Well, this is just like old times. It\’s Thursday night; I\’m sitting home alone with the lights off and my face in front of the computer monitor. I have a bad case of anxiety I am trying to suppress by overeating and masturbating until my labs bleed. I hear the crickets and the summer cicadas chirping outside. I\’m not wearing any pants and I\’m procrastinating working on the new web server. This could be 1999, or 2000, or 2001 all over again. I guess sometimes, when left unchecked, we all fall back into the worst of habits.
Yesterday morning I sent my boyfriend and his daughter off to New York as originally planned to see his dad. I stayed here in order to be with my family and prepare for the funeral. I spent yesterday afternoon watching after my four hellacious second cousins, all under age six. I have no experience with children. The last time I babysat I purposefully allowed a one year old to roll off a bed because I wanted to see what would happen. (Hey, I was nine — it\’s not like I\’m a sociopath.)
I don\’t like kids, particularly young ones. Even though I have a twelve year old in my charge for four weeks out of every year, I am not good with kids. Sure, they look all cute and cuddly, but trust me — I share the blood. I know what it\’s like to be part of this family line. We look all nice and sweet but good lord, turn your back on us and suddenly you will find yourself with an enormous repair bill. So at around hour three, with two of the girls fighting and cramming crayons into the plush chairs, the other girl crying because she couldn\’t reach her coloring book, and the little boy decided to sneak behind my back to his great-grandfather\’s rocking chair and take it for a ride. The ride, of course, ended on the side table next to the chair, knocking over the lamp and a giant glass of soda all over the light grey-blue rug. My immediate thought was \”Oh, shit, Gran\’ma is gonna have a fit,\” but what directly followed was \”Um, no, she won\’t. Gran\’ma\’s dead, you asshole. And she never even liked this carpet.\”
When you reach a certain age where everyone begins to treat you like a child again, particularly your own children, and you no longer make the decisions about what color the new rug in the house you have lived in half your life will be, do you feel obsolete? Like a burden?
I\’m somewhere in between those stages, the way most of us are. I let people take care of me for so long that now I feel like I am placing a burden upon others to ask for even the slightest things. So while my family gets together and processes in their way, I have mostly stayed at home at my apartment. All my appointments cancelled for the week. Took the week off work. No plans. Nothing concrete until the funeral tomorrow morning, and then driving to the airport to pick up (I don\’t even know what to call him anymore but I decided not to use names in this journal, so use your imagination) ___, whom I have not seen in two and a half years. Of all my lovers, he became the closest with my family, and so when I gave him the news on Tuesday and asked him to come, he dropped everything right away and made flight arrangements even though he is not rich and last minute transatlantic flights cost more than one thousand dollars right now. He would not allow me to pay for the ticket. We tried our best to get him here for the service, but the only time the cemetery could arrange was four hours before his flight lands. But he will be here for a week, which will cheer my grandfather up immensely. Me as well.
My mom said that the first night would be the hardest. That was some bullshit. I slept like a baby Tuesday night. It was the first night in two weeks that I did not have nightmares. Last night, on the other hand, was hell. Despite taking a more than ample dose of my prescription sleep aids, and despite having put both an hour into the gym and then four hours in with the kids earlier in the day, I couldn\’t sleep. When I did doze, it was only to return to the horrors my unconscious mind releases when I\’m drugged out of my panties. It was the first night I had slept in this apartment alone, and I kept semi-awaking to half-dreams of intruders breaking into the apartment and doing atrocious things. I went to bed at midnight, and gave up on trying to sleep around three.
All day I\’ve dragged my feet. Despite craving downtime and alone time for the past month so that I could read, write, and work in peace, I have accomplished jack shit. I stare at my stack of reading material and wish that I had read it already. Photoshop looks like some ancient Egyptian technology to me. Forget switching over to the new server. I managed to answer about thirty e-mails and take a shower, only to come back and discover new replies from most of them already. I hate answering e-mail. It\’s so damned tedious. All of this is tedious. All I want to do is pick up the phone and have someone be with me, but I don\’t know who to call or what to say. I don\’t want sympathy, or empathy, or an attempt at inane entertainment to distract me. I don\’t want to drink until I\’m blind and crying like a baby. I don\’t want to fuck my cares away. I just want to know I\’m not as alone as I feel. That people care about me enough to not send me to a place I hate where I am bed bound, in constant pain, bored out of my skull, fed disgusting food, am forced to wear a catheter on a daily basis and then inevitably end up dying alone in the middle of the night, anyway.
My family believes in God and Heaven and all that jazz. Problem is, I don\’t. They believe my grandma is in a better place now, away from all the pain, and has been reunited with her first child, whom she lost at birth. That all around her, all the family dogs from over the years — D, C, G, F — are playing around her while she gives God hell and tells him how miserable things are in Heaven. This brings them comfort, and I suppose amusement. But I don\’t believe in those things. I don\’t believe in anything, I guess. I used to say that I have faith in faith, and I suppose I still do. I believe that if you have faith in something, no matter what that faith is, it will get you through. But I have faith in nothing — no higher power, no destiny, no religion, no philosophy, no emotion, no person. Science, perhaps. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Right about now they should be finished cremating my grandmother. I spent most of yesterday wondering what temperature blood boils at. Tonight I\’m wondering how cold it has to be before the human heart will freeze.
