Am having a really shaky morning.  It's hard when a friend has gone somewhere you can't follow.  I miss him so much already.  He was a beautiful person who readily opened the window for me to his part of the world and shared his culture and that soft Scottish brogue.  I felt better when Nikki was home, but alone it hits harder and there are no hugs.  Four more hours and I can get my hugs.  This really hurts.  And people saying internet friends shouldn't hurt this bad when they're gone piss me off.  Friendship is friendship.  It doesn't matter that we never sat in the same room, it matters that he told me Scottish tales and comforted me when I had a bad day and shared a snark with me about someone we found equally irritating and all the other little details of friendship. 

I had a talk today with one of our joint best friends, who shares a trauma experience with Nikki, and invited us to her home this weekend to open that box together with him (and me, I'm invited to this but said I would stay home if either or both preferred, but apparently I give good hug).  He's still shy about telling people, so he asked me to talk it over with her, so I just got done telling her the story (From my chronological point of view, since I"m shaky on Nikki's timetable, but it's getting clearer as we go).  One of the reasons she's such a great friend is she instantly saw both our points of view, how they dovetail and how they click, and offered me some advice on how to deal with my often unstable emotions.  She was there the time someone I had let really close to me hurt me badly, and saw the emotionally spirally effect i go into that poor NIkki had to live with while I sorted it out. And he was a victim in that too, it was actually him ex-friend lashed out against without warning.  Nikki wanted her to know before so that he could speak freely about how all tangled up it is, and she's wonderfully non-judgmental in all things and supportive of us both just like the wonderful people here.  But it's his first face to face talk with someone other than me about this, that has to be big for him. 

Todays Good Mindset: I had a wonderful friend.  It doesn't hurt like this if it wasn't amazing.

Today's Stupid fear: That my stomach will flip out on me.  It feels shaky, and I hate feeling sick, and it freaks Nikki out that I'm in immediate need of surgery again these days.  But my stomach responds hard to my emotion and feels swirly.  Work with me stomach!  Let's not get sick at work, okay?  At least til we get home?  Please?