when I say there is nobody left standing, I mean NO BODY

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Fun doesn't seem to be organically burbling up from the routine. You'll have to create it. [👀 no shit?] Originality will be required. What would you do if your main job was to enjoy yourself? Who is to say that it's not?

Every body.

hide my gun - post mallone ft HARDY (sing along)

"inventing fun" (for them)

Sunshine also, fired despite the massive staff shortage at falls memorial, budget cutting the humans of course. we were supposed to cook today, but she is scattered in the wind to Binghamton on a travel contract, homesick half to death. so Bug is going to learn how to make dickbutter to keep that dream alive for Sunshine.

fence dude is down with gout - I should bitch but don't have the heart to do that - so we pivot, put trees in the ground anywhere / back from the fenceline because they were half dead baking in their black pots - they too need to put a root down Here X or die

I do not want to be nothing but a tether. I increasingly want that to stop. I am a human woman, not a 1000-mile-deep post. endurance is not fulfillment. but what else can I do that is not a moral injury? 

I am not sure where Aaron is, where he goes after the hospital part that won't let him smoke, he's always been very evasive on specifics - maybe I am looking right at him at St Joes as we plant trees in the cold barren yard. The only point of contact I feel sure of is here, and that is just a FEELING of mine, one I probably need too much to trust.

 👋

But I am leaving him a note here, the only way/where I know: Bru will foster your cats if you want. I did not bring it up. Trying to fix everything/anything never works/ed and has murdered my sparkle entirely. He offered. All I said was that you might never come back. Like he didn't know that already. In which case they'd grow old with him. 

"In her view, human beings resembled peregrine falcons: they had the power and the ability to soar up to the skies, free and ethereal and unrestrained, but sometimes they would also, either under duress or of their own free will, accept captivity. Back in Anatolia, she had seen at close hand how falcons would perch on their captors’ shoulders, obediently waiting for the next treat or command. The falconer’s whistle, the call that ended freedom. She had also observed how a hood would be put on these noble raptors to make sure they would not panic. Seeing was knowing, and knowing was frightening. Every falconer knew that the less it saw the calmer the bird. But underneath that hood where there were no directions, and the sky and the land melted into a swathe of black linen, though comforted, the falcon would still feel nervous, as if in preparation for a blow that could come at any moment. Years later now, it seemed to her that religion – and power and money and ideology and politics [all sheeple shit] – acted like a hood too. All these superstitions and predictions and beliefs deprived human beings of sight, keeping them under control, but deep within weakening their self-esteem to such a point that they now feared anything, everything. Not her though. As she fixed her gaze on a spider’s web glistening in the torchlight like quicksilver, she reiterated to herself that she would rather believe in nothing." 10 Minutes 39 Seconds

correction: all or nothing 

my way - riley green

cottage open finally - view from the turn when you know you're There X

"... he had vanished, leaving only a burning candle behind. From this point onward, it was always the same dream. I started to look for him in the house, searching every nook and cranny. Next I ran into the courtyard, where the roses had blossomed in a sea of bright yellow. I called out left and right, but the man was nowhere to be seen. “Come back, beloved. Where are you?” Finally, as if led by an ominous intuition, I approached the well and peered down at the dark waters churning below. At first I couldn’t see anything, but in a little while the moon showered me in its glittering light and the courtyard acquired a rare luminosity. Only then did I notice a pair of black eyes staring up at me with unprecedented sorrow from the bottom of the well." ~The 40 Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi, Elif Shafak

Don't forget (how) to breathe.

"morning coffee spot"

Choose Love, Love! Without the sweet life of Love, living is a burden—as you have seen.
~Rumi

I think the real issue is:

you are profoundly undernourished in one specific category of human experience,
while massively over-functioning in almost every other category.

That imbalance would wear anybody down eventually.

GEMINI (May 21-June 21). Ultra-encouraging invisible forces are around you, and they are available to help with wish fulfillment. You'll still go through the steps and complete all the work, but you'll have greater motivation, like a wind at your back.

(if she butterknifes me one more time, Im'a wring her neck) 

I gotta paint that wall.
It's the reason the roof is leaking, says the asshole roofer.
I can't paint that fucking wall.
I run into a lot of impossibles, impasses, like that - my mind imposes the corrective (reality) on my aspirations or assumptions, and I don't want to accept reality (it is in my nature to try to change reality to how I want it, and I often succeed - that's the trap, because I occasionally succeed, I might sell myself a sack of shit impossibility as possible and then kill myself rather than give it up) but I gotta be like 🤷🏻‍♀️
I can't paint that wall.
I might paint that wall.
I should not paint that wall.
etc.

