How it leaves me tired and worn, like a pair of shoes that's walked miles of day-in, day-out life. I woke to my emotions, to my thoughts. I woke to thinking of J., and the anger re-surfaced.
How can one person be so fickle, so misleading? How can one person lie so easily? It wasn't that we were meant to be together--goodness knows, we were meant to pass one another, looking to our left, to our right, and to move like two cars on the expressway--barely glimpsing anything but colors.
I lied in bed, staring at the ceiling. Once, I tripped on mushrooms (a week, or so, after returning from Amsterdam) and the ceiling was full of sea anemones colored like rainbows. Today, however, the ceiling was white, and painted over--with my thoughts (and fears) spread out for me to read.
When one is the reader and the writer, does there need to be an interpreter?
I feel like the Great Gilly Hopkins--the heroine from a Patterson novel, only she bounced from one home to another, before settling, at last, happy in a carved out nook.
I don't necessarily believe there's a nook for me, but I don't believe there isn't one, either.
I spent the afternoon drinking wine. At first, I drank it because it was cool in the heat. Then, I drank it, because in the tipsy, slanted world, the writing on the ceiling turned to Arabic, and I refused to be the translator.
I'm still tipsy. Hours spent drinking. Hours spent sending my mind into a poetic place--into a place where emotions are nothing to be feared but something, always, to grasp and swim with--like a life jacket.
I began to think about my father--how he spent a good 30 years of his life as an alcoholic. What was he hiding from? What horrible thing in his childhood, in his life, did he not want to see written out on the wall?
I want to weep for him. (I am weeping for him). And yet, I wonder if there will be a day that I'll forgive him. Forgive him for being so closed off in himself that he couldn't save me from the devil. And I'm not talking about the devil with horns and cleft chin, but the devil of flesh and wandering, cruel hands.
It's hard to be angry with a dead man. It's hard to yell into a void of endless, always endless, silence. I miss him. I do. It's a strange thing: to be abandoned by a dead man over and over again.