hush

I’ve been trying to work-at-home this afternoon, had a group today and just trying to finish up my day, having a hard time, just wanting to do stuff by myself. Paint my nails, go get coffee. I even feel like grocery shopping, if you can believe it. My husband is gone for the weekend and there was a time that it would just kill me. There was a time that it would also just kill me to imagine a time that it wouldn’t kill me wo spend a weekend without him. I had to get married to be comfortable alone.

I slept in this morning trying to shake a migraine, and the pills I take for them make me all sleepy, so by the time I rolled out of bed I was all late. And B came waltzing into the room with a plate of eggs and some coffee, and I gulped and slurped, and I took a R_grace-is-late-shower (wash/condition hair, wash face, wash pits, that’s it), and was about to run out the door, and poor Ben is standing in the middle of the dining room saying, “Wait…” and he engulfs me in the slowest, softest, sweetest, mmmmm… I’m so fucking LATE.. and he says, “WAIT!” And I’m like, “I CAN’t…” and then I remember, he’s flying out this afternoon, he’s going to his cousin’s wedding, he’s gone all weekend. Oh MAN. Of all mornings to sleep in. And he cooked me BREffast and all. My baby. He’s probably flying into Charlotte right about now.

What a night.

I’m ready to write about my weekend now.

On Friday night, early Saturday morning, really, ER and I ended up at Erl and SH’s charming little apartment, that for some reason makes me think of the word “bungalow” even though the whole place is about the size of my living room. We drank this amazing amazing chocolate, we talked about SH’s purse being snatched by the man in the cab in Guatemala, and how she hung on and was dragged for a block. She survived, obviously. She was scraped up pretty good, she screamed bloody murder as she was dragged, people turned out of their houses and they eventually let go. Erl was almost on fire with not understanding how a little slice of my heart admired S for, I dunno, winning, I guess (an admiration which was apparently shared by the native women she met during the remainder of her trip, who were apparently used to this sort of thing). In his mind, the brave thing to do would have been to let go of her bag, that it’s just stuff, that she could have been killed. And in my rational mind I completely agree. Keeping her bag was not worth the risk of being hurt or killed. But I can’t help it. And I couldn’t make him understand that for a woman, it’s not just about the bag. The idea of someone using intimidation or strength to steal something from me feels like a bodily violation, the lividness I feel comes from someplace deeper than the inconvenience of losing money. It’s the same place in me that’s tired of peeking around corners and wedging my keys between my fingers, but still persists in walking alone at night whenever I please. It’s the part of me that wants to claim something, to say, “This is mine.”

We compared this to the complete lack of resistance that we’ve shown in less dangerous situations of some kind of violence, or what we perceive as such. Like when a man licked S’s ear at the place she tended bar, or the GAY man thought it would be really funny to kneel down and kiss my vulva at a party. In both cases, we froze, and we HATED ourselves for it. She at least got the guy kicked out, but I didn’t even give the vulva-kisser a talking-to. I told them that I wish I would have hit him, but at the time it seemed impossible. In fact, it didn’t even cross my mind, and it would have had to been a conscious choice to start a fight (like, he would have been walking away, I would have turned him back around and clocked him, for instance). Then E said the best thing ever: that guys like he and Erl felt bad that me and S lived in a world where we felt guilty for not responding, that sometimes freezing is the best thing to do if it’s going to keep you safe. That, in a sense, it doesn’t have to rest on our shoulders to correct the behavior of assholes and psychos. Not that we shouldn’t resist, but that we shouldn’t kick ourselves and be wracked with guilt for failing to respond quickly enough to kick the guy’s ass or something.

By this point, it was about six in the morning, so we decided to walk down to the lake and catch the sunrise. There were clouds hovering, but the horizon was clear enough for the sun to begin as the sharpest bead of honey light. We imitated E, watching it rise like a bubble through the cracks of our fingers (in a manner that I’m sure struck us all as “nautical”), until the sun cleared the horizon. Erl and S turned in, and me and E had breakfast at Standee’s. He talked about how he can’t stop sleeping in four-hour shifts and reading deckhand job postings as Internet porn, and I told him that I want to find him a wife.

