We Will Get There/When We Get There/Don’t You Worry

‘And lo
Our hearts
Were heavy laden’

I am wine-drunk _{<I never talked about how much I drank when I drank a lot. Never>} and stressed, as we all are at this time. Padding inside from smoking a cigarette, my broken foot _{<they are both broken, don’t lie. Rolling them both being the cost of being drunk whenever possible for years now>} clicks and cracks. It is partly the impending spring’s fault. The buoying season dragging each pivotal moment of bodily damage back out of me chronologically. First my hips go rotten, back in the still-cold month while the moisture swells. Then my slipped disk _{<from fucking back when I didn’t eat and we fucked like we were never going to see each other again>} starts to poison everything below my ribs but above the gull-cage of my pelvis. Then _<now> we’re on to mid- to late-twenties damage, and my malfunctioning feet click and pop and ache as they sing about falling down the basement stairs and just cruelly crumpling one day stepping down into the garage in the morning.

There are other small aches and cramps and stiffnesses in between _{<too small to measure>} that remind me of every misadventure and punctuation in this long walk of not having died yet.

‘Lord
Lift up
These lifeless bones’

_{<I am not telling you that Dad is not taking Crow Flu seriously and I am teeth-chatteringly scared about it and so deeply worried about him>}

‘Light cascading
Through the windows
All the rainbow’s
Heavy tones’

Back when we were kids and I hadn’t even slipped a disk in my lumbar spine yet, I took an adderall before a party and didn’t know amphetamines fuck up your ability to feel drunk and drank quite a lot of white wine at a _{<very, very tense>} party. I drove everyone home in the small hours, not knowing I was extremely drunk. I don’t know now why we decided to overshoot home and stop at one of the public access beaches no one ever even goes to. But we parked in the top lot above the small patch of sea in the grey hours of that summer morning and watched a schooner’s bow light for no reason in the dark. It was the only bright thing we could see until the sun slowly, ponderously rose somewhere into the fog and that tiny yellow light quietly faded into an overwhelming bank of bright grey dawn. We turned and went home before the fog broke, and I found myself out of bed and vomiting bawdily in our high-ceilinged and anemic mint-green bathroom within an hour. I had no idea I was wasted before that moment.

‘Stayed up for several hours
And then slept like infants
In the burning fuselage
Of my days
Let my mouth be ever fresh with praise’

As always, there are other things here. The seaweed plant going into lockdown and the overwhelming bellow of its noxious klaxon. I have never driven drunk on purpose; before or after. The smell of that apartment with its butter-yellow kitchen linoleum and gigantic six foot windows. The absolute singing of our elation in that hidden dawn that none of us has ever been able to quantify _{<but we all, ALL grin like ghouls when we tell this pointless story>} or explain.

‘Feel bad about the things we do along the way
But not really that bad
We inhaled the frozen air
Lord, send me a mechanic
If I am not beyond repair’
-Mountain Goats