falling apart to keep it together

My face would make a great salt lick for a deer. As would my neck. The sleeves of my sweater. Yesterday I spent most of the day in the company of a gal I've been meaning to hang with for nearly two years. We both laughed about it, the timing, and all. We are wounded in similar ways. She is quite different than I in that she has served in the military, overseas, and has some serious war trauma simmering beneath the surface. While we sat talking, her faced started to twist up and I realized she was fighting back tears. I left her to her dignity the first few times, and finally patted the bed next to me and said, "Come here. It's ok." And then I just held her while she cried, comforted her while she worried that I would think she was a nutcase, and laughed darkly with her while she ruminated on what a fine first impression she was making. I said, "You're doing fine. You're in good company, kid." She was. As we traded stories throughout the day she marveled at how well I seemed to handle things, to take them in stride. As best as I could, I clarified that she was simply witnessng the aftermath, not the moments themselves. I am hardly so well put together as that. Today, for example. Most of today has been filled with explosive bursts of weeping, the kind I won't allow myself the luxury of having with my son home, so now I have to pull my shit together. Time to grab some water and make like I'm not teetering on the delectable edge of a nervous breakdown. *sigh* I miss those days of chain smoking and silence and painting for days on end and refusing to speak to other humans even if they thought I was insane, simply because I fucking felt like it. Today I spent an hour curled up in a chair outside in the sun, weeping. Perhaps my neighbors saw me, perhaps not. Meh. It was needed. At least I have worked out some of the strength behind my grief. That's for another day, though.

grief overfloweth

Did you know that you can strain the muscles in your chin by trying not to cry, and that when you do that it makes your lower lip twitch? This is one of the many things I learned over the weekend. The speech that I was worried about finding the words for, that I was to stand up and give at my grandmother's funeral turned out to a moot point. All I was able to do was refrain from bawling, and so I just sat there in the front row next to my brother and shook, and shook, and shook. When he got up to read the cheesy poem his wife had printed out, I stared up at him in little sister admiration, even though he admitted aloud that his hands were shaking, he walked up and he stood there and he read something aloud without falling to the floor in pieces, which is about all I thought I could have accomplished. Being in public with a twitching lip and chin is awkward. It repeatedly reminds me why it's twitching and I am quiet and sad.

"When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move..."

Last Friday my mom called to say my grandma appeared to be dying. She was in the last stages of Alzheimer's. Saturday afternoon my mom called back to tell me she passed.

She was the only member of my family that I was remotely close to, growing up. My grandparents often watched my brother and I while my mother was working multiple jobs to support us after divorcing my drunken father. As it was, my grandmother tends to figure in a majority of my childhood memories.

The woman was a firecracker. Every year she'd fly out to Reno and go on a week or two drinking and gambling binge with her girlfriends from childhood, even into her nineties. In her late eighties she once lamented when she returned that it was getting harder, "I just can't GO the way I used to," she said with the wistful grin of a hellion. She always French inhaled her cigarettes, and blew them out the bitty crack in the kitchen window, over the sink- as if that would make it all go outside. Ah, well. I appreciated the effort, anyway. She called me by the wrong name all the time, but I thought it was funny- she did it with everyone. She bowled and golfed like a champ, and could cuss people out like I've never seen the like of.

While pondering the void in my heart last Saturday, one of our two gerbils died. He died, no joke, between my boobs. It's ok, you can laugh. It was morbidly funny. I'd been nursing him back to health (just like his brother, who had displayed the same near death symptoms and recovered magnificently)by giving him water by a dropper (they die of dehydration very easily) and he was wet from where it had dribbled out of his mouth. I dried him off as best I could and put him into my tank top to stay warm while he finished drying. He cuddled in and scooted around now and then but seemed very content. Because he was so warm in there, I didn't notice when he died... but pulling a dead gerbil out of my shirt was my emotional breaking point, and I balls to the walls lost it.

Crying that much is a bitch. It fucks me up in so many ways. My neck still is a mess.

It's a huge distraction from what I was supposed to be doing this week: filing for a divorce. The lovely state of Virginia makes you wait a year, and I've been going through a lot of "A Year Ago Today We Got In That Fight" and "A Year Ago Today He Hooked Up With His Twenty Three Year Old Girlfriend", etc.

Processing, grieving already... and then my grandmother, and then the gerbil.

I'll be ok and all, I guess I just wanted to say hi, tell y'all what's up, and ask you to forgive my erratic postings and occasionally dissociative states.

On the upside, Nice Guy came to visit a few days ago. Bless his very soul. Living here is a strange exile, and I've been losing friends left and right (another post for another day), so seeing anyone who wants to hug me is absolutely welcomed. It was very strange though- his skin felt like magic. I kept stroking my fingers over his back in wonder and awe. Marveling, I told him what I thought, despite the fact that I knew it would raise some red flags with him, "Your skin... it feels like love..."

