i hate being alone so much. i hate it hate it hateithateithateit quiet and alone and lonely and cold even in this heat cold. even in this heat the cold strangles my blood freezing it cold solid cold i shiver in this heat.
i could have stayed at yours but no. i am afraid. the rain, the dark, the aloneness. you held me in your arms you squeezed me closer felt the heat bloom from my body setting it afire holding me closer. i tangled my fingers in yours hoping to keep some of you for me when i go.
i sit in your kitchen, smoking vibrating in place i cant sit still inside i don’t know how i appear, manic, most likely i hate coming to you, needful, needy. i don’t think i ever feel pity from you, i don’t think (if i begin to think i won’t let go so lets just not)
i know i am not always like this i know that but right now i am very much like this and it is hard to be. much less be around.
I wonder what you would say if you met my Brian. Would you look up at him and say (head cocked like the dog on the victrola commercial)
how? how are you so good? why are you so good? I see how she loves you. Everyone does.
And he would look at you with kindness in his eyes and his voice would drop and he would say
aww sweetie because you are me.
I want you to feel the love I feel I want you to know what this feels like because I don’t know that you ever have. I don’t know that I have ever felt this love for you before now. now, when it is un/complicated.
It hurts me that this is here and you are not. That I am here, That you are not.
How I wish. How I envy the decades you have had learning this man, evolving with this man.
How grateful I am. For your caretaking your taking care of each other until I could get here. I wasn’t ready. So many things had to happen, first. so many terrible things. I arrived, breathless, on your collective doorstep. Invited in but still a surprise.
sitting in my car, rain smashing into the windshield coming hugely into the narrow slit I’ve opened in the window smoke hazing around the inside of the cabin
It is pouring (again)
giant crocodile tears wetting my sweater I don’t dare lower the window any further not even to tap my ash thunder competing with the din of the rain on my roof
I have eaten and smoked and am grateful for the help I had in making it through this day. I am not alone.
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.
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.
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.
a photo of me with my unwashed, tearstained face, in front of a wall with a laser-cut rising sun sculpture, a photo of me as “Rosie (the Riveter) Revisited” by my husband in 2002, and an exhortation to “cheer up honey pie” . there is no filter on this photo.
I am driving and I am listening to the President and I am crying I am crying and I am crying and I am crying and they are huge ugly tears “A dose of hope”, he says and the tears flood down my face “a dose of hope” he says
Hope is something that I never ever had. It was never even on the list of things to look for. Hope was for the foolish and the losers and the suckers. the idea of hope was as painful as the reality of unrequited love, a crush that goes nowhere, being ghosted by someone you really, really thought you liked. Hope was not for me, not ever.
but maybe, maybe now it is. maybe I can have some for myself, just a little. I’m not asking for much. Just a little.
Hope. The taste of it, the texture. rolls around in my mouth, between my fingers. hope.
I draw my hand back, my heart back sharply from the edge of this hope too sharp, this edge, too unknown.
My chest tightens, my jaws clench, my fingernails dig into my palms. breath shallows, and hitches as my eyes darken, kohl smudging my cheeks.
“Guess what!” the President says, excitement clear and bright through the speakers “We landed a rover on Mars!”
You say I never write about you. It’s true. well Not exactly true. You are in everything I write. You are part of how I am able to be still here So yes I have written about you.
But tonight it is in a conversation with another lover that I think of you that I am reminded of you.
I am saying that you are French and you wear scent and I don’t think that the French are allowed to not wear scent and this makes me giggle. And that what you wear is perfect for you and not too much and just enough. Just like you are not too much and just enough. I say that you are polished, and smooth, and slick, and you wear cufflinks (you wear cufflinks that I made for you) and you always look perfect and that I love when I cause you to not look perfect. That it makes me happy. I know how happy it makes you to have me undo you.
I smile for the smile in my voice and my lover can hear that smile and he knows that smile. He has heard that smile. He has made me make that smile.
You have allowed me to be open about who I am what I want how I know my worth. Your vulnerability with me has allowed me to feel safe, and worthy, and brave. You have trusted me, and gained my trust. I can depend on the memory of you. I have learned the importance of being wanted instead of needed.
Desired. Ached for, pined for. Lusted after and well missed. Treasured. Cherished.
Adored.
“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”
Up at four-something; the sound of an upchucking cat isn’t a noise to be ignored. Pushing him (gently) off the bed so I won’t have to wash the entire coverlet again. Tangled in the comedic/horror movie mess of giant bed + weighted blanket + CPAP mask and racing against the threat of a heaving animal simultaneously a thousand miles away and on top of me, I know that my day is going to be a fight.
The waves of depression and subsequent rapid cycling and eventual mixed states yesterday only subsided because I smoked myself into oblivion. I ate a shit ton of sugar and passed out. Took an edible to stay asleep.
Mojo. DUDE.
I go to the bathroom, look at my phone, my email. I’ve been avoiding the actual mail and swiping left on my email like it’s a dating app. The email saying my rent is posting today.
Okay.
I’ve been looking at my balance, not buying things. Nothing. How do you get money?
You sell things.
You have things to sell. Good things. You even have photos.
why, then. why frozen. Fogged. Stuck. Frozen.
I can do for Mojo, I can take pretty good care of him. If no one else.
It’s 6:14 in the morning and I realize I can’t go to work. I can’t control this today. I barely could yesterday. (there is no longer any thinking about what would happen if I had to, about how terrible it would get)
there is no longer any fear of safety.
that is a difficult sentence to write. to digest. I cannot breathe. i cannot breathe. . breathe. breathe. . What it means what it means is that I can do what I need to do to care for myself without worrying about getting written up, or in trouble, or fired, or discarded. Left. Ghosted. It means that I have compassionate people who care about my safety for my sake first.
My safety for me, not as an asset. A tool. A toy.
It is 6:27 in the morning and this is what that is, this rage, this dysphoria. This sadness, this depression.
This makes it so clear to me, finally. The sheer disparity. Reminders of how it felt. The unpleasantness, the imbalance. I don’t want that. Not ever. Not even knowing.
So, now what. Delete the playlist (again. It has one song on it.) Done. Back away. Understand this isn’t ever going to change. Really, though. Understand you don’t have to burn it to the ground, either. Really. You can continue to walk away.
you know there isn’t always a trigger but a lot of times, there is.
it is seven in the morning and I am inside as the rain begins to fall. it isn’t, though, raining outside but sure as a rainfall cools the planet feeds the plants smoke slakes my thirst, soothes my fear.
the sky is lightening, the grey becoming less so enough to douse the harsh overhead light and open the curtain.
Mojo in the foreground, backlit, sheer grey linen curtain gathered in the center. hanging from the window: a suncatcher in the abstract shape of a whale, made of driftwood and vintage beads, and a small astronaut 7:08am
I am worrying about how I will manage things but right now the fear isn’t strangling me. it’s sort of set apart, a bit. It isn’t going to stay there, not today. Today is going to be
(oh, Mojo)
better at home. Quiet, as I need.
it is seven forty-nine in the morning and and there isn’t much getting done today.
That isn’t true, no. no it isn’t.
progress, however glacial a pace, is progress still.
The Salty Widow 