oh if I could just go If it could just be over, done. gone. finished. please.
1215p
safe but uncertain terrifying.
melting completely down desperately lonely and not wanting anyone to see me like this
1223
I am feeling very much that I do not want to be here anymore so as soon as I finish this joint which is no longer working I’m going to go inside and get in bed with Mojo.
1236 I recognize it now it is the desperate
1242 I can’t take care of myself
219 i have eaten a sandwich bag of stale crackers drag myself inside to be in bed Mojo comes right along after I’ve fed him sunlight splays across the bed and covers his brown/black fur pushed up against my face and I am whole again.
food will come in parts and I am hoping to eat it.
All the food groups?tuna salad bbq chip slider
323 I deserve to eat.*
318p relief.
*i write this line only after having eaten while still eating because I do not know if I deserve to eat. it certainly didn’t feel that way. crumbs falling on the dirt to serve the birds later.
Stay here. Stay here stay here stay here (repeating ad infinitum into the dark, into the open windows of my car out to the night ) stay here please so much more for you so much more please stay.
I look out into the night, look into my mind to remember the things that are waiting for me. please stay. I know you feel unwelcome but please stay. I know that you feel that there is no room for you and that you need to be by yourself but please stay.
Please stay.
I smoke and I smoke and I smoke and I smoke I smoke until finally I find something that makes me laugh, I comment, “thank you, that finally made me laugh.” knowing that it will only last until it doesn’t.
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 late at night at this time of year there are some very dark stretches of route nine heading north to home so dark that i could turn off my headlights
and disappear
there are very few other cars no lights i could drift into nothingness brightness
then black. Nothing.
the road ahead opens its maw promising to swallow me whole. it could be done. Over.
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.
Last year I turned off Facebook memories for 2017-2018-2019 for this week beginning today. Today is the beginning of the end. Today is the beginning of the last week that Gary was alive.
So much in my life has changed in the last four years. I am not the same person who I was four years ago. I am not the same person I was forty years ago.
Forty years ago is when my bipolar disorder began to truly manifest in ways that other people could see. When my behavior became outwardly observable. Things that only I could see and feel and experience from age five were finally coming to the surface. The person that I grew into, the person that I became was by necessity, a damaged, broken, angry, fearful thing. I was shaped by my experience, by the storms inside my brain that no one could understand, but the results of which everyone could see.
The person that Gary met, she was a powerhouse. She had divorced her first and second husbands. She was taking care of her cats. She was running her own shop, she had an employee, she was working a lot. She was working out a lot. She was taking care of everything around her. She was not taking healthy self care.
She was, however, manic 24/7 and hella cute and driven. And on fire.
She is still here, in my brain, part of The Committee. She listens mostly. Doesn’t have much to say anymore, more an observer. She sits back and nods knowingly, joint in hand, smoke curling from her lips. She is Rosie Revisited, captured in a portrait, hanging on my wall. There are times when she does speak, a forceful, if gentle “STOP IT.” I have evidence.
your author. 📷 Gary Hoffman 2002
Four years ago I was forced to stop. I became incapable of movement in any appreciable direction. The formerly driven, push-through-ahead-no-matter-how-miserable-it-makes-you person could not go any further. The “attack wife” had no fight left. I had no accountability to any other human. There was no one there for better or for worse. My life spun completely and totally out of control. I lost things, am losing things I can never get back. And yet…
I have found a new self, a calmer, more even self. I am finding the capacity for euthymia, for a happy evenness above my emotional equator. A firm-yet-squishy pleasantness that exists beyond the edges of what I smoke and carries me through the day and into my involvements with others.
I am no longer miserable.
In voicing this thought, however, there is such exquisite pain for the reality that Gary could have been helped. That perhaps he too could have finally found some measure of relief, as I have. That we just hadn’t gotten here yet in researching. That given enough time, we would have.
We didn’t have enough time. But I do.
I miss you so much. I wish you could see me now. I wish you could hear me now. I wish I could talk to you. The only thing you can do is listen.
And all I really want is to hear what you have to say.
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.
The Salty Widow 