It’s an interesting thing how life works out sometimes. (bite your tongue – i’m going somewhere with this.)

As I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, Stephanie and I broke up last Saturday. Sunday, we all got together and I embarrassed myself again, as is apparently becoming a habit. (well, one i’d like to break, at any rate.) Monday I kind of moped around all day because I was feeling pretty out of it. Tuesday I still felt pretty out of it – didn’t really sleep it off, and i’d had this wrenching soreness across my chest and up my right collarbone.

It was on Tuesday, though, that I think my brain had cleared up enough to begin processing what was really different in my life – no Stephanie. I had a fiddle lesson with Eddie (whose cd is excellent, by the way, and you should all ask me for a track or two off it so you can hear for yourself), and then later in the day I took KT out to dinner at a wonderful steakhouse, and was about 20 minutes late to a rehearsal with my new band, Gaida. Still, though, out of it, and quite depressed. For some reason, my brain and thoughts were lagging some noticeable time between thought and understanding. (makes for some trickiness playing the piano-accordion.) I kept thinking, maybe Steph will call .. did this really happen? is it really over?

The idea, “life with Stephanie,” had become so deeply ingrained in my ways of thinking, and not as an obsessive thing, but just as a sort of matter-of-course, that yeah, some day we’d be married, and have kids, and so on, that when that was suddenly absent, it was strange for me, almost like I wasn’t sure what to think about the future anymore.

Then, Wednesday happened……

For the first time in about a month, I slept pretty well. I slept 8 and a half hours, which is a hair’s breadth short of the nine I prefer, but not so bad anyway compared to the 6 and 7 i’d been getting. I woke up and I was sore all over, and my head had a groggy kind of blanketed feeling on it, like I’d overslept or underslept or somehow both at the same time. I had several work-related matters to attend to in the morning, though, and then went off to my violin lesson, where we worked on Bach’s solo violin works (some of the best violin music ever composed – ask me for mp3s!), and Stefana told me then that even though I was depressed about breaking up with Stephanie, that I should consider myself very lucky – in her adorably impenetrable Romanian accent, “You were born under a musical lucky star!” And proceeded to tell me how the amazing Thara Memory wants to turn our string ensemble into a professional performing group – which, if you know Thara Memory, is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of event…. (he’s already attracted some remarkable musicians to the group – his plan is to bring in some very sharp talent to let us neophytes learn from the best in town)

and that — that is when I began to realize that maybe things were going to work themselves out all right anyway… my folk band, Gaida, has at least one show lined up for December, and our bassist is maybe working on another, and after the new year we’re going to play lots of shows all over town. if Thara Memory wants to work with our group, that could turn into an absolutely amazing experience.. to top it all off, my computing career is beginning to develop some really positive and useful contacts, which’ll help all of my employment endeavors.

so, yeah. I miss Stephanie. She’d been such a good friend to me for so long, I just miss being able to talk with her about the usual assorted goings-on of everyday life.

but it isn’t all bad. Seems like things are getting really interesting around here, at any rate…..