Said ;Don’t They Look at Peace/ Sometimes I Wish That Was Me;

Today I loudly, bitterly miss getting _{<just extraordinarily, raucously>}drunk about my feelings. Plugged to the couch under a dog and a blanket with purple lips, glass in hand, noisily face leaking over Bones. I know it is a privileged, protected impulse to stop keeping up with events; but I am choking to death on my own fear every day there’s news. I can’t live in this world and be well. Not like this. Not anyhow I think. Not even well medicated and happy otherwise. It isn’t possible. I’ve been stopping Mister from relaying headlines he reads lately. Just cutting him off cold. I don’t want to see the information I already see; please do not add more I can’t breathe already — it’s all sitting on the center my chest.

‘I was the son you always had
Tugging at your coat
While you were sad
I was the son you always had
I was the son you always had’

I do feel good and proud that my days are full of doing and that I do a lot. I’m pleased to have taken _{<most of>} the weight off of Mister _{<if I don’t leave a certain amount for Friday, he chuffs around at loose ends muttering>} after so, so many years of him carrying me, for one. But also. Handwork _{<especially repetitive and long>} is very satisfying to me. When I was a woman, I couldn’t be comfortable with enjoying caretaking and emotional labor; I had to make convoluted rules to get away with nurturing so I wouldn’t feel like I was Role Performing. I miss precisely nothing about being a woman and that’s been washing over me a lot lately. However, housethwifing is not exactly high thought engagement for the most part. I am bouncing from room to room, rattling from task to task with only myself and my fear to ponder. A is here, of course, working from home downstairs _{<he doesn’t even take lunch naps anymore>} but even so I spend the greater part of the day haunting my own house once again. Only now the apocalypse has deepened greatly and my elimination is openly on the table.

‘Don’t cry
Hold your
Head up high
She would
Want you to
She would
Want you to’

The last time _{<October, 2020>} I felt like this, A and the kids needed to be rescued _{<December, 2020>} and then they stayed forever. Then I got medicated and fixed all of our fucking lives by basically sheer force of will _{<and Bea’s life insurance money>} and refusal to quit. What am I supposed to do about once again haunting my house now? You set everything to rights and have almost the same amount of extra time and headspace when you’re all done it’s devastating. I guess I just get someone new to move in _{<to our 1000 sq ft ranch>} and hang out during the days? I’m like a 10 year old with dogs but with packing my life with people so I never have to spend any hours alone I don’t actively choose to _{<someone build me a whole compound>}. There’s probably therapy for that but that’s a whole separate powerpoint of excuses.

‘Please
Just
Don’t cry
Hold your
Head up high
She would
Want you to
She would
Want you to’

I feel extraordinarily dramatic, but I know I’m fine. I know I will take one to two medicinal _<jager>shots this evening around dinner and feel little to nothing and the rictus of today will pass into feeding and bathing and trying to find out what the fuck the kids’ dad did to them over the weekend that has them both climbing the fucking walls and arguing about devices and last snacks and glasses of water and ‘goodnight gummies’_{<MELATONIN you little neurospicy monsters>} and finishing the book of Abenaki scary stories and rubbing legs and feet and feeding dogs and all the other aspects of the bearable part of my days.

‘You said
;Stay in the car and wait
There’s just some things I have to say;’

Just right now? Right this fucking moment? I want to take my skin off and crawl away under the snow and see about that lifestyle. But get just wasted before I go.

‘You’ll lie patient by her side
With roses red
Come lilies
White
I was too young to understand’
– Bear’s Den