I had almost made it through the day

having decided that this compulsion to write every day to prove to an imaginary reader that I can is ridiculous

Talk about both hubris and a host of small neuroses bundled together. And yet now that I'm--what a week plus in it--it feels that skipping one day would ruin all the days I didn't skip. Rome wasn't and neither is this blog. I have found myself thinking about writing about this and that as I move through my days.

Shall I describe the condomium with the gray vinyl floors and the gray marble counter tops and the view of a gray pond with snow dissolving into it?

Or maybe I'll talk about how I suddenly cried while driving back across the bridge to my side of the river. I haven't mourned my dad that way for a bit. I'd sort of found ways to shave the rough edges of the grieving for him encapsulating it somehow into the day. Practicing the moment where I think of something and think of telling him about something and realize that of course I can't. It doesn't matter really that he had been fading away for years. The combination of near blindness and physical and emotional deafness had separated him from the rest of the world for a while. I'd noticed that he mugged in photographs always. There are old photos of him being silly for certain. Wearing a silly hat or miming a silly action for the camera, but there were more noble looking poses. He had handsome ways of looking. He, was I realize in retrospect, more conscious of his appearance than I ever realized before. Today as I drove the country roads with light snow falling, his words came to me. Not his thoughts or ruminations though they often come up too, but his words. He had a language cobbled together out of English slang---silly buggers, codswallop, oh my giddy aunt, charwallah and then the words he made himself--nicknames and neologisms. He named his blanket and his car. He told me once, "I have a name for everything." So I said, what is the couch's name. He said he didn't have a name for the couch. I cried missing him today for the first time in a bit.

Or maybe I'll write about the zoom meeting with the other women who have been cyberstalked by the same person. Though I don't think I will afterall.