Super Sonic   +  trip

There's Always Christmas

I still have no freaking Internet.

In a case of "this is totally not even funny anymore", I've just discovered that neither ADSL broadband, nor cable, are available in the TinyTrainTown.

Fuck. To the power of one million. Fuck, fuck, fuck. How ridiculous. I've found the perfect place to live... except for the fact that it cuts me off from the one thing I love to do, from my community, from the virtual place that saving my real-life arse, over and over again.

I'm trying not to be so pessimistic. Telstra (*ahem* *cough* fuck you, Telstra) have signed me up to their mobile broadband. My modem gets here in 5-7 working days. Again. I'm hoping the service is reasonable. I can live with reasonable. Some Internet is better than no Internet at all.

And I guess I'll keep doing what I'm doing now. Not Tweeting, or Instagram-ing. Doing a forty minute round trip every two days to sit in my car, laptop on and iPhone plugged into it, and get a little bit of a fix.

It's enough to make me want to sob. Why does this have to be so freaking difficult?

***

Written sometime last week.

Tomorrow is my daughter’s birthday. I’m trying not to let it hit too hard- she is, after all, only two. And this is only the first birthday of many she will spend without her father.

It’s easier, and harder, with her being such a baby when this happened, such a tiny 15-month-old. I’m spared the grief her brother carries with her sunny smiles, her lack of questions.

I know it will be harder for her, as she gets older…. Grieving a man she never knew.

I’m glad we’re here, in our new house, for her birthday. It feels just right.

And I’m so proud of my sunny, smart, funny, boisterous little girl, who loves dollies and babies and flowers and birds and food.

I’m not going to try and explain the patchwork of disbelief, and sadness, loneliness, confusion and terror that comes hand in hand with each of these ‘firsts’ without my husband.

***

In the top of my linen cupboard is a box that contains all the bits for a pink doll’s wardrobe. I bought it just a week or so before Tony died, in the post-Christmas toy’s sales. It was for the Bump’s second birthday.

If Tony were still alive, that’s what we’d be doing tonight- standing, talking, in the garage of our Purple House, wearing shorts and thongs for the first time in six months after the first real day of spring, while he drilled bits of a tiny wardrobe together.

It doesn’t sound like much at all. But if I close my eyes, I am almost there. And it hurts like I can’t even fathom.

I pulled down that white box earlier tonight. Pulled the bits out, glanced at the instructions.

And decided that all of it, the entire project and what it represented, was just too damn difficult.

Hell, there’s always Christmas.