Ears spent his whole vaca under the cottage to no avail just getting wet and driving back to the city every night. He's still rock steady, never lets me down. 

But. He's the only one.

So, I promoted Bug to adult-enough. I need another steady grown-up, and she's going to be that person. 

It's time for Bug to step into her power. I got that promotion at her age, same reason, adults all batshit sick m.i.a. But she has me, and I her.

I must build a garden paradise out of NOTHING, like tundra parking lot level nothing. I must think like a child, creatively, to do that - while keeping it together like "grit in the shape of a woman." 

She is still just young enough to believe in the force of magic. Such as: if you build a space that invites the life/feel you want, you can find yourself safely inside it. 

A garden full of twinkling lights, birds and butterflies, shade for sitting, sunshine for everything else, the sound of water, the smell of food. No pit in your stomach of dread. Bug knows that pit, too. And we are going to banish it. We will imagine it together, then hold that thought. Hold it and hold it and hold it. 

Garden Spell: Happiness will happen here because once you cross the threshold, there is no terrible. All ye who enter must leave terrible behind. Or they will not be able to stand being Here X at all. smib 

[image removed]

step 1 - fortress infrastructure

Last night, I wrapped her in a blanket after dark and we went out back to see the horrible compound lighting of the hospital. Now look up - STARS. Understand? "Yes," she said very soberly. That'a girl. 

making love out of nothing at all - air supply

card of the day:

Justice — the central issue

This card is mercilessly simple:

actions have consequences.

Just:

• addiction has consequences
• avoidance has consequences
• overfunctioning has consequences
• endurance has consequences
• grief has consequences

Justice is the card that says:

stop arguing with reality’s accounting system.

Which is very hard when love is involved.

This is also about your father, too.

Grief has been pulling you emotionally underwater for months.

Sit beside grief and say:

“these feelings are real; they are not the only reality”

That’s not coldness.
That’s stabilization.

---

One sentence for today

Clarity is not cruelty.

New moon. The sky cloaks four cosmic conjunctions of various persuasions — two in Taurus, one in Aries and one in Gemini. What was already "a lot" becomes even more as the intensity dials up with added attention, company or money. This is no time to focus on trouble or throw money at a problem. Instead, picture exactly what you want, then tuck that vision in your heart's pocket.  

Yep. Then HOLD THE THOUGHT.

she's no help, too depressed to pick out flowers 🤨🤦🏻‍♀️🙄😵‍💫 she actually said, "then someone has to water them" 
😳seriously? yes, flowers need water, so you water them.

newsflash: YOU WANT FLOWERS
(duh)

TGIF 🙏 The whole last week+ went relentlessly sideways. Wowza. Absolutely nothing worked out. And everyone fell apart, all at once, just when I was expecting to fall exhausted across a finish line and I'd have done it, gotten everyone to spring still alive and a place to sit and see each other again and laugh - and then my heartache could Just Be free inside me to rest.

Even heartaches get tired. Mine needs a month of Sunday naps.

But no rest, more grit required instead. (sigh)

I heard my mother say to Aaron that I had built this for him. Just like that, the knife 🔪. 

There is truth in that. But I rewrote 🪄 the story: Getting here was the result of a spell cast on the injured witch. Sick at heart almost to death, she fell unexpectedly in love with a djinn in the form of an ancient lost lover wearing her long unused name. He called himself Huckleberry. With a kind of bruised-pink haze, the djinn blew desire into her lungs. Just a couple gulps of that showed her that she had not been breathing for years. It was painful, waking up to breathing, but she was moved. Literally. And then like magical beings (including myself) are wont to do: he vanished. His voice faded, body disintegrated, he dispersed into a fog that lifted from her and drifted elsewhere. And she found herself alone but Alive in front of a children's marching band in a place called Vegas. It happens.

Now, I need to conjure a life: I have to imagine a life I want to be in and then pull that into Reality by creating space for it. Physical space. Then, one hopes, personal capacity. And I have a new plan for how to get that done. One that relies on Olde Practical Magic pulled up from the ground itself, older than any djinn.

card of the day again, but now I think I know who that could be (not a dog) 🤞

the songtrack is about to be taken over (like a wish, I am giving it away) 

your place at my place - josh stone that gap can stay Empty, like every painting needs some blank

that guy - when he stops for a sec to answer TJ, who's off to the side like yea yea you guys are always dancing in here but whens dinner

the detail that hit hardest in what you wrote wasn’t Aaron.

