(Insert Pithy Title Here)

It’s finally warm here.

The air smells fresh, despite the gray-brown-beige colorscape. The double windows in my bedroom are open, shades pulled up for the first time since we moved into this house three years ago. My mother opened them, pulling on the thin, white cords.

“There,” she said. “That will make you feel better.”

I wish it would.

Under normal circumstances, the onset of spring-like weather would see me outside blowing bubbles with The Poo, suggesting impromptu runs to the playground with Shaggy in tow, and after-dinner jaunts to the custard place, finally open for the season.

Instead I am laying on my bed, knee akimbo and throbbing, foot elevated above my heart for at least the next 24 hours.

There are so many people suffering right now. Cynthia is dealing with another blow from the enemy, and Cathy’s father died. NieNie struggles to heal, while grappling with drastic changes to her physical being. Lisa died.

Kids get sick, families are murdered, the economy robs us of security and confidence as the days roll ever onward. That’s the thing, isn’t it?

Time just keeps moving, with or without us.

When I hold my life up to the light and examine it from every angle, it looks … it looks pretty good. I have food, shelter and clothing. I work and make some money doing something I love. My children are bright and healthy. I have extended family members who love me.

I have a good, kind husband who does the dishes every night after dinner, as I gather the kids up for bathtime. Their fresh little roly-poly bodies run and wiggle and romp as we draw the water and talk about the nothing that makes up our everything.

I am blessed.

So why do I feel this sucking fear in my chest?

Trapped in here, in this suburban Midwestern bedroom, I stare at the ceiling and wonder what is going to happen next.

Is that the mailman? Will he bring another bill we can’t pay?

Is that the telephone with more bad news about loved ones sick or dying?

Is that shortness of breath I feel, or just the tightness of a body at rest for too long?

When they wheeled me into the operating room Wednesday morning to look inside my knee, I looked up into silvered lights and thought about my dead father. I wondered what he thought about when they put the mask over his nose and mouth, preparing to tear his insides asunder.

I faced nothing like the blackness that ate my dad’s body. I expected to come out from the surgery fixed, repaired. I am a machine, nothing more, a machine with a part that needed replacing.

Instead I come away with a swollen leg and days lost to healing from a pointless surgery. Yes, something bad is wrong with your knee, the doc says, and no, we don’t know what it is, and we couldn’t fix it.

The first thing my husband said to me when I woke up, before I could even form the question on my lips: “It isn’t cancer.”

That we both feared it might be speaks volumes about how we live.

We live crouched in a defensive stance, bracing ourselves for a blow. Every bit of news has the potential to bring us down. We are a sliver away from the razor’s edge—or at least, that’s how it feels. Are we crazy?

The easy answer would be yes, for God’s sake, the two of you are out of your fucking minds! Everyone has stress. Some people have MORE stress than you do. Some people’s actual LIVES and the lives of their actual CHILDREN are in danger.

But this constant, low-grade disappointment and fear wears on me just the same. Yes, yes, I know I am (mostly) lucky.

Yes, I want to count my blessings, and even more so, I know that I should.

I want to wallow in the embarrassment of riches that is my family. But all I can do is put my head down and wait for the next blow. So far, we’ve escaped from our skirmishes with fate with bruises only.

But next year continues to look bleak for us. I have one foot reaching over the line to the future, while another is stuck in the wet cement of the present. I can’t live fully in either world.

The fact that I am walking with a limp now strikes me as so perfectly metaphorical that all I can do is laugh. I once wrote that I could hear my father whispering in my ear. I wrote that he wanted me to jump.

I jumped.

And haven’t landed yet.

I am afraid of the impact.

After all, I have this bad knee.