Beloved:

But Sam lay back, and started with open mouth, and for a moment, between bewilderment and great joy, he could not answer. At last has gasped: “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”

“A great shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed and the sound was like music, or water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then as sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from his bed.

“How do I feel?” he cried. “Well I don’t know how to say it. I feel, I feel” – he waved his arms in the air – “I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!”

Not counting.

The funny thing is, I don’t have any regret over yesterday. I feel more like celebrating. Yesterday was meant to be a giant celebration, but to me, it was a subtle reminder to me that I am alive. That I am here.

My phone alerted me with a calendar event. Two hundred days, it said. 200 days. An event that had been in my phone for over 3 months, simply waiting for yesterday. 200 days clean. That is the message that it wanted to tell me. 

Truth is, I haven’t been clean for 200 consecutive days. And as discouraged as I could become over that, I’m not. I’m okay with it. I’m okay. In the best way, I am okay. It’s not that life is so drastically different, but I am.

Days are days and numbers are numbers, and I don’t have to count either. Days are better spent being lived and numbers belong on the bottoms of pages like stories. And stories that have the best endings are the ones in which there was a fight for being alive. This story that I am living is going to have a good ending, but I want it to have a good middle too. Perhaps it got off to a rocky start, but perhaps it has fallen just how it needs to be. Everything in its place.

All said, all done, missing two hundred days is not filled with regret. I am more alive than I thought I could be. Uncounted days give opportunity for creativity. My story can be something more than a calendar marked with days that are supposed to be my freedom. My story can be pages in a book and words on a page and wind in my hair. My story can be lived out in healing and in freedom.

There is more to me than recovery. I am alive.