Sundayitis

The wind whooshes outside and I just ate cereal for dinner while watching America's Funniest Home Videos. I feel sort of pathetic, and am absolutely dreading the thud of work's start on Monday.

I've been bad about writing because I am overwritten. I must write from morning to evening at work, groping for topics of interest, trying to say something for the sake of it and it's exhausting me. My words are evading me and I'm grasping at the B-line. Stringing sentences together not worthy of being written. I've heard of burn-out before but to have it. I just feel finished, done. Which is so not lining up with reality.

The other thing going on is my father is sick. Five years ago he had his mitral valve replaced in his heart and recently he has been feeling overtired and overcold. He wrote it off as a cold; it ended up being endocarditis (heart infection). He's on a six-week course of IV antibiotics that he's serving himself up each day at home and then they decide how much lasting damage there is, and whether he can live with it, or whether they need to redo the surgery.

With everything I have, I hope they don't have to redo the surgery. It's been difficult thinking positive but I'm trying so hard. I went back east for a week to take care of my dad and that helped me feel not quite so useless. None of us have any control over the situation and that's hard to swallow.

I think I'll go to bed early tonight. Get a full night of dreams.

Outliving Jesus

Big milestone. I'm outliving the old carpenter, growing out of my Jesus year. Still haven't figured out how to walk on water, though. Or, how to turn water into wine.

7x7 is not Enough

I just learned that my ex-boyfriend is relocating to San Francisco, and all I can think is, this city isn't big enough for the both of us. Hopefully, since he's got kids and a wife and stuff now he'll settle out in the 'burbs somewhere far from here, and I'll never run into him unexpectedly on that one day I decided not to wash my hair.

I liked the protective pocket of knowing he lived out of state, that I wouldn't/couldn't run into him, that when my friends came to town I'd get them all to myself. And knowing he's moving now, it's just too close for comfort. SF is MY city now. MINE. I've staked my territory and laid claim and in all the country for him to move... it's back here!?

7x7 just isn't big enough.

Bad About Writing

I can always bring to term this heavy pregnant balloon of words waiting to burst from me. Or can I? Or will I? I'm just so afraid of the labor pains and whether what emerges will be healthy and beautiful or deformed and sickly. And whether it'll be followed by a sense of catharsis or the deep depression of the post-partum. Something's in there, it's on the upswell, it's starting to kick. The belly of my brain is bloating, it's contracting. Coward, I am, by not pushing I abort.

Quit Plane' With My Emotions

This has been happening to me frequently enough that it seems to be a lasting condition, but when I get on long plane flights, and I have to sit with myself and just my own thoughts without any distractions for hours on end, something horribly embarrassing happens to me: I start to cry. And it's never just a sniff-here, sniff-there kind of cry; it's always a gusher, where I just can't wipe the tears off my face fast enough and have to do this weird turn-thing into the window so I can pretend no one can see that I'm having a breakdown. It's like I'm suddenly reminded of all that's lost, I get anxious about my family and sad about certain situations, or, in this most recent case, I miss my departed cat and that leads to thinking about how she was sick for so long and I didn't even know it and that leads to having to hold her in my lap as she was put to sleep and that leads to the contrast of my friend Jon's death being so quick which probably started this whole crying on planes thing in the first place. That was because I had to leave straight from his funeral on a plane back to San Francisco and didn't cry at all at the funeral and then I got on the plane and was just sitting there and everything hit me all overwhelming and the tears just gushed on down. Since then, it's literally every time I'm on a flight more than four hours it happens--even when I purposely try not to (this time I even took ativan hoping that might put the tears away). Once it starts happening there's no stopping it either, no fighting, it's just time to sit back, let those tears flow, let those shoulders heave, sniffle and boo hoo and have myself a good cry, miles high.

Today, Nothing

I come home sapped, tapped, completely out of ideas, yet my bones want to write and create when the brain just feels mush. Craving the escape of words but just not finding it in me. So I blather and rattle, regurgitate the day's news or tell a pointless story about the day. And then today comes, and I just really truly have nothing to say.

Dear Jon

Dear Jon, Dear Jon,
By the time you read this note, you'll be gone...

I've been putting off writing this letter to you because I'm not sure of what I'm going to say or how I'm going to say it or even where to start.

I can start with the fact. The fact that you are dead. That you killed yourself and are now gone forever even though I can picture you clearly with those sweet eyes and goofy smile.

I picture you with a sky full of stars behind your head. Perhaps a puff of smoke you exhaled climbing towards the moon.

I picture you wading into the water, muscled, alive and glistening in the starlight, somehow looking at everything but the waves, getting knocked over and under, surfacing laughing.

I picture you digging in the sand, endless holes to nowhere, constantly being borne open and filled back in again.

I picture you drinking. I picture you smiling. I picture you sleepy at sunrise saying, "I've got three brain cells left and they're fighting."

I picture you knocking the sign and knocking it down again the next night in triumph.

It is hard to picture you sad, although I hear you slur your words, which makes me sad now. I know you drank too much but it's hard to have known there could be consequences, not then, when we made it night after night traipsing until sunrise alive.

I wish you didn't do it, but imagine when you did, it was with your whole heart, and there was no turning back. My guess is it was swift and violent. And there is a part of me who is glad that if you were feeling that much pain, suffering that much, that I'm glad it is over, and I hope you're in a better place, as cliched as that sounds, no one should hurt that much that they feel death is the only choice.

And I wish and I wish. I wish you felt you had a choice. I wish you'd sought help and maybe you did and that if that help wasn't working that you'd sought it again. I wish a lot of things. That we could have those nights back when we were young and could have taken ourselves a bit more seriously. That we hadn't drifted apart. That it wasn't all just so much fun and fluff. And selfishly, I wish you'd reached out to me, that I could have helped you, or at least tried.

It was shocking and not shocking at the same time that you left instructions to have your ashes scattered right at the spot where we did so much hanging out, so much talking and laughing. Way before I ever met you, this beach was my magic place, a place out of time where I always felt I belonged. As a kid, I'd spend hours digging at the sand near the breakers, entertained by the dislodged crabs and clams, watching as they over and over again dug their way back into the sand until the water would come again. I made sandcastles. Mermaids. I swam and jumped through waves and wiped out and went back in for more. I'd search the tidal pools for shells and watch the moon rise in the water making a path that led all the way right to me. I listened to the crickets in the dunes and my hair went blonder and my skin went brown. And at night I watched meteor showers and mapped my own constellations. It's a place where the world is mine.

It's the only place in my life that's always lived up to its idealization, and now it's marked by your death. And I feel sad and mad about it in a way that's making that the focus and not your death, because it's still hard to think you're gone forever, and that any goofy laugh I hear of yours on those sands to the pound of that surf will be in my head, a memory, and there are no more times with you to look forward to, and that's the way it's going to have to be because you made it so.

Perhaps, I feel closer to you now that I know that the beach, my beach, was your beach, too.

You shouldn't have killed yourself. I wish you hadn't. You're too young and too smart and I just wish you hadn't done it.

For now with love, From Me