Looks like I’m moving again. (Now don’t all you dykes grab your paintbrushes all at once.) Sigh.

I’m going back to the red house—I have to think of a name for it. Headquarters? I’m in a life that for the most part was built around a marriage that isn’t any longer. The only toehold feels like that place, and I’m in freefall so I need a toehold. I’m struck by the strange irony of it. X is being kind and generous, very, so I’m noting that. I will, I hope, take some comfort in a real home again, where the sink is actually a laundry tub because I insisted that the baby be able to take a bath in the kitchen, and my father swore up and down about the pain in the ass it was fitting the dishwasher beside it. I’ m struck by the strange irony, in other words, of being surrounded by the generosity of men who in the last month, for their different reasons, have had to conclude and concede that they didn’t love me. That they had wanted to, that they had tried . . . but they couldn’t change the things about me that they hated. There is a pain, a hole, in their hearts where they tried. (woops)

After my little girl got sick and then better, I started waking each day and giving a few minutes to remember all that there is to be grateful for. I’ve stopped that. I should start again. Solid house, solid job, two little kids who couldn’t be better or sweeter or smarter or weirder. Old grape vines. Old quince trees from Greece. My mother would throw in “skinny and smart”, but all jokes aside it’s hard to be grateful for a mind and a body that both feel every inch across lonely lonely. I can feel very keenly tonight the appeal of Jesus. I wish I could cry out quietly, O ______ [something] . . . . All I ever believed in was the ability and will of people who wanted to and did hold on to each other specifically, despite the evidence I had when I married X that love might not be able to bridge geography or sexuality or trauma (or anything, ha). Still, I spose that many women have started over (again) and faced the world alone (again) with less (and less practice at it). But I am not quite five feet tall, too little for all this, and friendless in this city now, and so I am going to be best friends with self-pity for awhile so we can hold hands. It’ll probably make my playlists kind of dragass’n shitty for another spell.

The Used – All That I’ve Got (acoustic)