This site has never purported to be a journal or a diary, or really anything more than a public place where I chose to share some bits of my life with people who are interested in reading them. But it's all been very controlled, and I've been very aware of my audience — from grandparents to potential bosses to strangers — since its inception. And so most of what I think and I do goes unsaid on this site, which for the most part is OK, except that when I look back on prior entries, sometimes I wish I had a better sense of what was really happening between the lines. So this entry is more for me than for you, because this week has been really been something and I need to get that down someplace.
It's been cloudy and insanely windy for two weeks straight, and every marathon training run has been a battle against the wind whipping across the orange and red landscape. The marathon is a little more than a week away, and I realized I've been spent a third of the year training for it. Somehow I hadn't really understood the intensity of what I was undertaking. On Monday my neighbor was murdered, though I had never met her. The yellow police tape came down yesterday. Now there are "No trespassing" signs at the driveway, and there are still lots of police cars. It's brought up lots of existential questioning, for obvious reasons. I don't know when I'm leaving Nantucket nor where I'll go when I do, but slowly my friends are leaving as the seasonal work ends and they head to other jobs elsewhere. I hate the tenuousness of the relationships I'm forging here. I'm exhausted because all I do is work, eat, run, sleep and watch baseball. Occasionally I go out after work, to watch baseball. And then last night something I've wanted as long as I can remember actually happened: the Red Sox won the World Series (see the front page of the Boston Globe). When Johnny Damon hit a lead off home run, I knew we had it, but it was nine tense innings before it ended. When it did, the bar exploded in cheers, but I sat there stunned. And then I started to cry. It was just too much. Everything from the week, from the fall, from the summer, from the whole year, it just overwhelmed me.