That deserved some serious pondering: I think I've been so emotionally locked down since my husband left (for that matter, maybe the year or two before as well, as we fought so much) that it took my grandmother's death to knock down some internal wall. It's no wonder I feel so vulnerable and reclusive.

It's given me plenty of time to tear apart my kitchen because there's a dead animal in the wall or possibly the attic, and it reeks. This happened before and it took something close to sterilizing the walls themselves and everything in the room to be able to not retch every time we used that bathroom. This time it's in the wall next to the pantry. Needless to say, all of my food is on the counter. The walls in the wee little pantry are being repeatedly sprayed down with super Sport Strength Febreeze, which is working, much to my surprise. Then again, it's February this time. Although it is a lovely warm day, it's not the same as a bigger animal dead in the attic in the middle of the summer (which, if you mistype it, becomes the word "simmer" which is true enough. Our attic was basically a Crock Pot for a decaying raccoon or something. It was wretched. Even the guy who cleans up that mess for a living was astounded. He told me he'd never had to go back in three times to spray some massive disinfectant over everything, but that we were a first. Oh, joy!

To smell that smell again was enough to shut me down again and go into Clean Everything mode, which is kind of a relief but... I'm supposed to be writing something for my grandmother's funeral, which either I will read if I can make it up there, or my mother will read in my place.

Now I wish I'd taken the time to write them down after Nice Guy left and my heart was still open. Words can pour out of me, but when I think of her all I can think of is green grapes and Twinkies in a brown paper bag. It was what she would bring me as a snack when she picked me up from wherever I was. I don't remember where I was, just getting into her car that always smelled just like she did- faint cigarettes under a just right amount of Estee Lauder perfume. I'm sure there were other things in the bag, but those were my favorites, like the Hubba Bubba bubble gum she would keep on the counter in a jar. Or the bottle of bubble bath stuff from Avon. Dove soap in the bathroom.

The smells, the smells... they break me down and tear me apart inside. They build me up and make me a child again.

I realize now why I cannot find the words- they are located just behind the levee of emotions that I fear for it's strength and it's pain and it's intensity. I'm not ready yet. Not yet.



*exits stage right*

Spamalot, no.

Sorry about the change to word verification on comments, y'all. Lately the comment moderation isn't enough, and TONS of spam is making it's way through and requiring my moderating it. It's clogging up my inbox with notifications. I'll change it back once I get time to figure out what Blogger's deal is, because I really hate using that feature. For a dyslexic, it's a fork in the eye. For now, it's better than fifty sporks of email, though.

Blogger....
When have I EVER needed to know about designer purses? Really. And I don't give a shit about libido pills, either. Get yo shit straight. Sheesh.

wandering thoughts on a lid swollen Sunday

Facilitate.

The smell of popcorn and hotdogs, a hot summer day.
The noise of a baseball game, the muted roaring murmur of a hopeful crowd.
When a player comes skidding into home plate, feet first, the dirt pushes up in a wave before his foot.
He walks away.
Look closer, lay down next to me.
Do you see the way the sunlight hits the grains of sand where his foot dug in?
Do you see the trench made by his shoe, the miniature tower of sand triumphantly pushed to the top?
Can you hear the crowd's murmur, the food, the sweat, the freshly cut grass?

When I try to define the word "facilitate" in my mind, this print in the sand is what I see. The energy behind it is inherent in it's existence.

Facilitation is forward moving energy.

fat broken hearted blues

Fatter, that's me. And I'm pretty pissed off about it.

In the fall, I had decided I would be sweet and forgiving of myself for my holiday treats, because what's the point? Should I berate myself while I eat pie anyway? That's silly. So I decided I wouldn't, and I didn't. Oddly, there wasn't much holiday feasting at all, so I wasn't very concerned about it.

With my weird guts (I bloat sometimes and look a good seven months pregnant, and then it just stops and is fine again- it hurts, it looks awful, and it fucks with my abdominal muscles, so I do NOT like it) I guess I just didn't really notice that I was packing on pounds. I mean, I didn't wolf pie like previous years... no holiday parties, no family dinners, so I just didn't think there was much to worry about, as far as my weight.

Suddenly, *BLAM* I bugged out. I think it was exactly and precisely once I could see the weight gain in my face. Oh, horrors. Not my FACE. My hips I can handle, some extra butt, whatever, but my FACE? No. NO NO NO. There is no way I can dress that up to make it look fine until the weight comes off.

Looking back, I think I just ate a lot of fatty foods because I'm battling depression. Love life, zero. (Don't even ask about Nice Guy, I really don't want to talk about it.) Friends, near zero. (Even less friends than before as I've had apocalyptic fall outs with two friends in the last month alone. I have nearly no friends here as it is, now I have two less.) And all of this is on top of riding out the end of A Year Ago Today My Husband And I Were Doing Such And Such Today, Fighting About Such And Such Today, and while that's still happening, it's nearing it's end. In the meantime, I'm lonely and fat. Awesome.

