Acknowledgement...

I chop garlic while Genesis asks where Superman has gone to now. The melody sinks deep into the recesses.Translucent onions act like windows to the past. I've done this before. In my home. In as normal a life as I have ever experienced. I am transported back to when she was in the corner, reading. 

My beacon. 

The comfort of knowing your best friend sat not more than a few feet away wrapped me like a wool blanket, soft with age and the time it took to really know someone. 

I cooked. To feed doesn't come close to explaining what breaking bread meant to us. We cooked to share. Normalcy defined.   

She stirred. I stirred. The onions were done.

Normal was infinite. Both defined and undefinable in the hands of interpretation, I defined it by how happy I was at the time. But my old normal was replete with chaos, making this new normal feel unreal, in both a positive and negative sense. 

Pearl Jam thumped into a long intro, WMA. Eddie Vedder mumbled beneath rolling drums. Dirty his hands, it comes right off. I rinsed the aroma of garlic off my hands as the skillet billowed its fragrance into the kitchen air. The smell wafted into where she sat, peering over her glasses to watch me shake my skinny white ass. I was into it, the cooking, the music, the intoxicating normalcy.

I felt home. Not a home we knew and recreated. One we built for ourselves. 

The way we wanted. 

The new normal.

Use the man you are and measure it up to the man you want to be, I'd heard more than once, twice, a hundred times. I did this repeatedly while we were together and always came up short. The old normal ruminated, refusing to sever its ties, ties that bound, constricted, and held me back. Can the two be reconciled? 

The old normal swept me away when I wasn't looking, wasn't working on keeping the ghosts at bay.

My body rejected the new normal like an incompatible organ. The old normal grew like moss, blanketing, suffocating, draining the new. The new normal fell apart. The old rolled in on road scarring treads, like a regime, back for revenge, with a full memory of being abandoned. It encompassed all the ego and twice the brash of an ousted dictator, who knows nothing about love. The old reigned again.

It didnt take long for the old normal to take me back to the same place it always does. So why return? What wasn't learned in the thousand other times I was here? What more do I have to pay attention to?

I left the new normal for the old and almost died. The old normal wants me dead, or at least subservient to its antiquated doctrine that I am the kind of shit that needs to be eradicated or at least alone.

She answered when I called from rock bottom and pulled me from the rubble. She poured me into the mold forged by her faith that I could have all I've ever wanted, I just had to reach out and take it. 

Because that's what her faith in me told her. 

I learned from this that the old normal needs attention, its due, if its ever to be integrated. I need to handle its fagility with care, let it know that its ok to hurt, stumble, fall. 

But I want normal back. A new one. One where the old can't get to me. I pine for it as I cook broccoli soup for myself. The man I want to be calls out from the darkness. He works undercover, throwing me images of his potential to love, live, and be truly happy. With each instance he sheds a little more light onto his opaque frame, filling it with a touch of color, of substance. Can he emerge? Will he?

I ponder this without her, believing her faith wasn't her mistake. Maybe she was right.

if only...