Down the Rabbit Hole

Lighthouse Beach - April 14th

"Blogging Circle of Friends "
DAY 1248 April 15, 2016
BCOF: Tell us about a place you pass by every day, ...does it make you happy or sad?

There is a place that makes me both happy and sad. I don't pass by it every day but I used to live there years ago. When I was a resident, I drove by it every day. After I had finally found the courage to leave my husband and our home, I took a summer rental down along the New London shoreline. It was a small cottage, not on the water but with beach rights to the private beach at the top of the street. I lived there for almost nine months and the beach was where I often started and ended most of my days.

It was a small, crescent of white sand that looked out over Long Island Sound and the red, brick lighthouse that marked what locals called the race. I lived there with my boyfriend and best friend and in those first few months, it had been every bit like the life I had so desperately. We had parties with lots of laughing friends, we cooked amazing meals side by side and we decorated as much as we could within the bonds of our lease. We were not two people who lived under the stigma of having had an affair that ended a bad marriage, but two people who were building a life and a future together. We were able to live and love out in the open and experience the good life with our family and friends. We walked hand and hand on that beach and sat watching the stars together at night. In the early hours of dawn, I'd find Seth down there, waist deep in the water, gracefully casting his surf pole out to where the birds worked in the dim light. I loved watching him like that, so at peace with his environment, so connected to that place where even his demons couldn't find him...or so I had thought.

It would only be a matter of time until that idyllic existence would crumble around us. Before the lease ran out on my summer rental, Seth began losing the battle with bottle in earnest. Those wonderful nights and serene mornings disappeared, replaced by raging arguments and days full of bitter disappointments. The life I thought we were making was built on a foundation that was too fragile to support the weight of his sickness and our futile dreams. The relationship would continue after our time there was over but those nine months would hold the moments that were among the finest and darkest of our time together. That place is forever embedded my permanent memory bank, etched there by the love, the tears and the pain. To this day, I can't drive past it without the onslaught of emotions those memories invoke, both happy but also extremely sad.



"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
DAY 769 April 15, 2016
We all have those days.... you know the ones where you bite your tongue more times than not
Where do you go to hide out from everyone? Is it always the same place? Random?


I've had a lot of those days lately actually. Honestly, with a six year old in the house, there are few places I could actually hide with any decree of success. I'm not sure it matters where, but as long as I am writing, I am someplace that is uniquely and wholly mine. Is it hiding? I'm not sure. In a way, I suppose it is an escape.