Sometimes it's the little things

I woke this morning from crazy, unsettling dreams.  The kind of waking that made me hesitant to glance at the clock, fearful that there would still be hours left in the night, fearful that there wouldn't be.  The themes varied crazily, but enough to make me pause and think, "Clearly I'm still working through this and that."

Sometimes it's the little things that make life doable.

The tiny bit of hope I found in actually cooking a proper meal in Grandma's kitchen last night.  I'd realized over the weekend that because I mostly avoid the upstairs, and the inevitable conversations that end in me biting my tongue on "I don't care" responses, I've been eating rather unhealthily.  Grabbing snacks and supplementing them for meals.  Take-out.  Frozen pizza.  Basically anything that I could get on a plate in less than ten minutes, making for a quick escape back down to the basement.  Last night I cooked.  Healthy food.  (My body thanked me.)  And Grandma mostly left me alone.  Yes, while the food was in the oven I still escaped - to the shower, and back to the basement, relying on my watch timer to let me know that the food needed to be checked on.  But it was mostly okay.  And somehow, that tiny bit of normalcy - real food, prepared by me, and then carrying my plate to sit in front of my laptop and catch up on a bit of television viewing, that tiny bit of normalcy carried hope.

There was a little bit of hope in taking the cardboard away, just for the evening, from the window in the corner of my basement world.  In the tiny bit of fading dusk peeking through a window not really positioned for allowing light in.

There is an odd little bit of hope in cradling a mug of passion tea this morning, and listing these seemingly little things, especially after a morning with weird dreams, and a cold commute in the dark.