With my wonky ass joints I can't work out like normal people, so just hitting the gym isn't as simple as it is for most people. And most people can come up with a plethora of excuses not to do it, at least I don't have work to contend with. Taking care of myself and my son IS my job. So that leaves an awful lot of time to work out, right? Wrong. My joints have been wreaking all kinds of havoc. Even after going to the chiropractor yesterday I spent the night in horrible pain. I could have just taken some Vicoden, but fuck- to what end? This morning I took it, though, in the hopes of working out. Yesterday I napped off and on throughout the afternoon and evening.

Side note: I have been having some WICKED interesting dreams the last few days!

If working out and burning calories isn't always an option, what is? Ah, yes. Cutting them in the first place. A damn slower way to lose weight but it's something. And so, the mostly raw food diet is reenacted.

Carrot ginger bran muffins sounded promising... but I found the only way I could get that thing down was to chomp big fat strawberries with every bite. Afterward, I could see it being useful as a diet aid as I felt as if I had eaten a paper fiber elephant.

Now, the Gazelle. Working out looks more promising when one is faced with the option of eating cardboard elephants for eternity otherwise.

Still, I like eating better. I realized late last night as I walked into the kitchen that I wasn't actually hungry when faced with a bran muffin. Not hungry at all, in fact. I guess I just wanted something that tasted good.

I confess, I thought about tasting ice cream and then just spitting it back out instead of swallowing it, but that's just too freaking weird.

Onward.

Yes, yes, I said yes

There is much going on, some very heavy thought that takes too long to think out with my hands...

... this kind of thought takes a long time and my hands but I don't have to think about this, just say yes:

some days...

Schrodinger's habit

Earlier today I put my boots on and started kicking apart boxes.

It wasn't what I'd meant to do. That is, I'd thought I would put it on my list of things to do today, but realistically knew that there were way too many of them and trying to haul them all out to recycle would be a bitch. So... I was thinking perhaps it was not the best plan after all. Then I ended up in a small avalanche of boxes again as I was trying to do laundry and just started chucking them out of the laundry room (really, "room" is far too generous for a medium sized closet but whatever), and then out of my closet, and then realized what a lunatic pile of boxes I actually had.

Chalk it up to yet another experience in the year since my husband left that I've had an AH HA moment. This one was in reference to how very difficult I found it to break down certain kinds of boxes. My husband had A Thing for boxes. A very OCPD thing about boxes, in fact. At first it was just electronics, and he wanted to keep the boxes and specially shaped foam that came in boxes for electronics to keep computer bits, etc, safe while moving. Ok, fair enough, especially considering my idea of safely moving a computer is to wrap it in a blanket and set it on the front seat. The problem arose, for me personally, in the sheer amount of electronics that he amassed, and therefore the amount of nearly empty boxes taking up otherwise useful closet space was a bit irksome but hey, we've all got our quirks.

At some point I grew accustomed to the boxes. Meh. Make room, boxes exist. Part of marriage. At some point I started inquiring whether or not I should keep this box or that box... oi. Never ask someone with hoarding tendencies any such question. Hindsight, you silly little whore! Hardy har har... suffice to say the answer was almost always, "Yes." At some point I stopped even asking and just started stacking boxes inside of boxes, like rectangular cardboard nesting dolls. In a way they sort of were- I usually justified their existence by telling myself we were going to move eventually. We planned to and aborted the plans repeatedly, so keeping them and then keeping them a bit longer seemed sensible enough.

When he moved out he took the boxes for electronics as the electronics were in the boxes as he left with them.

In a few more weeks a year will have passed and still I had a vast collection of boxes. Today, as they cascaded gently down upon my head for the bazillionth time, I wondered why I have such a motley collection of boxes- after all, even when I move, I really dislike having strange assortments of boxes to pack.

I described it to my mother while talking for over an hour on the phone this evening:
At some point in my illustrious moving career, I discovered the fact that one can actually buy boxes from UHaul. And while it is perhaps wasteful to buy boxes when one can simply collect them and reuse boxes, it is really freaking awesome to have boxes of two or three sizes at most and that stack nicely and neatly and making moving a helluva lot easier all around.

So.... why exactly would I keep all of these freaking weird boxes? Ah. Yet another adapted mutation. Even knowing I didn't want the boxes, I found it challenging to give them up as I listened to a background stream of chatter about the virtues of each box, what uses it may have, it's structural integrity, etc etc. It sounded like my voice, but it wasn't my logic. Not originally. It just became normal. Like so many other things.

The first box I kicked apart and wrenched a few toes. Hopping up and down on the other foot and cursing myself, I went immediately for my boots. Having acquired those, I went on a boot meet box beserker happy rampage.

