This picture is taken on Nana and Ba’s boat. They had a Grand Banks named Fleetwing, and Nana always brought zinnias aboard from her garden. The same garden that Ba would go out to and cut asparagus from, but only after the water was boiling. Anything else was just not fresh.

They also had special cups on the boat, two kinds. One had rubber around the bottom so they sort of stuck to the surfaces rather than skidding. And another, which was rounded on the bottom, so they would rock back and forth but not tip over. A weeble wobble for beverages, I guess.

I’ve been thinking of that image lately. I don’t feel like I have a flat bottom (well we know it’s kind of big, don’t we!?) or a sturdy purchase on my surface. I feel like I’m wobbly. Wobbly, all the time, but somehow I never tip over. I oscillate and being my friend must feel like riding a rollercoaster sometimes. Believe me, all of you, the moods are twice as bad for me as they are for you. Grace, Whit, I swear to you: as much as I yell at you, I’m yelling much more loudly inside my own head. And I promise I hate doing it, and I promise I will try harder.

The weird thing is I have certain strands of emotion that are so incredibly constant. As much as I oscillate about most things, I have a firm, steady commitment to certain principles and people. There aren’t that many people who are granted this level of deep, sturdy constancy, and they know who they are. They are, both obviously and ironically, the people who are asked to endure my fluctuations most frequently and viscerally. I cannot quite figure out how to reconcile or get comfortable with this contradiction. It reminds me of high school graphs of the sine curve, honestly: a straight horizontal line across the middle of the page and the regular curve swooping above and below it. Is this normal, this combination of some certainty and many questions? This merry-go-rounding of moods, this combination of steel-solid absolutes and fluctuating emotions?

Today I am a wobbly cup, an inelegant, less-regular sine curve. I hope that the deep seam of constancy within me will gain purchase, take away some of the energy that feeds the vacillations, and help make me a more pleasant person to be around.