what do i do now 854a 17 october 2021

my voice, transcript below

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.

Shower, head north. Make more stuff I guess.

the seventh day. 13th september 2017/2021

I never heard your voice again that last day, today.

By now (8:18am) you had already had a stroke, you were already being prepped for neurosurgery. I never heard your wonderful, delicious, boomy voice that day again, today. That voice, when it was being clever and kind, I could listen to for hours. The last time I heard your voice, a few hours earlier as I was leaving your bedside for some sleep, it was pure and true and you told me you loved me and I take that with me into Oblivion.

I have the words you wrote to me, I have the texting we were doing about the kitties, about your anticipated relief from the meds they gave you every day to soothe your terror, I told you that “they will, my love.” You did not tell me about the stroke. You saved me from that. You gave me the most selfless gift of not having to worry when worry wouldn’t help.

I know that the last words of mine that you saw were that I was coming to you and that I would see you when you got back. I have that unbelievably beautiful post that you put on Facebook that morning. I didn’t know then that these would be your last words. You were so concerned with last words you had a whole book of them on your side of the bed. You didn’t want to end up like Pancho Villa.¹

I know the last words of mine that you heard were from my mouth to yours, to your ear, my head on your chest, your hand in mine. I know you heard me because the doctor told me you could hear me. I told you you were safe, that you were loved, that you were okay. That everyone was working on you to help and that you were okay. That you were still going the right way and that I would see you soon. That I wasn’t going anywhere. I told you that I loved you. I told you that I loved you. I told you that I loved you.

I am posting this to you directly because I want certain people see it. I want to know (even though I won’t) that certain people are aware of what today is, that certain people are thinking about you.

Of course I won’t know. Of course I know that that part is a useless, useless exercise and one that will not bring me any joy. I know that that part is petty and small. And still I feel the need to do it. Perhaps someday I won’t. I believe your memory deserves to be cherished in a way that perhaps your life was not.

I have been learning how to exorcise from my life the things that do not serve me. I have been learning how to be more patient. I think you would be amazed. Truly. And yet I don’t do these things to amaze you, I do them because I am finding my way towards happiness, for truly the first time ever.

I know that every breath you ever took in and exhaled is still out there in the air, circling and eddying and dissipating and coming together again.

I know that the electricity that powered the supercomputer that was your brain and that faulty thing that was your heart is still reverberating out here in the ether, in here, inside me. I know that the ashes and broken bits of bone and teeth that I have on my bookshelves, in the room where I spend most of my time aren’t indicative of who you were, that even at their most concrete, these remains are the most ethereal ones.

Things are still so hard. The pain is getting easier to bear. I have people who love me who are helping to ease the weight. There are times when I feel you in the room with me, when I am transported for a moment, and it is comforting.

There is so much I have to tell you; so many things I need to say. So much I need for you to hear.

I am learning so much.
I need to tell you everything.

bisous,

glitter

¹ https://truewestmagazine.com/article/the-lie-of-villas-last-words/

four years/forty years

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.

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.

1042a 8th august 2021, sunday

I forgive you.
I forgive you for everything.

I did not think it would ever be possible
but in this moment
bells ringing
birds singing
breezy air soft and comforting around me
there is no benefit to questioning any longer
it doesn’t matter

none of the things we said or did to one another matter now
none of the hurtful things, anyway.
you are no longer here to protest and I am too tired to do so any longer.
easier to let go

let go or be dragged.

listen, here: https://recorder.google.com/share/5161f077-5e7b-401b-9b15-565e53ccc52f

I see you, out in the world

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.

(re)possessed

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.

It is 3:55 in the morning and everything is damp.

i do not know if I can take being loved this way.

Yesterday was my birthday.
I turned 53 years old.
I spent the entire weekend with people and missing people who clearly love me and who I love so much.
I spent the weekend

I spent the weekend doing familiar birthday things,
Going to the Lyndhurst craft fair as I have done for decades
(maybe half the artists this time, different layout, timed ticketing, all due to covid restrictions)
stressing out from all of the unknowns
(known and unknown, thank you D. Rumsfeld)
wanting so much for normalcy
(but what is “normal”, anyway? I certainly don’t have a fucking clue)
feeling so much that I have to explain even though I know I don’t
It seems like all I have been doing for the past three and a half years is explaining and explaining and explaining because honestly I
don’t understand any of it.
Just when I think I do I get caught off guard and none of it makes sense again.

I suppose I’m not explaining to others so much as to myself.

I miss all of the things that we talked about, all of those things that we never did.
All of the ways we responded to each other, all of the good, all of the terrible.
The contrast, I think,
the contrast is what’s killing me now.
i do not know if I can take being loved this way.

