letters into the void 1:11a 29th may, 2020

I hope you are safe and well, and stateside.

I’ve gone back to work, albeit only one day a week with clients, one when the shop is closed. I went for a test at the drive-through location in New Rochelle. Everyone there, the State Troopers, the Army, the healthcare workers, everyone was so calming. One of the army guys, the name on his jacket said Lorenzo, he called me beautiful. He saw how nervous I was and he called me beautiful.

I’m waiting for results, no symptoms but I’m in a public-facing position. I was sicker than I ever have been in my life back in January but no way of knowing if that was it.

I’ve gone back up to the pottery after a 5 months hiatus. I’ve wanted to go back, needed to go back. I’m making new work with nowhere to sell it but online. It isn’t really the selling that the making is about, though.

I called my father.
I haven’t spoken to him in a brutally long time. i know that he did not recognize my voice. but i told him that i loved him and he told me that he loved me too. i’m going to call him again this saturday.

I’ve been writing more, leaning into how cleanly I want to live my life, how little extra baggage I really want to carry with me. Channeling and focusing the rage that has been, in my past, such an incredibly destructive force with little to no benefit into something that I can use as both a tool and a weapon. It’s been this side of exhilarating, and I want to keep it that way. It isn’t something I want to revel in feeling but to be glad to be done with.

My second husband used to get off on watching my fury rage on unfettered. He loved how sharp I was, how precise. How everything I said was undeniably true.

That is until the day it finally turned on him in earnest. The day in couples’ therapy when the doctor asked me how I was feeling after watching me sit and seethe for 20 minutes, when he asked me how I was feeling and I turned to my husband and answered,

“I’m feeling like every time you fall asleep before I do how much I’d like to slit your fucking throat.”

I can tell you he didn’t like it very much then.

I’m not going to send this to you, am I.
No.

I have no way of knowing if you are alive.
I wish I did.

victress. 11:14pm 26th may, 2020

i have harnessed my rage,
my dysphoria
my fear.
coalescing
twisting down deep
needling in not a pinprick, no
knives-sharp.
talons-strong.
this particular prey has been waiting
simmering
back-burnered.
today, too much.
enough.
time to stick it straight through the eye and into the brain
destroy it so efficiently
so completely
so, so.
that even an offender this egregious this
deserving of wrath this
necessarily murderous preciseness
so fucking dense that volcanic fury is all that will forever make him think twice
and again,
and again.
he knows my passion,
whet it.
words on a screen are nothing to the maelstrom that i bring in the flesh.
i kept going, calling him out for every transgression.
i paid out enough rope for him to not only hang himself
but macrame a body bag.
and boy howdy did he deliver.
i launched my final assault, knowing i’d need no more.

do i hope i got through?
do i care?
yes, not for him, but for the countless women he will no doubt woo and offend.
truly believing
bitches be crazy.

he’s right.
bitches be crazy.
but we’re not stupid.

Things that have made me burst into tears today: a list

My own writing. I had to stop, and leave it for another time.

Driving to work and listening to the governor’s briefing where he assured everyone paying attention that taking the COVID-19 test was easy and that he would show us. And then he proceeded to show us just how easy it was. That there was nothing to it. He did exactly as he was told. He followed the directions and there was nothing to it.

Recalling to a friend on the phone the feeling of a neighbor’s eight-week old puppy in my arms. Taking two selfies with this sweet baby angel and not giving a single shit that the photos are not aesthetically pleasing but for that I am so motherfucking happy in them it doesn’t matter that I have like six chins and my mouth is doing something weird. And jfc what a run-on sentence.

The Peekskill sign on Route 9A when you come around the corner where it meets up with 9. I see it every single time and today, with the sun hitting it just right? Home. I am close to home.

These are the big things. A host of smaller things also, but these are the highlights. The ones that leave me stinging, wide-eyed-and-mouthed in a silent scream.

The only thing for it, as I was driving and couldn’t light up (as much as I wanted to dear gods if I could just. No.) the only thing for it automagically appeared. Dirty, filthy guitars filled my car. Fiercely echoing, I cranked it nearly to the top. Heartbroken, In Disrepair blasted from my speakers as I hit the straightaway on 9. I opened the windows, the sunroof. Flexed my calf, increased my speed.

Rosie, my red Juke, responded like a lover.
Rocketing up the highway wasn’t smart. Wasn’t responsible. I didn’t give a single shit. This is what I needed.

There was no one in my way, Waze showed clear sailing. I accelerated until I hit ninety, no strain, my curls whipping in the tumult. With the music storming all around me, wind buffeting my face, the depression finally broke. I felt it physically melt in my chest. My shoulders unclenched, lowering from where they’d been, up around my ears. I let out a long, low whistle, much the same as I have heard from lovers.
Release.

