Dball charged right out there, 11 pounds of GET OFF MY LAWN.
But Janis just sat down, put her head down, ears back, looked like she wanted to cry.
I know how that feels. I walk through that door every day of my life. Let go of.
 |
| don't worry, Fatass, you're mine |
I don't think Aaron is in rehab, for instance. My therapist says that's "anticipatory grief" exacerbated enormously by my mother. Butterknife is thinking 30 days, then he will be out and feel better and come visit with her. I want that to be true. I wanted it to be true enough to try to make good on my promise to visit him. I called Sisters, they had no idea wtf I was talking about and directed me to St Joes, which has a voicemail box for this info, and nobody ever calls you back, wondering if I should just go over there....until it occured to me: he's not in rehab.
I don't believe it is true because I cannot. The rug has been pulled out from under my mind too many times. It cannot rest.
I think, no feel because I cannot know, that he's somewhere not calling her today, and tomorrow, maybe forever, probably forever. I didn't bother counting 30 days and marking the calendar - she assumed I had, but it didn't even occur to me to count on anything. What occurs to me always, like a dripping faucet inside me plop plop plop plop, is that he's never coming back. Like he's dead. AND he's suffering. An endless despair loop. No matter what, if he's in rehab or not, he's suffering somewhere. And not coming back even if he does turn up. Those kisses last fall, my bare feet on the cold concrete, that was the last of my djinn.
That is a very hard truth to live with. An acid burn that will not heal. Never healed. I have to learn how to really live with that. Not hide it. Not endure it. Def NOT throw Nebraskas at it. Not numb it in any way. What my therapist calls "acute intimacy malnutrition" is a kind of pica. I eat dirt.
My mom loooooooves this neighborhood. I never drive home down Harlem, I meander through the side streets, so to her these little houses go on forever. She likes to sit on the patio and say hi to everyone, look at all their front porches and hanging flower baskets. She likes to look at my truck. She says I have the whole world by the balls.
But a gash opened in me, a wound ripped wider and wider over the long lonely scary af winter. I feel like utter shit a lot of days. Like today. Alive, though, as I wished. Just hurts like hell. Huckleberry. Aaron didn't name himself that, he named my gash where there is no such person.
The Knife understands, but slowly bc she made a terrible and totally understandable decision over her own dark winter: because she could not stop thinking about my father's death, she chose dementia. The things she does now that make no sense make perfect sense once she told me that. She stopped reading. She stopped knowing what day it is. Stopped getting dressed ever. She watched the same garden show over and over and over until she could mute it and watch it that way (though I can hear it as I write this, Monty Don over and over 🤦🏻♀️). She just left her mind as much as she possibly could.
"But ma, it didn't help."
"No, it didn't help at all. Just made me more annoying."
🤣🤣 so true
Then we sit and look at the truck.
