Fragile Little Things

Just a few moments ago I found out that one of my twin nieces who is 4 was rushed to the hospital after falling off a stool.  No one seems to be answering their phones and with my family a million miles away I am only left with my destructive thoughts to try to piece together what may be happening right now.

First off,  I am overcome with sadness that she fell and hurt herself and I can't imagine how scared and how much pain she actually is in right now.  I worry that because my brother-in-law was without my sister that it was tremendously hard for him to somehow get one twin and the other out of the restaurant they were in and somehow sooth poor little Ella.  I just imagine this horrific terrible event happening and I feel sad and upset that I couldn't be there to help out.  Or how, if only she hadn't taken that one faulty step then she wouldn't have fallen. 

It's moments like these when I realize how much I really truly love and miss my family and how I wish I could be there for them for everything they ever have to go through.  I wish we all lived down the street from each other so that I could be there at the hospital right now in the ER.  Or I could have been there when the other twin fell and cracked her head open.  I think about how many good and bad moments I've  missed in the lived of people that mean so much to me because I am far away.  This year especially.  I am so terribly far away that I feel so disconnected from every one and I feel like I chose to make my life something different thinking that what I has wasn't enough.  Thinking that I needed to search to find new and better things, when I realize now that all I ever wanted - I had.  

I had every thing I could have ever asked for.  Friends, great family, a beautiful place to live, a job that made me happy, a lifestyle that was carefree and full of life and joy and laughter.  But for some reason that wasn't enough, and now, in moments where someone needs me most, I am stuck in an apartment ALONE, because I have no one in Chicago, and crying by myself because the only thing I can do is wait by the phone to hear what happens next.

I am not really living.  I am surviving off old memories and waiting for phone calls.  I am revisiting happier times to somehow manage to live another day.  I am reminiscing through old photos or old laugher but I am not creating anything new. 

I took for granted all the fragile little things I had in life.  The things that didn't seem to matter from day to day.  I thought that I somehow would come to this new city and this new place and find some miraculous thing that I had never seen or had before, when I realize now that the real miracle was having a full and abundant life.  

Life is full of fragile little things that make it all worth it.  My advice:  don't ever forget that.