With a Little Help From My Friends

This last week has been a bit of a roller coaster. 

The morning after we arrived at Bishop, I was making lunch and (like an idiot) cut my hand with my knife (it’s always the approach). I sliced deep through a vein and bled all over the cheese (does that make it no longer vegetarian?), and cried tears of frustration at my own stupidity while Morgan taped a towel to my hand to control the bleeding. 

A few days after I maimed myself, Morgan and I took a (totally not romantic) moonlit hike through the sand dunes of Death Valley. Somewhere between romping through the dunes, a kangaroo rat-sighting, and eating lemon pound cake under the stars, I realized I lost my phone. We spent over an hour combing through the sand by headlamp, trying to Find My Phone with little to no service. As you can imagine, we didn’t have much luck. 

Experiencing these two misfortunes basically back-to-back let me see very clearly that I have a systematic and fool-proof way of dealing with disappointment:

• Step 1--Cry. 
• Step 2--Try to convince self and others that “it’s fine it’s fine this is fine I’m fine.”
• Step 3--Think about all the ways in which this is definitely not fine.
• Step 4--Cry again (very important step).
• Step 5--Make some jokes (e.g. The morning after I lost my phone Morgan: I don’t have any service. Me: Me neither.).
• Step 6--Accept the reality of the situation and move forward (probably with more jokes). 

While I processed my grief, Morgan was an unwavering beacon of positivity and helpfulness. Of course, she physically helped me by dressing my wound and cleaning up the crime scene I had made in the back of the van, as well as wandering around in the middle of the desert at night searching for what was ostensibly accepted as sacrifice by the dune-gods; but what was more amazing was her infallible emotional support. Your girl got moody (see Steps 1, 3, and 4), but Morgan met me with sympathy and hopefulness. 

She dragged me out of the pit of despair to the nearby Alabama Hills and Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, which I never would have visited if my body had been in proper climbing condition (because obviously there can’t be anything worthwhile in the world if it’s not climbing-related (I’m still only half-convinced of this but those trees really were cool)). 

My hand is healing (it’s even climbable with some caution); and as luck would have it, a good Samaritan ended up finding my phone in the dunes and contacted Morgan to return it. We were literally in a Verizon store in Las Vegas about to purchase a replacement when Morgan received the call, and though we had to drive an additional 4.5 hours to pick it up (4.5 hours Morgan was all too happy to sit through--what a trooper), it was so serendipitous that I can’t help feeling like this was some sort of weird flex by the Universe. 

We are headed to Utah as we now make our way back towards New York for Morgan’s wedding (I am officially half way through the Morgan-portion (Mortion) of my escapades--I expect a run-through of the aforementioned Steps when this concludes in May).

Morgan says you have to have the lows to feel the highs, and while I did expect some things to wrong, I might settle for more middle-ground experiences for the rest of our time together. Fingers crossed for good times in The Beehive State (honestly a little foreboding of a state nickname but we'll keep our hopes up)!