I was mistaken…

It was actually her son who was killed, her 6-year-old. She has three kids. On the phone she said, “My baby got killed on Friday,” and I assumed.

hit and run

I was just getting ready to write in my journal about the weekend I just had. I’m going to write about that still at some point, because, as much evidence as there is to the contrary, I know that the small details of my life are still important. I have to believe that.

…

I just got a call from a book group member who graduated some years ago, RH. I see her every couple of months in our alumnae group. She called to tell me that her youngest child was hit by a car on Friday and killed. Her baby daughter, her youngest. I think she couldn’t have been older than one. I met the baby for the first time this past July at a cookout we had. I can’t remember her name.

I know my blog is sad. You guys know me, though. I’m happy most of the time.

I have several cavities. I just found out. The dentist says that my teeth were actually really clean, and that I’ve been taking good care of them. It’s not my fault. I floss every fucking day, I really do. Although I didn’t start flossing every day until about 3 years ago. But I still feel like I’ve failed my little teethies somehow. The good thing is that they’ll be filled with the white resin fillings, the good kind, so they’ll look like whole real teeth again, not like little lumps of lead. The prospect of teeth that look like teeth is so exciting.

Sometimes I try to imagine what I would look like if I still had my own front teeth. Would they be prettier than the ones I have now? What would I give to have them back? Do I even care today, or not? What if I had flossed my teeth every day since I had them? What if I had never drank a Coke in my whole life? How would I be different?

I feel like at 27 I’m already starting to decay from the inside out. I feel like every day is only a brief reprieve from the next root canal. I still have tooth dreams from time to time, where I’ve fallen on my face like I did when I was seven, only this time, all the teeth are snapped off at the gums, no stumps for my bridge to hold onto, no possibility of repair.

an ode, an homage

Sometime in the universe, I think that you and I must have been one person, but at some point, our heart just got too big and we had to become two people. And my own words–that I never, in fact, said–come back to me across that time. Through you. To hear my own truths come out of another person’s mouth…I sympathize. I maybe even empathize.

Maybe we are on different sides of an argument. Or a fence. Or maybe it’s not an argument or a fence at all, but a center, and you’re on one side of an orbit spiraling in, and I’m on another side, another orbit also spiraling in, and every so often, we pass each other in perfect eclipse, and say, “Hey.” Or maybe not. Maybe we just hear our own echoes. But either way, I still don’t pity you.

this line is metaphysical

I parked around the corner from the restaurant, going into the bakery on the corner to get some change. I took out my wallet and opened it, asking the girl inside if she could spare some quarters. Laughing, she scoffed, “Um, no, I don’t have any money on me right now.” I pulled out a five and told her that I just wanted some change, at which she apologized, that she thought I was asking her for money, and gave me four singes and four quarters. I couldn’t meet her eyes after that, and left the bakery flushed by the shame of her initial response.

I fed two hours into the meter, and went to the restaurant to wait for my friend. I sat outside so that I could see her coming, and finished my book in the perfect comfort of this evening. It was “Perelandra,” and every tree and building in my world is a little changed since I finished it. I left one message to tell her where I was sitting, and another twenty minutes later to ask into the air whether I might have been mistaken and we were, in fact, supposed to meet on Tuesday and not today, to let her know that I was going to finish my glass of wine and then head home, to call me later. Thinking back over it, I have a feeling of having been headed off, of a darkness trying to get between sisters. She hasn’t called yet.

He brought the check and I put a twenty in the folder, telling him he could just give me fifteen if he had the change on him. He said, “Sure, um, I think I do,” and got out his own wallet. I held out my hand and said, “Not that I’m in a hurry or anything…” I used to carry the whole wad from the evening in my pocket when I waited tables, and I’d thought he did, too, but I didn’t have time to say that; he said, “Oh, okay…” and scurried back inside and brought me a ten and a five a few minutes later.

I had a sandwich elsewhere and walked back to my car, where I noticed that they stopped checking the meters here after six. I’d arrived around 6:15.

Driving home, the lights of the city appeared through the haze, filling me with the same “there it is” wonder as it does every time, at first like columns of phosphorescent coral, then like an outer space castle, some alien encampment, then finally like separate buildings with windows that were all different, with different people inside. Just a city. Either the most natural of any thing, or the most artificial. I wasn’t sure if it was my body that was about to blow away like the clouds that skim the tops of these buildings, or the buildings themselves that would collapse into sand any minute now. Any minute now.