I knew I was cold but I wouldn't believe it until I looked at the thermostat. I was right. I am cold.
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Him in the bed is the best drug. Warm and sweet and gorgeous. When I was there last we went to bed very late every night, after staying up to watch movies and then talk about them. Usually some time between four and six AM. Then the timebending mindblowing, which lasts exactly as long as it should. Then the sweet actual rest that comes without worry. The first rising. The looking over and knowing this is real life, plus the heartfelt joy and gratitude of of that. It's very strong. It's huge. It nestles us back to a new melding, a warm twining. Skin to skin is a recharge. I know we need as much of that as we can get. His arms are very long. One alone can wrap around me entirely but there are two. He whispers to me in the dark, sometimes fully conscious, sometimes at just the barest edge of it, but always the same message... “I've got you. I love you. This. Is. The. Best. Thing.” No wonder we don't get up early. There is nothing sweeter than those moments. The saddest part comes the second night alone again, with 200 miles between us. All the distractions of being “home” again are less urgent. My bed feels lumpy and terrible and there is no joy in getting in or out of it. I am always two places at once as long as my sweetie and my children are in two different states, which will probably always be the case, which breaks me in half.
I fantasized with my fourteen year old self that one day I would live alone with plants and cats and I could listen to whatever I wanted and be sad any damn time I felt like it and no one could tell me to feel any finer than I actually felt. Then, because my life took a long time making that even possible, the idea got shoved way down, only to push it's way up long after I had forgotten I'd ever planted it. Now it's a thorny weed. It chokes things when I am out of town. I have to do a lot of swearing and slashing to clear a path big enough to get in and wake up the princess. Right now she's trapped in there. I can't even tell where the damn door is. Sadness sucks the doing out of the day.
Going home is so full of intense emotional geography. I pass all these landmarks with terrible memories trapped in them. I pass the Ram's Horn where I worked the night shift and the spot up the road where I once avoided a 4am assault by making insane chicken noises until the guy ran away. I pass the giant gothic high school where I suffered through my own tortured young poetry and messy understanding of how things worked. The house where I was raped at sixteen by a thirty two year old construction worker who assured me beforehand that everyone else in his family was a lawyer. My best friend's house where every interior wall was pink, where I was granted emancipation, which was a refuge until it wasn't. I pass the donut shop, pie shop and Target I worked at, concurrently. The cockroach infested apartment on Horger where the prostitute lived upstairs and worked out of the bedroom above mine. The haunted house on Robindale where the walls shook; the house I escaped earlier than expected but then had to slink back into when Oregon turned out not to be my home either. The apartment on Appoline where I listened at the heater vent and heard my mother OD on cocaine in the apartment downstairs. The church on Altar road where my mother stood and drunkenly shouted her many abysmal sins. I pass too near the horrid ghetto apartment in Taylor where my parents still live, where their hoarding got out of control, where I was made to understand I was worthless and regrettable by both of them, the last place I lived before hitching another ride with the same wrong man and starting over in Ohio. Past the house of the ex-boyfriend where things far too old for me took place as often as I could manage it. Past the apartment where the tree fell and crushed my father's car, where my mother's stupid friend Stanly told me if I tried to strike out on my own the best I could do for myself would be to become a hooker, where we washed our laundry in the bathtub, where my mother got me a cat and then hated me for loving it and got rid of it. Past the Detroit public school where I attended 6th grade, where I was once shoved into an alcove and very aggressively groped. Past the chunk of Warren where I took up cigarettes so I could walk with the boy who always asked for a smoke but kept on going when I didn't have any. Smoking was safer than being alone after a gang of over-ripe 8th grade boys followed me on my long walk home, trading stories of the vile things they planned to do to my twelve year old body. Past the place where I was once hit by a car while riding my bike down Ford Road. Biking down Ford Road is an insane and foolhardy action, there are no sidewalks, there is no bike lane. But I had flunked gym because I hated it, and I flunked algebra twice because my glasses broke in half and without them I couldn't see a damned thing. I was trying to get to summer school (which I had paid for myself on the threat that I would never graduate). My parents wouldn't give me a ride and the buses didn't run like that. I was hit by a car and flung onto the lawn of The Ford World Headquarters. My bike was destroyed. I remember lying in the grass, winded and shaken, staring a the bluest sky through the spinning spokes of the one good wheel left on my upside down bike, thinking OK, that's it. There goes my future. I flunked summer school because I couldn't get there. I entered 11th grade at yet another new school knowing I was already one credit shy of graduating, only to learn there were new standards there and I was two credits shy. My life outside of school had not gotten any easier. I filed for emancipation and moved in with my friend. I finished 11th grade and moved to Oregon. I got three stupid jobs at a time. I never went back to school again. I moved into my future as a brilliant fuck up, scrambling out of holes like a champ because I never had the guidance or self worth to avoid the holes in the first place.
Memory Lane is pretty much full of high speed potholes. It's a good thing there ARE lovely parts to going home. Maybe one day I will detail those things instead of this dreadful list. I feel like I am supposed to be doing that now, since all this talk of insanely crappy things is bumming me out. There are beautiful parts but apparently those things don't press the keyboard right now. It's just this sucky haze of Man That Used to Suck, and It Sucks How Much That Sucks and Wow, How Interestingly Sucky My Own Patterns Are. I woke up and my internal voice was like, “Wake up asshole, you have to figure your life out.” So I went back to sleep and had a lot of dreams. Lately my dreams are like driving past those landmarks. Maybe I am resolving things there. Maybe that's where these sustained bursts of late night typing come from.
Mike thinks I should write it all down. “Think of it like a story that doesn't belong to you and it will be easier.” Sometimes I can do that. I should probably figure it out. I'm on the lawn again, peeking through the one good wheel. How did I get here? How can I fix this? I'm still trying to figure out how to meet my own basic needs.