Gary saves the day again… 10:08p 11may, 2020

That’s what the subject line read.
“Gary saves the day again…”
An email from T**, a client of my husband’s who I haven’t heard from in a year, if not more.

Thinking it might be spam, (the all-lowercase addressee and the name of my dead husband in the subject line seeming strange but somehow remembered) I was only slightly distracted from watching the new season of “Dead To Me”, ironically enough. coming down off my necessarily extreme cannabis high of earlier, however, and thinking about what I wanted to smoke next while waiting to hear back from several friends, I opened the email.

It said, (and this is where I am stopping, having read beginning of the email, gasping for breath and not wanting to look any further, not yet, not before I refilled my lovely pipe and repaired to the privacy of my parked, darkened car where I could smoke and sob in peace) in part (and here, I should tell you, I am pausing to take an enormous hit of medication. Perhaps five or six. I brought refills. Who can know for sure?):

Lysa,
One of the core components of (our company) which Gary designed stopped working today after the Government changed something on their website. Back in the good-old-days I would have called Gary in a panic, he would have calmed me down and quickly resolved the issue. Now I have to reverse engineer his work in a language of which I am only somewhat familiar.
You got some comfort from seeing his writings last time I e-mailed you, so I thought I would share how he saved the day today. While attempting to understand what he wrote, I looked through his copious notes and discovered that he described in great detail how he solved this problem last time. This allowed me to bite a little piece of code that he wrote years ago and use it to fix everything. If he hadn’t documented everything so well, I would be spending the next few days trying to figure out what he did while customers complained.
Man I still miss that guy.
Hope you and the kitties are well. N** and I finally closed on a house after living in a crappy apartment for ** years, so now we get to live like adults. How are things with you?
Below is boring shop talk, but it reminded me of how much I liked working with Gary and how good he was at his job.
T**

(So here is where I am now, sitting in my car, about to read words from my husband from years ago which somehow saved the day today for someone’s company. Eyes wide and full of tears, of missing and knowing how much of a huge void he left.)

a screenshot of the kind of zealous documentation Gary adhered to.

How do I explain that?
How do I explain how seeing what looks otherwise like gibberish I know is tinged with his particular flavor his
Stink (he used to say “I like your stink”, a pretty aggressively passive-aggressive way of saying something nice, like he had Calvin as an interlocutor)

Knowing that code that he wrote notes for six years ago with no idea of the future
(especially not that he wouldn’t be in it)
would save the life of someone’s company today.
That that person chose to pay that forward by remembering how much it comforted me the last time this happened and to let me know again.
save my life, today.
Gary did indeed save the day again.

to me this is what it means by
“may his memory be a blessing”
.
there is so much pain
so much brokenness in his life, my life
our life.
I got shoved into the lessons I am learning
everything all at once
a whirlpool of chaos
nothing to do but be stuck
choosing to pick through the debris and only take forward what shines
what will shine with enough patience
taking forward the joys, the lessons.
I wouldn’t be here but for him.
In every single way.

may his memory be a blessing.

pandemic diaries: 10:55p 6 may, 2020

in desperation I tried to not be desperate.
(I do not think that I was successful.)

to your infinite credit you did not shy from my touch
you never do.
I stroked your cheek, your chest, your collarbone.
watched you inhale
exhale.
I tried to be in the moment, to get out of my head and simply feel.
Wanting to swallow you whole,
to be swallowed. Whole.

i could not.

breathing through my open mouth
so I would not sniffle
so I could control it (could I? Girl.)
so my breath would not hitch
so you would not know.
Right.

I had to stop thinking about
about not touching any other person
until I see you again
having not touched any other person since the last time I saw you
And the time before that.
no other physical contact no matter how wholesome.
None.

I am hoping that the intrusive, inconsistent noise from overhead isn’t disturbing you
anywhere near as much as it is clearly disturbing me.

i cannot sit with these thoughts anymore so I turn away
pushing myself back up against your hip to hide the inevitable tears that
are
Falling.

you know.
you just know as I just know, always.
You curve me into your embrace
resting your head on mine
dear, sweet thing.

You have given me exactly what I have needed
And for a while, it is enough.

pandemic diaries: 7:41a international star wars day 2020 | birthday thanks

“I don’t know how it’s possible, but I, I think my birthday this year was possibly the best one I’ve ever had. It’s certainly one of the most special, and I want to thank everyone for being a part of it. 52 on 5/2 I’m certainly not playing with a full deck it’s more like a deck full of jokers.
So thank you everyone for being part of it.”

for the record (and as far as i know you look it up if you don’t believe me) for the past fifty-two years it has been shitty exactly once on my birthday. That was 2001, the year I turned 33 and one of the years I was in and around dating Noel. I’m sure he had just recently broken it off again. Anyway.

my parents built the house I grew up in in 1970. A typical, split-level ranch. Right outside my bedroom window they planted this glorious cherry tree, a Kanzan Sakura, with the big, fat, pale pink marshmallowy blossoms. I love that tree, it’s my favorite flower of all. Blooms every year on my birthday.

