You weren't meant to notice
or: tiny ticking time bombs
When they look at you like “How dare you?” —keep the fuck going. You’re on to something you weren’t meant to notice, let alone understand, let alone on your own terms. Press into the wound. Push on with your questions and your exploration. Exploration over explanation. You don’t owe them anything and they don’t owe you either. Operate as such.
The heating system all around the baseboards of my house is loud as fuck today, or maybe it’s just that the house is quiet as a church after the finely-dressed congregants leave on Sunday, having tucked away their hymnals to rush the parking lot and cut each other off. The sun hits my eye at an odd angle in the winter time as I write to you. I like how piercing it is, shooting right through the tangle of empty black trees in the yard to slice my retina as I stare at my screen—but I have to shut the blinds so I can see.
I’m warm in my Ugg boots—like it’s 1997 when I was pregnant and not wearing heels—sipping hot coffee, but my fingers are freezing. My fingers are always freezing, I don’t know what it is. Some parts of me at odds with other parts but all of them mine. I type fast to try to thaw them out. I’m tired. More tired than my body lets on. I’m tired with the weight of another year gone by, or just about. I’m sunk deep with the shock and awe and sickness of it, just as I’m light with the joy and the giddiness of 1069 mornings sober, and hungry with the gratitude I force myself to muster. I’m ungrateful too often, that’s the truth. I’m a dick, I’m an asshole, I’m not nice.
Shedding old skin is letting other people cry behind closed doors. Letting the tears and the blame fall like rain into a flood that is forever. What if you are seen? What if you are given the credit you are due? What would it matter? What would it change?
Coffee and scones. 90’s music and forgetting you were a kid once with dreams of her own. Look: they don’t want you to know. They only like the ideas they hand out because then they can hang them over your head any time they want. Then they know what to look for so they never have to look you in the eye.
I was addicted to alcohol. I used to take it to bed with me. That was less than three goddamn years ago. I’m not supposed to talk about any of it anymore. I can see it in their worn down expressions. Rare is the gem who addresses me directly. I tried, I want you to know. I tried everything I could to destroy myself because I didn’t like me either. But here I sit. Here I am, same as I ever was before you placed the gun in my hand.
If it’s not shocking it’s not noteworthy. If you aren’t paralyzed by abject terror you don’t have a pulse. How far are you willing to go? Do you want to be right or get it right? Press on the wound and smile about it. I asked myself, while someone or another was spouting off about Trump or the ‘fucking libs’ or some such wallpaper topic (same pattern plastered all over everything so you don’t think to think about what’s festering in the walls), I asked this person (as I asked myself): why should I believe you? How did you get here and what do you know? How do you conduct yourself in your daily life when no one’s looking and you aren’t thumping your chest for digitized attention?
This is the real world, man. It’s nuts out here. I go first because that’s who I am. Maybe it’s because I’m the first born to two firstborns to people who had a lot less than I do. Maybe because I prefer to fuck around and find out in real time, or so it would seem is the overarching theme of my life. I don’t want to be told. I don’t want to be quiet. I don’t want to sit next to my uncle and feel afraid of how fast the rage blisters out in all directions from the bottom to the top and out all the sides. I’m so sick of being the one who has to feel this and swallow this and handle this. I’m so sick I could spit in the eye of the beast of the entire human race.
Life is tough but only because you didn’t do it right the first time. Nobody is coming to save you. All the monsters live in your head. To this day I don’t know if that’s better than under the bed or worse.
Biden pardons his son. I imagine mothers who can’t do anything to help their own. Who cry behind closed doors. I don’t know what to do with my nervous system today because it is a string of tiny twinkling time bombs strung up as a sign of these weathered, wintering times. I make a fresh pot of coffee and thank the vacant heavens for days as razor cold and electric white-gray as this one. I find it hard to trust anything else.
I write for you with all I know how, which admittedly isn’t much and will never be enough. I drink my black coffee, and nothing else.
Also almost three years sober. Loved reading your stuff.
Fucking 💥💥