This is a Love letter

Dear Group,

This is a love letter, an expression of love in written form.It is not a teenage infatuation letter which is later torn up as a mistake, - Oh, just kidding! The same letter a week later, inserting a different name.

This letter is for real and Real is true. This was love at first sight when I called and asked the woman whose name begins with the third letter of the alphabet, who I’ve known from long ago, if she remembered me- Of course I remember you, she said as if I was being silly. Love began in that moment, it stood between me and the shame of returning after over twenty years in the worst sort of way, in a faded shade of hope neglected in the hot sun, or a word I never had learned. She said to me through the phone, my husband standing in the farthest corner of our dining room, waiting for the hope to come through- We will get you better. My love has grown over two and a half years:126 work weeks, 352 days, too many minutes and incomprehensible seconds. My love is big and forever- for all future time and permanent, the longest kind of love. I’ve only felt it before with pets. My cat, Katie, most recently who I had for seventeen years. I tattooed her name on my arm so not to forget her. But she is impossible to forget. So, are you.

I came here out of a Perfect Storm: a particularly violent storm arising from a rare combination of adverse meteorological factors; a natural phenomenon. It is also a particularly bad or critical state of affairs, arising from a number of negative and unpredictable factors such as two rotator cuff surgeries, a pandemic, all which led to a serious depressive episode- a bad and critical state of affairs, leaving me lost. Not the kind of lost as when I lost my car at the airport for five hours because the parking garage did not have their name printed on the ticket. Or when I called my dad from L.A. and all he had to do was look on Google maps to get me where I was going. Not as replaceable as losing my phone in a parking lot after grocery shopping, or loosing the beginning of my thesis and my boyfriend now husband yelling with concern, “Didn’t you back it up?” I had, three different versions. I lost myself, and I couldn’t back her up for a ‘just in case situation.’ I didn’t know it until the storm had dried itself out, and I was left swaying as if on uneven ground or in shoes whose heels had worn down. Lost was an intense feeling and had been lodged in the illness for years, I had pretended it did not exist. Lost preceded the storm, before where we live now at W. Eastwood, the place I had pinpointed as the beginning. Here it merely picked up speed and crashed. I was lost before 5547 Lakewood, a place I thought we were happy. My lost went as far back as 3235 N. Volz Dr. when my bipolar began. Inside a pretty bedroom with tiny rosebuds on the walls and creamy lace curtains, our black poodle, Licorice, sleeping on the carpet who I would love, forever. When I arrived here I had already been missing.

People go missing all the time. In 2022 546,568 people went missing for reasons such as mental illness, miscommunication, misadventure. In most missing persons cases the missing are found. In 2021 485,000 were resolved.

Approximately 1,600 hikers go missing a year, the Grand Canyon being the most popular. Ten people a year are never found, forever lost. The water is another place. On May 12, 2022 the world’s greatest free diver, Natalia Mochanova, who held 41 world records and descended off Sardina, Italy, more than 232 feet down on a single breath, went missing. No one is sure if she was injured or caught in stray fishing net, blacked out, or is still alive drifting at sea. She most likely lost hold of the rope she would have had guide her to the surface again, passing out in the darkness below.

A more common item to go missing is socks. Both go in the dryer but only one comes out. You search inside, feeling with your hand, then sticking in your head because maybe the dryer is like Dr. Who’s police box, larger inside then outside. You separate your clothes, retrace your steps but you are left with one sock. I had bought twelve pairs of cat socks last year at Target and now have only three. “I put them both in,” my husband will say just as perplexed as me. Sometimes the missing sock will show up in the wrong drawer or a tenant finds it in the laundry room and sets it aside. The cats have been separated and I wear cat socks not meant to go together: a happy dark brown cat with a light brown mad cat. Or one foot with a cat on the top of the sock and the other foot with a cat on the bottom. I have misplaced keys I know were on my dresser but twenty minutes later after frantic searching and a text to my manager stating I may be late due to missing keys, are found in the kitchen next to the clock.

The most common items to go missing are wallets, keys, phones, and umbrellas. No mention of socks. In the United States cell phones are lost most often. We lose items typically in public places such as restaurants, airports, and public spaces. Objects have been lost in space. While trying to clean up a leak a NASA astronaut accidentally let a tool bag slip worth one hundred thousand dollars. In 1965 an American spacewalker lost a glove.

The average person loses nine items daily, 3,300 items a year. Forty three percent of lost items are never found! I searched: People who have lost themselves, people lost in themselves, but the answers where people who lose themselves in others. Google didn’t understand what I meant. I searched for evidence of any human bodies lost in space but as of July 29, 2023 the answer is no.

A larger percentage of items are found then remain lost. Like joy and words, two things a woman whose name also starting with the third letter of the alphabet said I would find again. Finding is retrieving, the retrieval of lost things. Retrieval is the act of recovering something such as myself. When I first came to group, I cried about losing myself, wanting back who I once was. Found implies the same: the same keys, the same sock. Recovering one’s self is different. Found not necessarily, most improbably, the same. Found is discovery.

I was asked when I came here, “What do you want to do?” Everyone was looking at me. “I want to own a bed and breakfast,” I said without thinking twice. The depression had already lifted, the storm settling down.

Fifty-seven percent of lost things are found.

 A woman whose name begins with the fourth letter of alphabet told me long ago to make a gratitude list when having negative thoughts. She gave me a small tan notebook to write them down. My first list began small: Diet Coke. Swimming. My cats. This list will also begin small but don’t worry, D, it will get serious.

I am grateful for: My friend whose name begins with the eleventh letter of the alphabet who told me to buy a wetsuit for swimming outdoors. I am grateful for my wetsuit. I am grateful for my cats and the pomegranate I ate yesterday morning. The cash tips I get Monday afternoon, especially the week of payday.

I am grateful for this group and all the people with letters from A to X. The first X. Only .43percent of names begin with the letter ‘X’. The most common is ‘A’.

I am grateful for staff, for the letters C,D,K,L, P and Dr. F.

The first C for keeping her promise that I would get better. The second C who when I told her I no longer felt joy said I would again and when I told her I had lost my words to write that I would get those again, too.

C and P for my marriage.

 D for this ongoing list of gratitude and self soothing.

Dr. F for telling me you see me and L who wouldn’t let me get away anything, P, too. And P, when I was mad at you and your words stung, you stayed, you made note of my changes.

K, I haven’t forgotten you. You welcomed me now as you did all those years ago.

I am grateful for all of you loving me when I was ugly. I am grateful you never give up.

I am grateful for accepting who I am and letting go of the shame associated with my illness.

I am grateful age fifty-two isn’t too late to be found.

I am grateful for this group, the people who have come and gone. D, this is 22 items of gratitude so far, the most I have ever listed.

My heart is racing. Usually it’s a slow fifty beats a minute. It’s nearly 116, the number of beats in a pop song. Happy songs have a tempo of 150 beats per minute. If I were afraid my heart could beat as fast as 200 beats per minute, as if I were running. With fear a person may feel fluttering, lightheaded or short of breath. This is called tachycardia, a response to emotional stress that may occur out of, for example, fear to move on, but only lasts a few minutes. Tachycardia has passed. My heart beat is back down to 50.

I am grateful to be moving on from lost into found. I will be taking with because moving on is not synonymous with forgetting. When I go back years from now, writing the memoir all this is to become, love will not feel like loss. It will be a four leaf clover, a rabbit’s foot, a free diver resurfacing on a single breath-lucky.