I took this photo while working with my boyfriend and his dad in the woods the other day… gotta love the Birch’s philosophy: find a place to root, grab hold, and grow something beautiful and full of fantasy!

Once upon a time, there was a love story. It was like any other love story ever written, but better. It was better because it happened to me (isn’t that how it always goes?) The worst part about this love story is that it’s not done yet. No tidy ending. And who’s all involved is in question. But this a love story…

I spent the last night and this morning with my love, a perfectly ordinary evening. So grateful for that.

But, let’s face it, I am alone in this. And that is how it’s always going to be. At least, that’s what it feels like. Am I perpetuating my misery with an absolute statement such as that?! I’ve accepted that treatment. I assumed something that I shouldn’t have…

Okay, I can say this: #saferathome can be a good thing. He and I- We- are too new to ask for what I want. There is a huge flaw in that thinking, but I’m not sure exactly where. Or when. But I want to believe this because the alternative is so painful.

See, my love was forced to choose. I was neither the one who forced him, nor the one he chose. So. I should be grateful for that, because I wouldn’t admit to myself that I already knew the answer. I knew because I had lived this before, in a way. I had always lived this, in one form or another. But the last one was a doozie… a two-decade long catastrophe.

I brought with me a blind assertion to both of those decades. I cannot say when it left, but I…