I miss...

...Kopecky Family Band.

...not having to work full time and sacrifice myself at a job I hate.

...being able to spend time with friends when I want to.

...my gay friends who have forsaken me for no reason.  I was one of the few who didn't freak when they came out, but for some reason I just didn't make the cut.  It's happened too many times for me to say it's just him or her...I can't make heads or tail of it.

...being Catholic.  The Mass.  Communion.  My veils.  Believing with my full self and *knowing*.  Things have come up in my life and my research that I cannot conscience being Catholic.  It was hard enough to live an unsustainable lifestyle.  But to tell me that now that I've found my soulmate that I cannot have him because he is paralyzed...it is wrong in so many ways.  I cannot support this. 

...cooking.  The last month I lived at my old apt my refrigerator broke and they wouldn't fix it...I couldn't keep food.  Then I moved in stages and lived a month without dishes.  Now the apt I've moved into already had many 6-legged inhabitants and in the process of evicting them I've had to spend the last month with a kitchen covered in poison.  I miss the thrift, the satisfaction, the gastronomical happiness of home-cooked food, even if it is simple fair. 

...my grandmother.  She died in her sixties...much later than my father's parents who were dead long before I was thought of, but still too young.  But I selfishly miss her!  I was 10 when she left this earth, and I'm more her than anyone else.  Everyone knows it, everyone says it to me.  But she doesn't know me.  Over the past couple of years the wound of her death has opened up like it hasn't been 14 years. 
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Why is it I appreciate types of people that are not commonly appreciated?  I love old people, disabled people, gay/trans people, people of other ethnicities/religions.  They have stories and experiences.  I have such an appreciation of who these people are individually and within their specific cultures if applicable.  I will never understand why people say old people are past their use.  I will never understand why people will never see past the wheelchair or the stutter.  I will never understand why people call differences in gender or sexuality "abomination" or "disgusting."  I will never understand why people don't understand the beauty of different or don't perceive the fount of knowledge they are turning their backs on.  Why am I so different?  Every time I get caught researching or doing something as innocent as going on a date with my boyfriend, I am reminded by the stares and comments that I am not like them.  I walk alone, neither fully different nor fully the same...just open-hearted.