I don’t remember how early on but it was early, I told Gary that when I finally owned my own home I would plant one of those trees in my yard. The first spring that we were in the house we planted our tree. We didn’t plant it in a good spot, it didn’t get anywhere near the kind of sunlight it needed underneath the massive canopy of maple and oak. I could, however, see the blossoms from my bedroom window.

Last year, after the house went into foreclosure, I knew that would be my last birthday with that view, of cherry blossoms from my bedroom window. And then the neighbor went ahead and chopped down the maple and oak, that gorgeous canopy of green that had been protecting my head for 13 years. A full backyard of sunlight meant that the cherry tree would have a chance to grow properly now, reaching up towards the sun instead of slinking around corners to find it. Only I wouldn’t be here.

This year however, with the world on pause, I got one last, magical reprieve to spend with my tree. So I went to my backyard, prepared to see admirers as any queen would, and enjoyed my day under the cherry blossoms.

pandemic diaries: 3:53p 26th april, 2020

i took two showers yesterday
one when i got up, thereabouts
another after i knew for sure that i was going to see you
brushed my teeth, twice.
(nothing is sure anymore.)
i hate having to keep putting myself out there to ask
hate being the one to put myself out there to everyone
this isn’t about you so much as it is about me.

i reach out tendrils
lengthening, sometimes to the sky, it seems.
feeling so very pushy, always
but now even more so since there is literally no one to talk to
every in-person conversation, interaction feels precious
hoarded.
turned over, inspected. saved.
i don’t want to waste any of it on anyone who doesn’t matter.
screens are one thing but it is no substitute,
so flat, so
cold.
so not real.

i had hoped for more skin time
more actual face time.
more hugging
more snuggling, curled up.
more of your hands in mine.

patience is something.
i know i cannot push you, you will stand firm.
and there is only so much that i can say.

i am thankful for you
as i know you are thankful for me.

as always.

pandemic diaries: 734a 25 april 2020

good morning.
it is a beautiful day
the sun is out, shining on my bared skin
raptors circle overhead
in the clear blue sky
and we are all thinking about death.

softness, poignant and melancholy in my ears.
rediscovered from a time of such darkness a hopelessness, back then.

i cried every day eleven years ago, every day.
always on my way to work.
often in the bathroom.
usually from relief in the parking lot.

“…lose yourself in lines dissecting…”

good morning.
it is a beautiful day.

pandemic diaries 224p 21 april 2020

i cant smoke enough today
cant distract from all the love all the
couples
all of the truly meant “i love you”s
not the sweet softness of friends or family but the true
deep, desperateness of a real love.
the kind of love that has seen pain, felt it within its walls.
heard its voices quake in fear.

this pain this
absence.
this lack.

the isolation makes it more intense more
invasive
the virus of loneliness manifesting and growing wilder still.

try as i might to quench this beast this
monster
i sit under the clear skylight
under the rain
no sound other than the shrieking in my skull
the purring of the engine
the staccato of the rain on the car.

six thousand
five hundred
seventy-eight days ago
on a day very much like (and completely unlike)
today
i saw your face for the first time
saw you wink
for the first time saw that thousand-watt smile
for the first time.
6,578 days ago i fell in love with you for the first time.
there honestly has not been a single day since
that i haven’t had the most incredibly complex thoughts about you.

i wish i could comfort myself with the belief that somehow
somehow you know all this
that in some way you are hearing me
seeing me.
still loving me in that complex, fierce way you had.

but this is how i know there is no god.
this
this is how i know for sure.
(nobody fuckin come at me over this you can fuck off and keep your smug shit to yourself i am TIRED)

unrequited love is BULLSHIT and it is roaring inside me like a furnace
oh it has places to go (well it used to, now didn’t it)
but it is held back
it is most definitely restrained

it doesn’t want to be.

everybody EVERYBODY
everybody says how strong, how brave, how resilient
WHAT CHOICE DO I HAVE.
no one is coming to save me. No one.

so i sit and i smoke and i cry and i hold my own hands.
and i scream inside my head all day long.
and when i do talk to someone anyone
mania takes over i have no control.
and i scare myself.

gam zeh ya’avor gam zu le tovah / this too shall pass and it is all for the good
i know I KNOW
but it is killing me NOW.

it’s been almost an hour that i’ve been out here, now, smoking.
my plant is finally drenched.
my medicine is finally working.
i smoked enough to take down a fucking RHINO.
there won’t be any ill effect from this, either.
my body knows what it needs, i feel clearheaded, if stoned.
none of the usual giggliness i usually do but most definitely
uplifted.
my medicine works hard,
i work harder.

pandemic diaries: 6:35p 14 april 2020

holding your own hand just isn’t the same.