This figuring out of things this Figuring out of how things came to be Things came to be me how I Became.
It is overwhelming in every single way in all three hundred sixty degrees.
It is inwardly and outwardly and upwardly and completely bowling me over and tearing me apart
no it is never too late to learn I just wish you were around so I could show you what I’ve learned who I am who I have become.
Who I am still becoming.
I am sitting in my car and I am smoking and I am shaking and I am full of fear and full of love and they are the same thing.
They have always been the same thing.
As I am parsing all of these things as I am As I am. As I am uncovering all of these separate very distinct very discrete things As I am peeling back the layers and understanding implicitly very explicit differences in things I am filled with patience and sadness at all the time lost in between then and now.
Knowing that I have the rest of forever to be well.
Having promised you the rest of forever to heal.
I had the rest of your forever. and you have mine.
This is so much on top of so much on top of so much please.
I don’t want this I don’t want this it doesn’t help to say I don’t want this until I say it I don’t want this I don’t like this I don’t want this none of it thank you please stop
i am thankful. greatly grateful. hugely. for my family, with whom i did not spend the day, but who understands, or at least is willing to take my word for it that it would only harm me to be there. i am grateful for my friends, my lovers, my loves. the people with whom i did spend time, both physical and emotional. trying to be as out of my head as i could stretch while still remaining tethered, albeit tenuously. knowing that this feeling as all feeling always does will pass and that there is indeed if not light then a less-dark path.
I have so much to say to you so much that, um, I just i keep thinking that
I keep wanting to
I just I just want to share with you. I just wanna tell you I just want you to see me now. I want i really
and I don’t think you would blame me for where I am. I don’t think anymore that you would blame me for where I am. Because I
depended on you so much
i depended on you so much and it just took everything away.
you’re gone.
and everything you did stopped with you.
There’s no one here. To see me doing fuck all.
There’s, there’s no one.
No one to report to.
There’s no one here.
There’s Mojo. He was real happy that I went to bed at 9:30 and fed him first and got into bed and he came right in with me. And we snuggled all night, got up around six or something for his medicine. And then went back to bed. Had like 10 hours of sleep sort of
what the fuck am I supposed to do now? what do I do now?
I mean, if I thought there was no way before and then there was but now it’s like everything is used up. I, i If I spend the money I have on the car, I will have nothing else. nothing. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.
I see you, out in the world flickers of you, flashes of you. I see your hands on other people’s bodies I see your shape, under the wrong face hints of your smile, your wink, your dimples oh, those dimples. I see these different parts of you, I see
you/not you I wonder what you would be doing if it was me who died If it was you who was left behind to cope. Where would you be, in all of this mess? How would you be?
Who, even.
I saw a man in a red pickup truck behind me last night, driving home. A man who had a long, scraggly grey beard underneath your mouth. your hands on his steering wheel (your truck was blue; I never saw you in it)
the other day I looked up from my desk and saw the body I used to hug it took every ounce of willpower to not stand up and walk over to not you.
I am sitting on the damp chair (everything is damp) It is 3:41 in the morning and in the space where my car usually lives there is nothing but a half a piece of paper towel I am smoking and I am smoking and I am smoking and nothing is going to soothe this I fear The woman who comes to repossess my car at 3:24 in the morning says, “I don’t want to embarrass you” I am not embarrassed I am defeated, again.
She says, “you have your health” I snicker Do I? Do I. “You have a roof over your head” yeah and a house in foreclosure. “Just call Nissan in the morning” she says, airily. Just call. She says this as if it were actually that easy. Just call Nissan. I try to explain that it isn’t that easy. That I have widow brain and I am bipolar. At the word bipolar she perks up. “Do you need to call someone? Are you going to be okay.” wanting to absolve herself of further responsibility The answer to that is obviously no and no. No I am not going to be okay. No I am not okay. No I am not okay no I am not embarrassed but I am desperate. How am I going to get back to sleep.
So if I’m right about this, all of the manic spending that I did, all of the things I did to treat myself, all of the retail therapy that I did that never filled any kind of hole, all of the evidence of this that is sitting in the house that I am losing that I am having so much trouble sorting through.
And now that I am not living in that house, now that I am trying to do my very best to figure out how to dispose of all those things, and it is so difficult and making me feel so empty and so useless and so all alone like I am worth completely nothing, perhaps it is because I am not
That all of those things that I collected, that I bought in moments where I felt not enough, maybe it is that I feel that I will be even less than not enough if I get rid of them.
Spending money on those things when I didn’t have it to spend but I bought them anyway because it was self-soothing and now that I have no money and now that I have to get rid of them even though buying them made me feel worse it feels like that was the only remedy I have available and now I am disposing of that like it didn’t even matter, like it didn’t even help ever at all.
clear, warm(ish) night, listening to music over headphones, productive day, visiting with some of my favorite people and meeting new ones. there’s some stuff rolling around in my brain; I’ve said some, but it seems too harsh, too cold to say, but it’s true.
my husband died and I was able to become who I am now. he died so that i could live.
I can barely even say the words without wanting to smack my own face in horror, but it’s true.
I think I’ve said it out loud to maybe three people, each time thinking my own skeleton will exit my skin when I say it. I feel like I am daring myself to remain conscious, like maybe I’m dreaming. I’m not dreaming.
I mean this is horrible shit, right? I’ll tell you something else truly terrible: on more than one occasion but fewer than ten, I confided to best girlfriends that
fuck this this is terrible.
“…no place to go but everywhere…” ²
I’d said to these women, these women all married like me, in various states of dysfunction in their own marriages and relationships, all bent and dented and damaged and nearly broken. Like me.
“…I’ve been waiting for you, in sunshine and rain… won’t you look at you now, you mad molecule…” ³
oh gods. Oh gods.
“The problem is all inside your head, she said to me The answer is easy if you take it logically I’d like to help you in your struggle to be free… …it grieves me so to see you in such pain I wish there was something I could do to make you smile again I said I appreciate that and would you please explain About the fifty ways” ⁴
goddammit.
I’d said to these women wtf knows how long before he died “If he could just be gone. I don’t want him to hurt, I don’t want him to die. I don’t want anything bad for him, not pain, not suffering. I just want to stop being in so much pain.”
and now he is and now I am. Now I am
I am becoming something more than I thought I could. I would like the dissenting voices to kindly shut the fuck up, please and thank you.
“…I just want to say I love you And make sure you feel it every day ’cause if today had been my last chance It’s just something I wanted to say…” ⁵
I feel like you know, in this way that my tenses and my conversations are still fucked up three and a half years in I feel like you know like you see Tonight, especially. Now. Like right the fuck now jesus fuck.
“Well I don’t mind sleeping alone If it means I don’t have to play your crazy games no more You’re the most precious thing I’ve ever seen But I ain’t gonna let it slide when you’re mean to me I know the love that I deserve…” ⁶
Deserve is a word I take issue with. Earned is better.
The Salty Widow 