I won't tell you how many boxes there were. I will admit I had to use packing tape in a big strip around the outside ones just to be able to haul them all outside without dropping heaps of them, even flattened.

Later, boxes. Hello gorgeous empty space.

MY gorgeous empty space.

the D word

There are so many things I need to do, and one of the top ones on the list I dread: I need to file for divorce. It's not that I don't want it to be done and over with, it's that I don't want to add it to my internal list of failures. Really, I just need to alter the way I look at it... so far that's not worked. Yet. *sigh* Such a beautiful day and so many heavy thoughts on my mind. 

sneaky and squeal worthy equals win

Seeing something like this makes me want to go get my nipples pierced- it's the only way they would stay on. What a fabulous invention.

Now, if I could just get a real life instead of distracting myself with sex toys, that would be dandy.

*sigh*

Back to work.

fuck it

I'm in a foul mood. The kind that would frighten pirates that have the word "Dreaded" in their names. Two months ago I was pondering if romantic love was ever for me, and a friend (well, many concerned friends, actually) seemed worried about my state of mind. Why? Is it really that important to everyone else if I believe in love? Does it makes me a freak to think it really IS just a heap of stupidfuck chemicals and to hell with it? When does it become acceptable for me to give up and become a nun or a whore?

rubbish and mutterings

As I tossed a nearly dead orchid bloom casually into the trash I thought to myself, "That's just wrong. It's like... me being celibate is wrong. My not getting laid enough is as wrong as throwing an orchid into the garbage." Then I laughed and realized I am so very glad to have you back, blog. I've missed having somewhere to toss these wacky thoughts.

*deep breath in aaaaand release*

I really need some new sex toys. I killed mine. Alas, I kill them all. It is hard to be so mighty. Perhaps I should take up very small motor repair...

reunited and it feels so monotonous

What is it with couples that break up, get back together, break up, get back together....? I know it's not very nice of me, but I don't ever feel happy for people like that. There's something that feels so grim about it to me that I feel like I'm being utterly contrite to say I'm happy for them. Really, what I'm thinking is, "Oh, well... if you're content with settling yet again, I guess I'll smile at you instead of just asking you to remind me of why you broke up in the first place... or the second time..." Sure, people can change, but really now, that much? Perhaps these are people who don't try hard to work things out in the first place and that's why it seems so bizarre to me. Maybe they have it right and you should just split while you work out the relationship issues, who knows?

Basically, who the fuck am I to judge?

Well, I'm me. And I'm telling you, if you've reunited with your sweetie more than once, you can tell me about it and I'll smile but I'm not happy for you. I'm actually wondering what the fuck is going on inside your head and resigning myself to listening to you complain about the same things you had stopped complaining about the LAST time you broke up.

icy cold creamy love in my mouth

It's cold, bitterly cold, and my ability to go work out in the gym every day is shot in the foot because of it. Oh, I know, for normal people it's a lame excuse. For me, it's true- I can't possibly go down and sweat and then walk back out into this kind of cold without risking one lunatic pain spike. If this kind of cold (and to clarify, I'm talking about 23 degrees and a 30mph wind) hits me I start having massive muscle spasms. Those pull my various loose joints out of alignment. That initiates MORE muscle spasms. Hence, pain spike.

I went out into it this morning, to take my son to school. I had on so many clothes it was ridiculous. If the weather in Virginia hit this level of holyshitcold more often I would just buy a snowsuit and that's that, but to wear once or twice a year it seems like a ridiculous expense, especially when I can just heap on clothes as an alternative.

So, heap them on I did and then I came home, left the majority of them on, opened all the curtains and blinds and curled up in the sunny bedroom and fell back asleep. Normal people wouldn't have to wait a few hours for their body to return to a steady temperature, but mine's retarded. The technical term for it falls under the classification of "dysautomia", which translates to "Nervous System FUBAR", although I do not care for the B or the A. I admit FUAND doesn't have the same ring (Fucked Up And Needs Repair) but that's how I feel about it. Fuck the negativity of incurable. I refuse to be incurable. So there.

Considering how cold it is, you'd think I wouldn't be tempted to eat the living hell out of some ice cream bars, but alas, I discovered Magnum. Damn you, big condom sounding named ice cream bars, for your hilarious name is what prodded me to buy you and now I'm a fat ice cream whore. Even when it's 20 degrees outside, what do I want? Icy cold creamy love in my mouth.

There's pizza. Hey, fresh pizza! Nice and warm! Nope. I want ice cream bars.

And because of this whorish addiction, I have to start going to the gym. A lot. Because clearly just not eating them is not an option. They SING to me. I take them apart in my mouth with my tongue, and slurp their delectable cream out. What. The. Fuck.

I'll work out eight times as much some other day. Fuck it.