I’ve been missing.

For quite a bit longer than usual, really. Before the series of family emergencies and life obstacles, I simply have not been present. Moving back to my home state has been, for lack of a better word, disruptive. To my routine, my writing, my health. Mostly that last one: Health, the kind with no outward sign that sits in your noggin.

I’m rather uncertain how to begin to scale back upward to ‘normal’, but this is another attempt. So here we go again.

I’ve found it easier to be reliable to others for their needs, than to be even slightly responsible for myself and my own wellbeing. I simply don’t care as much for myself. My grandmother was hospitalized and a condition of her release was pick line flowing injections every morning at a time at which I’m typically still passed out. I was volunteered.

I was glad to be useful, but the added stress of it all and the lack of sleep did not do me any favors, I fear. The doctors appointments, the frequent drugstore visits, the 911 scare while I was at work… it was a lot. She’s recovering well though, and that’s all that really matters.

I seek to do the same, I suppose. Recover from that which I have no proof of and have gotten so proficient at hiding, that I’ve been told to shrug it off as if depression was so easily cast aside. Perhaps it is and I’m just particularly weak.

Doesn’t matter. Like I mentioned: here’s another attempt and a return from the missing.

Jessie Gutierrez