Wisconsin looms. I never do well when I’m headed there. Days ahead, I feel like a 7th grader in the last week of August, doom approaching, counting down to the moment I have to be unaccountably undeniably ill at ease and psychologically vulnerable. Self + Conscious = Vinegar + Milk

I did not leave that place, I did not leave the people there, although to them that is probably how it was – to me, what I left was the person I was there, I hated that bitch. I just could not bear myself, insufferable. “And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell." -- Matthew 5:30 I amputated my childhood self and homeland. I had to. And now I can go visit from time to time, but that’s like visiting a hand museum, it doesn’t make the fucker grow back or stop the phantom pain either, in fact it just increases the haunted itching.

I don’t sleep. Aa and I squabble. He says, “It’s like you left already.” To him it looks as if I’m flying off to rendezvous with an ex-lover for a weekend. (ha) I laugh, then grow irritated as if he’s trying to talk to me when I’m trying to pass a kidney stone. But if I didn’t know better, if the situation were reversed and if I still had all my pieces like he does, that’d probably be how I would process it too. It makes sense that way. It makes a lot more sense than the reality.

Sleepless, I am on that road that dips down out of Geneva west past the boggy end of Como, I won’t even slow down to mention Hilmore, just head right out of dodge – coming up past the wetland end, the highway splits to the left past the land my dad lost, goes straight to Como Rd past the doomed little school and my mom’s best attempts to make something beautiful (what is more ephemeral than child art?), goes left to the little house Dan’s mom died in and all the tiny frogs we’d catch in the basement…everywhere I look: loss, feelings of grief and my helplessness (my stature is impossibly tiny in the face of loss, about the size of a frog baby) (which always did piss me right off) (for which I am forever helplessly sorry).

Upside to everything: I know exactly how much a game of Pictionary (or a mom-packed lunch, or a cuddled sleep, or a good paragraph, or a clean bathroom, or a paid bill, or a shared joke – all those little things of a peaceful life) is worth. Keenly.

Life, it's fragile as fuck.