In this moment, I am ensconced in the darkness of my bedroom. It is a cocoon of silence created by my husband managing the chaos of our life and light-blocking window shades. They are my two best friends, my husband and these shades.
Because of them, in this moment, my thoughts line up. I remember things, regret things, dream things. I carry things: world woes, faith tests, wishes.
I pull together words to explain it to you but they don’t rise to the occasion and haven’t for some time. In this moment, there is a smidge of honest despair, a deep belief that the hoped-for has become a resignation to permanent stagnation. And that is fine. Don’t ask okay? It’s fine.
Happy endings aren’t. There are only middles. Until we wrap stories around them that demand a denoument. We do that to them. The words want it. So do our sensibilities. But it isn’t life lived. Life lived doesn’t fit a story arc. Because life lived is only moments and middles.
This moment of mine is as good, as bad as any other of my moments. It finds me melancholy. It knows what happens next, the get out of bed part, the grind the wheat to make the bread part. It pulls me to it, the next moment always impatient to crowd out the now. The next moment feels like an insistent toddler who will scream until I turn myself fully to it, heart, arms, and effort.
But in this moment, it and the toddler can wait.
Until it can’t anymore. And then this moment is oh crap, we’re late because I should have checked the calendar before I thought I could have a moment that belonged wholy to me and my typing fingers. Then the moment is awful. It’s anger and rush and it’s not who I want to be but it is finally all of us in the car, only 15 minutes late to the appointment.
That moment leads to another of over-abundant chocolate indulgence. My, restoring-balance, caffeine- and regret-laced drug of choice.
Lately, most of my moments are tinged a little sad. I know you know how that feels. I know you have lived in these moments too. You might keep pointing out the bright side to me. You might tell me this too shall pass. I don’t believe you. But I will when you are the one who is sad and I am the one saying the comforting things.
The problems are too big for my capacity. The change is too slow for my patience. And the jeans are too small for my waist size. Stupid reasons but they belong to me.
It’s only a moment, a stack of moments that equal a slice of my life. No happily ever afters, no morals to this story, just moments and slices, eventually a life.
open book open heart 
Yes! You are so right. Life is just slices that we arrange into stories. We decide what the endings are by the way we tell ourselves the stories. Happy to be stuck in the middle with you 😉