So now that Camel’s rehab odyssey is coming to an end, I thought I should bow my head and pretend to be serious and see what positive things I can take from it. I’m eager to hear what it is that he got from it (hopefully a bit more profound than my list).

Of course the biggest thing I learned was that I am a gigantic baby when forced to be away from someone I love. It killed me to only see him once a week in a setting that seemed to make him so uncomfortable. In the beginning I was the same, but I can distinctly remember the moment we went from awkward small talk with just our knees touching, to joking with pinkies entwined, back to normal comfort, heads on each others shoulders. As we sat in an Al-Anon meeting, the speaker talked about the physical, emotional, and spiritual effects of drugs & alcohol, writing “P E S” on the marker board to illustrate her point. She put a line between the P and E to make some other point that I already zoned out on, and all I could think was how much it now looked like the word “PIES”. I leaned over and whispered this to C and he whispered, “Actually, I was imagining NIP on the beginning.” I whispered back, “This is why I love you”and we both just smiled little shared smiles. It was one of those moments when things just clicked back into place and I knew that things will be ok again.

This last visiting day was amazingly foggy, with first the road, then the parking lot, then the next building over slowly disappearing as we watched out the window. In the lot, first my car went, then the car with the white paper “Kids say Nope to Dope” bumper sticker (which had been exposed to the rain way too many times and was now crinkled almost beyond reading) went, sinking into an amazingly thick soup of fog. That same day, I was beside myself with happiness to find an orange ladybug in the ladies room, which I brought outside and deposited on a leaf. It seemed like a good sign.

Anyway, he’ll be back in baby’s arms on Thursday and I can’t wait. I’m all letter-written out. I have no idea what the future holds for us. I’m just happy to get to spend some time with him again.