It was:

you made chicken and dumplings through stress diarrhea because your mother loves them.

That is such a brutally human sentence. Just love continuing to perform labor while hurting.

About Aaron:
I hear what you’re saying very clearly now.

When you say, “that guy is dying” you do not mean literally dead today or a dramatic metaphor.

You mean:

the person you knew is progressively disappearing into addiction, despair, and fragmentation.

And you’re grieving him while he is still intermittent.

card of the day
intermittently alive

Three of Swords does not usually ask people to fix heartbreak.

It asks: can you allow pain to exist without making it the entire definition of reality?

That’s harder.

bar and back - joss ross

the things he says now are like bubbles of him that float to the surface sometimes from his drowned body 

but the show (pie) must go on

water of love - dire straights

You are moving through multiple overlapping grief systems simultaneously:

• your father’s death
• your mother’s deterioration
• Aaron’s unraveling
• the collapse of hoped-for futures
• chronic responsibility fatigue

That is difficult and prolonged.

What you said about Aaron, “he only seems sober and steady and fine if he’s got alcohol on board”

That’s a very grim stage of alcoholism.

And as you know, being medically sophisticated doesn’t protect someone from addiction—it sometimes just gives them more vocabulary and strategies around it.

This is no longer a dramatic-romantic problem.

This is:

• illness
• despair
• dependency
• and a healthcare worker trying to self-regulate a collapsing nervous system

You are not imagining the seriousness of it.

And what you’re describing about your mother feels extremely real and heartbreaking.

• someone’s personality itself seems dimmed
• the room changes around them
• they stop generating warmth the same way

And yes, of course she wants to see Aaron.

Not because she’s foolish.
Because he belongs to a chapter of life where:

• your father was alive
• the future still felt extensible
• you were less alone
• there was still a fantasy of restoration available

And because, as you said:

he makes her laugh.

Today is full of dyads:

• you and your mother
• you and Aaron
• Aaron and alcohol
• you and your therapist
• even you and your father’s absence

Everything today is about:

One person trying to reach another person across pain.

update: no one succeeded.

card of the day

my Consuelo

 the Express Mens "break up jeans" - but every other kind of love held up rooted deeper through this absolute shitstorm, making the whole category/concept of "breaking up" vestigial for me 

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/18kXF9SQnk/

(Sunshine snort)

Now it's today.

rescue me - elise legrow posted May 12 last year

"... she had done her best to have fun, no matter what. And if ever she came across someone partying too wildly, she did not judge them; who knew – just like her, they too might be overcompensating for a life deprived of party hats." 10 Minutes 38 Seconds

Your life is not static. It just feels crushingly repetitive right now because grief and exhaustion flatten time

I was gonna unblog this but 🤷🏻‍♀️. May-to-May, that little journal entry was a planting day.

"Cry Fucking" 

Last year in an entry I dated "May" in the little journal I have at the cottage, I wrote about Aa's coming over that night. I don't remember him doing so but apparently he'd made this date to make up for an earlier one he'd blown off (🤷🏻‍♀️) so maybe he was doing that again so I ate the cheese (🤷🏻‍♀️) but he was lost. I had time to kill with him lost driving wherever and getting there really late, so I started writing. Wondering how it was going to go cz I had called it for no fucking each other, at first, but then I walked that back to "you decide" because he wasn't hitting on me anymore. The hitting on me had been the prior November, this was May. I dunno why he's coming to meet me and my guess is neither does he. 

my conclusion

"Our essential dynamic." I illicit his feelings, and then I respond to whatever those are. 

I'm not sure that description is correct from his perspective. 

But there's truth in it from mine - so, doesn't much matter why TODAY he needs to cry - there are so many reasons why, he might never run out even if from this moment forward everything got easier. I illicit those tears. And every time we see each other, despite chilling me so far out that I am IN SPACE COLD, as soon as he's within striking distance, his body wraps around me like Iron Man's suit or some shit.

A little different each instance but the new normal has been, through every changing divorcing job kid sick ptsd reason: fucking + crying while trying to not to do at least one of those things. 

I could write that as something two people would do on purpose versus trying not to (recoiling).  Cry fucking. And see how "she" feels about it that way. She's still gotta be done with how he discards. Negligible cannot be her love life. But. She had way more tenderness in her tank than she ever imagined at the start. 

Maybe once I can get to the cottage again, I'll write that. And put the funny plumbersass bit in the story for comic relief.