regime change

last night, he made me laugh until i cried. almost all our boys do that...it's a charm, something i don't appreciate until the tears are hotly rolling down my cheeks, this time splashing onto the shelf of my bulging belly.
i desperately needed to laugh and laugh and laugh...i just wish its warmth were not so fleeting.
i am ready to be done. i told her today that i'm pining for a specific pair of my old jeans...which, once i fit back into them, will not leave my body for an entire year. i will not comb my hair. i will not wear sensible, professional clothing. i will not answer to anyone. she said she thinks i just need some time that doesn't involve my giving anything to anyone. she said she thinks that this 'gift' has drained my generosity...that i will hold onto it as a great gift for the rest of my life, but that for the next year i have to focus inward, that it has to be about me. i wish i could afford utter selfishness...the same i envied yesterday in him. even if it's not immediately up for grabs, i am ready to retrieve my life and redirect my path. this past year has been so fucking stagnant. stagnant like we are stagnant right now. we haven't done anything specifically us since april third. i told him i want to be locked in a room with him for two solid days, which was only slightly a whopping lie...not like this i don't...not swollen and awkward and deteriorating...i want to be locked in a room with him when i'm back in a phase in which he doesn't have to shut his eyes so much, he doesn't have to look past me from beneath me. a phase i'm aching to have return.
our marathons that he used to say he loved are longlost. our spontaneity is mostly lost. our nerves fray at each other. we need more sleep, more dedicated time.
they've been married now almost a year and he professed his undying love for her again to me before telling me goodbye today. they've made it through the year and the things he says have been the hardest are the little things like the shower curtain and the dishes. super soulmates, lousy roommates. i'm a bad roommate to anyone right now. pushing the gear shift into park and screeching to a dusty stop on the shoulder of the road, i turned and looked right at her small, porcelaine face as i shattered it with my words. i throw daggers even after i've promised to disarm. worse than saddam, the pain that i inflict as i undermine my promises crushes her. girl, interrupted someday, maybe, hating me and the inner turmoil i've created. the same fire spits in various, more dissipated directions, but most of it burns furiously upon the wick of her heart and soul because she is an easy target. and i am a tyrant. with a wicked itchy rash and a stultifying need for the same affection i cannot force myself to give. she needs to rise up and oust me as much as i need to rise up and oust my internal and external dictators. when i'm finally toppled, oh, how i'll fall.

tick tick tick

last week was heaven, nearly. access restricted, interactions limited. pure pleasure that makes the return the the meaningless montony of my working life more hellacious than was originally the case. i am counting the seconds. 12 days times 7 hours times 60 minutes times 60 seconds: only 302400 to go...
54 today only he seems so much older, so much younger. k's choice wrote the perfect song for us. i played it for him once and he recognized the truth i saw. why our relationship has been so consistently fraught with conflict i'll never understand. i wonder at their ability to raise such decent kids. she is beautiful but slightly troubled and terribly insecure, but she is nowhere near approximating the disasters i've witnessed in the halls, thongs out the back of their pants, cigarettes drooping from their painted lips. she's a good kid, if neurotic. he's a good kid, too, and adorable. they're very grounded, even if they're both mildly compulsive about food. i know where they get that...and i know it will take both of them a few years of living on their own to overcome the frantic feeling that arises when you think just maybe the supply is limited.
he sends me poetry from afar. i wish i could adventure with him; i so envy his freedom, his ability to flit from nation to nation, exploring, discovering, reflecting. i so envy his solitude, his total lack of consequence. how did i ever become so bound by secularism? how did the payment of bills become my reason for rolling out of bed? this isn't what i was supposed to be. before he died, he pointedly told me that he was glad i was planning to do something somewhat profitable with my life (before i threw a kink into that plan, too), that he had long feared i would spend the rest of my life floating through life wearing a flowy skirt and armed with an equally flowy pen. he said he feared i would try to save the world. because he identified the part of me that desperately wanted nothing more than to rescue the universe. the part of me that's now buried beneath debt and more ious than i can count.
he threw her in the garbage...did i inadvertently force it? we are blending so oddly. i don't know what to make of his expression last night, of his looking up at me but not at me.
she calls. and one countdown eclipses the other.
tick
tick
tick

