christy frink

I woke up and felt relaxed enough to be productive, so I was. I finally got the Fit’s tires rotated (long story involving my wheel lock key rolling under my floorboards and repeated [frustrating!] attempts to find some place that would remove them for me and finally finding that place, which was the one place that was open today, on Memorial Day). I was so happy about that happening that I then visited a car wash that was (illegally?) open before 4pm and gave the Fit a much-needed bath. I needed it to have a bath more than it needed to have a bath, probably. And once that happened, I spent another 45 minutes cleaning out the inside, vacuuming every possible surface, wiping down every surface that couldn’t be vacuumed, Windexing the windows, Rain-Xing the windows, and treating a few spots of winter (or maybe flood?) mud, and Scotchgarding the upholstery. Then I opened up a new air freshener and clipped it on the air vent. Then I (briefly!) hosed down the plastic floor mats.

And not that anyone out there cares about every detail of what I did to my car, but I can’t believe how much it did for my sanity. I don’t think it’s been that clean since I brought it home from the dealership almost a year ago (!). The Fit is officially ready for the next adventure.

While I was waiting on the tires, I started reading The Raw Shark Texts. I liked this:

Every single cell in the human body replaces itself over a period of seven years. That means there’s not even the smallest part of you now that was part of you seven years ago.

Everything is changing.

In the early days of my second life I noticed how the shadow of a telegraph pole would inch between the gardens of two houses across the street - from 152 to 150 - over the course of several hours, from lunchtime into evening. After watching this a few times I did the maths, the shadow movement from one garden to the next meant that both houses, the telegraph pole, the street, all of us, had traveled one thousand, one hundred and sixty miles around the earth with the turning of the planet. We’d also traveled about seventy-six thousand miles through space around the sun in the same period and much much further as part of the wider spiraling of the galaxy. And nobody noticed a thing. There is not stillness, only change. Yesterday’s here is not today’s here. Yesterday’s here is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s behind the sun, it’s in deep space, hundreds of thousands, millions of miles left behind. We can never wake up in the same place we went to sleep in. Our place in the universe, the universe itself, it all changes faster and faster by the second. Every one of us standing on this planet, we’re all moving forwards and we’re never ever coming back. The truth is, stillness is an idea, a dream. It’s the thought of friendly, welcoming lights still shining in all the places we’ve been forced to abandon.