I can say things out loud and
I can say things out loud and not worry about feeling stupid for saying them.
Being made to feel stupid for saying them.
I can say things out loud and not worry about
I can say things out loud and not worry about being instantly and immediately criticized.
I can say things out loud and not worry about who might be on my side.

I know
I know for sure
I know now that you loved me but I didn’t then. I never knew for sure. I never knew from one minute to the next.
You would rescind and retract your love like the outgoing tide.
Snatch it away from me,
away from my

craven, grasping, grubby little paws

I want to forgive you for saying these things to me.
I want to forgive you for this so much.

How can I miss you so much and still be so angry at the things you did to me?
That we did to each other.

I told your sister once that I never really had an accurate sense of your feeling for me, not that I felt I could believe anyway. That I always thought you thought I was stupid and not enough and too much all at once.
That now I can look at the last things you wrote, and know.
I can look at all the small lovelinesses you left behind.
I can look at those things and know that they are real, they are proof.
Not soon enough to be able to enjoy with you, no.

The very desperate need to hold onto them

((craven, grasping, grubby little paws)screaming to the sky to talk to you
for you to hear me

I am trying so hard to do everything I can to be well.
I am still so
I am still so unwell but I don’t feel crushed by having to hold up every other damn thing anymore if only because I have given up on everything it seems)

I can look at the small lovelinesses that you left and see them for the huge gestures that they were. Everything is relative.

I can see the unexplored and forever unknown possibility of us becoming better to each other, to ourselves.
Knowing how difficult it was even in the very best of us
knowing I would not be this person if you were still alive
proving my progress to the memory of a dead man
wanting so much to escape your critical eye, your devastating words
and yet wanting to show you that I am okay
I am not okay.

Yesterday was my birthday.
I felt loved, and cherished, and adored, and so sad for what we never had.
If you could see how people treat me now.
If you could see how people love me now and aren’t afraid to say, to show.
I know you would, too.

why does learning this shit hurt so much

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.

518p 2d march, 2021. On defeating suicide.

That’s what it is, that’s what suicide is
It is literally the only and one solution to
“I don’t want to feel like this anymore and I know that I will
I don’t want to feel like this anymore and the only surefire way to not ever feel like this anymore is to kill myself.”
That is the only surefire way.I don’t want to feel like this anymore I hate feeling like this I don’t want to feel like this anymore

my voice grows shrill inside my head and out and it amplifies as my heart rate amplifies and screams

I don’t want to feel like this anymore.
There isn’t any other solution to not feeling like this anymore to *not ever* feeling like this anymore.

nothing is helping nothing is helping nothing is helping

it is going to keep being bad, isn’t it
it is going to keep hurting
yes.
yes it is.
people are going to keep being stupid
you are going to want to scream and hit and rage and you cannot
it is going to keep driving driving you down lower and lower and lower until you cannot breathe.

you might not want to feel like this anymore but Mojo.
Mojo and cookies.
Weed.
The full fucking moon and a sky full of stars.
Kissing.
Art.
Music.
Kissing.

There will be kissing Saturday.

so if I’m getting this right the idea is not to wish for it to stop feeling this way because it will always keep feeling this way
I mean it’ll stop for a while but then it goes right back it always has and it always will
it always always will.

no the idea is to not think about how terrible it is feeling and to only think about ending that but to think about all of the things you don’t want to end
Mojo.
Mojo and cookies.
Weed.
Those are all things I can do by myself
Those are all things I don’t have to depend on anyone else.
but kissing.
You can’t do that alone.
You need at least one other person for that.

You can’t go just yet.
You’re not done yet.
There are still so many good things.

1012p 1st march 2021

I miss you.
I’m trying so hard to not miss you and I know that isn’t the point
I am trying so hard to be independent and stand alone on my own two feet even though it is clear that I cannot

when it seems that I have finally gotten my footing underneath
after that terrible summer
i have gained my balance and then I meet you.
you who sweeps me off my feet and takes my breath away in one fell swoop.

I know that you are coming back I know that I have nothing to fear and yet all I have is fear.

I take smiling pictures of myself to prove that I am happy, prove to whom, prove to myself? but the smiles don’t come easy.
crooked smiles, nonetheless.

I think about what you might be doing while I am sitting here and I know that doesn’t serve any good purpose but I do it anyway.

I watch the waning moon rise higher in the frigid sky,
fingers turning white with cold.
clouds moving with the slow scud of a Star Wars sequence,
branches in front of my windshield frantic and terse.

It is finally too cold to sit out here any longer but I am not yet finished.
I do not feel anywhere near able to sleep.
I am missing all of the missing tonight.
All of the missing who mean anything.
Even the ones I don’t want to miss.
The ones I would rather the missing be inequal.
I wish they would hurt like I hurt. I wish I knew they did.
That isn’t very gracious.
I don’t feel very gracious.