disheartened.

I just had a heartbreaking conversation. Already disheartened about the sky-rocketing costs of owning my POS car, I called a friend to talk about replacing water pumps and timing belts and wound up talking about his two-year-old daughter crying out for her mom in the night and being inconsolable.

"She is deeply, inately sad," he told me. I started to cry. "She wants to know where her Mommy is, and she gets confused when we play with other kids and they all have mommies, and she asks for her at night, and I'm sitting right beside her and I just tell her that her mommy is in heaven and she'll see her in her dreams if she closes her eyes and goes to sleep."

And I had tears streaming down my face and I didn't care at all about how much fucking money it's going to cost me to replace a stupid water pump in my car, because those kinds of things, while irritating, are just snags in the road and don't even remotely compare to the kinds of heartache that life is capable of serving us.

And he asked me why no one had given him photos or videos to share with her, and I didn't know what to say because there's no answer that can justify denying a two-year-old girl as many little bits and pieces of her incredibly fantastic mother that we can provide.

Today is a very disheartening day, and I feel smaller than small.