If I Could Just Focus OR On Dizziness

Only I would have a stomach virus my very first day off of work. My immune system sucks. And I haven't seen any of the others in days, and I don't have my cell phone anymore, so I can't text them to find out if anybody else is sick. And being sick makes it hard to enjoy your first few days of school, even though you should be having the time of your life. And it's possible that I've never felt so alone or isolated in my whole life. I miss my friends. I miss my kids. I miss being busy. I miss my job.
Daddy said (and voiced the inside of my head when he did) that maybe I wasn't actually sick - maybe it was just my body picking a ridiculous way to react to a violent change in circumstances - a kind of emotional toxic shock syndrome that my body didn't have a way to cope with.
It's hard to not feel directionless. To, after so long of not having time to ask questions, wonder why I'm doing anything and how it's all going to work out in the end. All of these feelings are things that need to be sorted through, identified, catalogued, and set aside. I need to have a nice long talk with my mom. I need to go out to dinner with my friends and remind myself that I'm still a person. I need to talk my little sister to go see a movie. I need to breathe. But right now, I just feel too tired and too out-of-phase to focus for a minute together and it's hard to make things make sense, and I'm hoping that it's just that I'm still a bit ill and everything'll be easier after another good night's sleep.
Right now, this girl is sitting in a Starbucks that smells more like motor oil than coffee. She's finished her studies for the day, and it's still a half an hour before she needs to walk across the street to after school program, and it's vertigo to be slipping out of my new world into my old, but here's to hoping that it'll keep me sane (and hoping that the vertigo isn't just still-not-recovered-from-a-day-worshipping-at-the-porcelein-altar dizziness). And it's kind of nice, just sitting here. There's so many other people here, some of them in groups and clusters, talking about life, some of them every bit as alone as I am, and none of them are questioning my right to be here. None of them have looked at me sideways. I'm sitting here with my overpriced iced tea and my macbook, come for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission. Breathing and listening to people breathe. And I'm going to fall into a rhythm and life is going to start making sense again and everything is going to be okay.

Also, I applied for a job at Starbucks. Actually at about six Starbuckses. And you'd think I would've heard back from one of them by now. This girl really needs a job.