombard street to get dinner after visiting hours were over. she said the four of them just sat there around the table, beers and burgers in front of them, not really saying anything. hearing her tell me that story almost broke my heart, but in the way that you want your heart to be broken -- broken open, touched, clunked over the head with one of those "it's a wonderful life" kind of realizations. my friends really were extraordinary -- above and beyond amazing.

and i somehow had all the components i needed around me at that time. i had joe, who, aside from being a wonderful friend, is a doctor and he was so crucial at helping me make sense of the medicalities of the situation. i had jessie, who came down from new york without needing to be asked, without any hesitation, without any doubt that it was what she had to do. she took care of the dog and cats and stayed at the house so that stean could be with me at the hospital. i had jenn and chris, who brought me silly dollar store diversions (including the most gigantic pair of underpants ever to imagine a grandma's ass) and kept me company. i had paula, who is always such a constant calming presence -- always has the right amount of perspective and sense of humor and trust that things are going to work out. and, i had stean.

oh, stean... a lot of my friends here know stean, some of them i know because of stean. and so he's come up in conversation a lot lately. i honestly miss having him in my life. i wish i could call him, i wish he and i could catch up, laugh together, go see stupid movies together. but even though i'm able to do that, i know that he's not. maybe someday? word on the street is that he's dating someone, which makes me really glad. but word on the street also says that he's still not doing so well... but that's his story, and not mine.

nevertheless, i had stean when i was sick, and i don't think there's a single person in this universe who could have loved me more or who could have been more brave or supportive. he was there for every doctor's appointment. he was there for every weird panic attack. he was there when i couldn't sleep at night or when i would cry because i had no idea what was going on. and he may not have always known what to say (but who the hell ever does in those sorts of situations?), but he never once let me get away with focusing on the terrifying stuff. he never let me see that he was terrified, too.

but he was. jenn told me that she saw her role in that time as being the support system for stean so that he could be there for me. and she told me that he had moments where he broke down, too.

why does it blow my mind to imagine that people could care so much about me? if the tables were turned, there's no doubt in my mind that i would be a wreck with worry. so why does it seem so wild that others would be like that for me? maybe it's because we go through life so absorbed with our own experience that we don't really pay much attention to the ways our life reaches out and mingles with others. it's not really just our own experience -- we get involved, those involvements become a big part of what makes our individual, self-absorbed experience meaningful.

i've never been one to believe that things happen for a reason. maybe i lack faith or i'm too much of a cynic, but it doesn't seem to me that "reason" plays that fundamental a role in how things pan out. yet, looking back on things, it sure seems that certain figures have been in place at the times when i needed them most. not really sure what to make of that. but one thing's for sure -- i'm incredibly, unbelievably, inarticulably grateful.