Yearrrrrs since I've last updated the blog!
Perusing past entries hurt my pride and I remember now why I stopped journalling. All that bleeding on the page. Yikes. I edited most of it out, cleaned up as it is. Less shrapnel, more sense. I owe this blog a recap, God bless Effexor and here goes, resigned at last to the movement of this endless sea.
Luke and I, on this pilgrimage, filling each other's gap as surely as two halves make one. We've dropped clues along the way, key-words-threads through the maze, that we may NOT forget we've been here already.
Birthday & Providence Hospital.
Stunted says the Counsellor.
then Plenty of Fish in the Sea. 2013.
Rebellion. Betrayal.
The Cabin. Saving Private Pomeroy saving Anne, 2015.
Labor&Industries.
Septic. Incorporate. Annabelle. $2000.00/month for L&I. $1000 for Maris forever. From $35/hr to $8/hr. Office, in the garage.
Septic repair. Pleasant View, inhospitable until funds are gathered. 32k for Stonebridge, 5k for the electrician.
My jaws locked up a few days before Christmas that year. I hear my Mom sob in the background, asking my Dad to do SOME-THING. That Christmas, he drives'on by on I-5 for one of his granddaughters: a ballet recital in Redmond. Alexis is in Bellingham, and it's probably her fault and my fault if he doesn't know that. Anyhoot, it's clear that he continues to have no money no time for this bastard branch of the family tree.
Fatigue now commands the day. I find myself lying on the floor near the desk in between phone calls. I blame Luke's madness, but it's mine all mine and I entomb the business, which by now grosses more than ever and requires more work than ever. As it grows, the labor:wage ratio for me has dwindled to minimum wage, there must be a name for this kind of inverse curve, and I tell myself to hang on 'til I find a worthy successor, someone who will split everything with me, without having to invest the years I have invested to build clientele, team, and reputation.
The Unholy Pregnancy takes fetal form in my breast and pushes everything else aside. One of my clients, Dr Hawkins who is a regular on Monday's cleaning schedule, says he doesn't need to see the biopsy's results, and I don't need to wait, for him to tell me that the dark mass he sees is what he knows it is.
He holds my hand. He is surprised that this is the way we finally meet face to face.
Triple Negative "XXX" Breast Cancer, and curiosity and sympathy draws a few near. Jenny is a steady, kind presence. Helped me clean my house a number of times.
Celina treats me to Colonics, for the Love of God.
By then, Alexis is done with college and she has picked her lifelong mate, whom I freudian-slip and call Dale. The birthing pains are all over, the cord chewed, and it is a phantom who now occupies my belly, kicking its might into the brittle shell. I do not resist. Let it break, I pray. End this. & Will a deaf god now hear me?
Isabelle. Catherine. Genevieve.
"Educated", by Terra Westover. I send the book to my other sister, it lingers then disappears without feedback.
It's okay. I am beginning to understand where the cuts were made, the intentionality behind them, and the pardon I must work on to release myself from the incessant shame and guilt. My sisters will go about their own learning, however they must.
By now we've moved to the big city to minimize the cost of self care. It took years to qualify Luke for his VA home Loan. He is his own landlord now and it will take one hell of a hater to dislodge this otherwise homeless Veteran.
I gorge on Eckart Tolle, and things are almost "normal" now: Home, my hospital, his hospital, all within a five mile radius. A pandemic then happens, stay-at-home orders are implemented, and it feels funny, to not feel funny at all about all that.
In 2018, when my second quarter in school was interrupted by my diagnostic, the year the Titanic wedged up on the iceberg of my mind, I wrote a small essay in English class, for a professor who had to look up "limbic" and who subsequently recommended I apply for Creative Writing at Western U in Bellingham 'right a'way, for a continuing lesson on The Art of Metaphor.
O that I could, and let's see if I can.
Minefield / Mind field.
It rains nearly everyday here. And what the pregnant clouds do not release during day time, they unleash in the dark with a vengeance. This is where I first met him, prostrated in the mud, weeping. “Let me weep with you” I said, and so we did, together, that first night.
Hundreds of acres he has, by virtue of having been born a man in a privileged society and for having served in its holy wars. Exactly how many acres, and in what condition: we’ll never know. Few seeds will themselves into growth here, besides the pugnacious weeds this soil offers well in spite of itself. Somewhere in a far away city tower, a conceited official has balanced the books.
All the same: We've mapped the clay beds and the thin red bands of sand which fillet through them like broken Navajo relics. We’ve dug a pond where the rivulets gather and drink from it, and we’ve leaned the house into a hirsute pile of rocks up in the center of things, where it receives the wind through its windows like breath through Kokopelli’s flute.
Every morning, I snap his boots on for him, and lowers his hat down to his brow. Once in awhile, he wishes to display his medals on his lapel, and I dutifully pin them on. A quick burst of pride flares in his eye, and I tell him he is beautiful, and we head out into the wet, my Soldier and I, readied for the weather and the land.
The fusion between his nano prosthetics and what flesh the war spared (his trunk, and most of his head) is nearly complete. The two of us can manage up to half a row per day now, his two “hands”, now “coils”, firmly wrapped around the plow’s grips, and my own, ready to catch him should he begin to oscillate from the top of his graphene legs and threaten to fall.
He hardly falls anymore.“You are a Miracle”, I say.
“…so I could get to you” he says, looking like the benevolent angel at Reims’ Cathedral’s door, as happy to see you’ve made it, as he is surprised.
Now his ghosts leave us and the sun appears. The Prolixin is still coursing through, regulating what his mind’s eye sees and modulating his limbic response, but briefly through the veil, I see his brilliant heart, and he sees mine.
Over & Out for now.