skeletal

i read that while she was writing it. i provided commentary. i wonder if she acknowledged me the way she acknowledges everyone at the ends of her books. i told her what worked and didn't work. i didn't know she'd gotten it published. i want to be happy for her; i want to admire her as much as i originally did. somehow, thinking about her, seeing her, reading her words makes my heart a little sore. she is such a fraud. but not.
she is crazy.
like she is crazy. which is probably what spurred the attraction on my part, but i don't know what attracted her to me. that i was weird. that i was not the norm. that she thought that i could write. i needed her support. oddly, i think i still sort of do. i certainly haven't managed very well with it on my own. i wrote books with her guidance. now, i write nothing. i don't know why it all disappeared. something made me realize that she was sort of right...i almost wrote no one normal. but then i remember writing normal and considering the implications of the word and concept, wanting to demolish society's ideal. no one is normal.
show me, show me, show me. the best thing i learned from trying to love the two of them.
i need to start again. tomorrow. i need to dig out my disks, and i need to force myself to write. it will not happen on its own.
i walked by your office today and, seeing the light on, felt a pang that i couldn't readily explain. the day we saw each other when i was walking to work and you were walking home, part of me really wanted to talk to you. i need to thank you. for helping me. i am eight months pregnant now with a busy baby boy who is not mine, i am preparing to cut every conceivable cord, i am stepping off into completely uncharted territory over the next few months, and i have never felt so strong. part of that came from you and the things you gave me that you may never have realized you were giving.
and now i have some closure.
or i'm opening a giant can of worms.
the renewed interactions of the past few days have unearthed loamy parts of my past that had more or less faded into the haze. suddenly, they feel the need to reach out. and i feel the need to reach back, farther, harder. these people are not lights that have dimmed and died out in my universe...they are not slowly fading mutant glimmers. they are lights that have waned only to reemerge with a thousand times the wattage. more forceful than ever. he is somewhere on a beach. i hope he's having fun.
he is somewhere sandy, too, and it scares me to death that i haven't heard from him. the argument i had with him today only reinforces my inclination that everyone should have fled to tiajuana. god knows i would be dragging my shit across the border.
i am beetlejuice trying to cram the skeletons back in my closet, but still they slither, slippery, out. they dance about my room, seep into my skull, softshoe through my soul, making themselves at home. we're here to stay.
your past is always a part of you, however much you stifle and stifle and try your best to forget it.
i made her cry. her reply: i'm sitting here stunned. in tears. i feel half crazy - or more than half -- when it comes to you. i'm so sorry that i caused you all that trouble with Richard. i'm so so sorry.
thank you for being willing to send this message.
i hope that baby grows strong and well -- and i hope that you can find a way to let go of him when the time comes. being a surrogate mom has to be one of the most wonderful things anyone can do for another, but also one of the most difficult.
stay well, Morghan. you deserve good things. let yourself live them.
not what i expected.
she sits with her new six-legged friend and stares hard intermittently at me and her computer screen. i don't know when she got so big. or how. the picture hanging on the wall next to her office shows me with her wrapped tightly in my arms, backpack hanging off my shoulder, doinker exploding from her scalp. she was so tiny, so different not so long ago. and we always think it's corny when our parents remark about how fast we've grown and how the time slipped away while they weren't looking. i never thought i'd be one to stop rolling my eyes and admit the depth of that statement's truth. i never thought i'd find myself caught between wanting to instill independence and wanting to be able to hold onto her and braid her hair and wave at her all the way to the school door forever. the day she didn't turn to wave because she was walking with a friend almost sent me into a fitful frenzy. slowly but surely, i am losing my little girl. who i guess i should never have felt like i owned in the first place. even though she owns so much of my person, she does not belong to me.
nor does he belong to me, as much as i routinely tell him i would like to chain him in the basement, as much as i chronically feel i would like to catch him in a jar, mount him on my wall. why am i compelled to suck the very life from everything i touch? i am never satisfied with the enjoyment of existence in the present. things are always tainted with anxiety about the next step, big scary dissolution. funnily, i don't fear solitude, actually kind of crave it. and yet i can't stop myself from winding and winding and winding around everything and everyone i love, an unrelenting, merciless, spasmically clenching boa constrictor.
when we watched her story, he identified incredibly with him and i with her. although we both recognized that she was completely crazy, he attributed her insanity to things i didn't. he blamed her insanity for things i didn't. there's been too much crazy in my life to even try to say there's ever a time when it only goes one way. it's always a two-way street, and the culpability only marginally rests with the one whose craziness bubbles past the surface. the crazy that lurks below harbors the true treachery...it's so much more insidious, so much more penetrating, so much more venomous. stick your head in an oven and everyone blames it on you.
what's her diagnosis? needy, hon, that's all. needy. and he couldn't take it because he wasn't ready to be needed, which is bigger than being adored.
her mouth twitches when she plays video games just like his used to. and she called herself a chip off my old block.

little missus

has it been a whole month? i don't know where the time goes. it trickles, it pours, it sneaks off down the drain. three weeks, she said...it could be just three weeks more and how absolutely delighted i will be to exit stage left, looking back only in amusement...no regret, despite their insistence that i will regret it when i leave...the comfort, the security, the paychecks. pshaw. i'll be much happier structuring my universe on my own. and health insurance will make its way to me. how do people let themselves become such victims of an utterly feeble machine?
he's sitting low in my pelvis. i can't walk three feet without feeling like i desperately need to pee. last night, we managed better than we've managed in some time. he's so stressed and tired all the time. i'm so heavy heavy heavy in every possible way.
i needed him to hear me and process what he heard the way he seems to have done. he seems to be invested in changing the behavior, he seems to want to rebuild their relationship. i don't know why i let it get so brittle. i don't know why i thought that i could continue to be their mediator. if we're all going to live together and vibe together, it can't be a constant strain, she can't feel like a chronic pain, and i can't feel like it's my job to hop from one to the other, mending and negotiating. we have to be a tryad supported by strong dyads from every angle. if one support starts to waver, our entire structure eventually will crumble.
today's drizzle makes me yawn, seeps into my skin. i can't remember such exhaustion. and i don't understand why i have this overpowering urge to get married. a year ago, i would have thought never, never, never. it wouldn't have crossed my mind. so much has changed. i never thought i could uphold my feminist ideals and still wash the dishes at the end of the night, still want to be mrs. someone. who knows when he'll be ready? who knows if? the 448 step puts me on edge. there's so much more, in some odd way, at risk now if it all goes to shit. i guess he knew this, somewhere; i guess that's why he put it off so long. i guess he didn't want the chance to teeter, topple, tire of one another. it would sting a little more now to unravel. still, i'm ready to meld entirely. probably for the certainty, the security (the same i'm so hastily trashing at work). what does that say about needy me?