Prolix Loquacity

I’ll begin where I left off, shall I? This story sort of begins, for the purpose of context, when I lost my job at the nursery I so loved shortly before Halloween. Sort of.

Last summer saw the return of something I knew would choose to rear its head some day, given the way I fetishized it the last time: chemical dependency. It seems that I instinctively turned to the only way my body knew how to produce enough serotonin and the various other chemicals needed to stay remotely functional in a world where you only have a certain number of days to mourn a pet and far fewer than it seems should be allotted for such things.

It took a psych ward, a month of outpatient therapy, and two different medications of varying efficacy to realize I was not just mourning a dog. I wasn’t even mourning just a family member… More appropriately I mourn a life. My life. The way it had been. And I’ve never been fond of change.

How do you know when it’s time to be done mourning a life? Nobody ever really prepares you for the amount of self-worth you attach to a relationship, or the importance you place on routine - these things happen so slowly and thoroughly a dome mortared with it would outlast and outshine even Hagia Sophia in glorious Constantinople. Cement. I digress. There you have it. I wasn’t just mourning a dog. I feel better already. Mourning a way of life is surely better understood and more socially acceptable than mourning a dog for a year, right?

But above all of the days in the psych ward (my former landlesbian drove to the hospital before my ambulance had even left and demanded they do a hold on me, isn’t that nice?), the pills that would make me happy but made my head feel like it was going to explode and might also cause my liver and kidneys fail (happy or healthy?) it took a miraculous thing to act as a catalyst for my revival, with me happening to my life instead of the other way, with me not shell-shocked from the amount of loss I endured, both then and when I had to move. It took a dog. Of course! Fire with fire, right?

It took the reason why my family and friends didn’t have to hold my funeral in 2009. Callahan. The weird, astonishingly sensitive puggle (pug+beagle mix, rescue), the reason my mother didn’t have to walk in on my corpse swinging from the rafters by my favorite true, my first to tie Windsor knot with sophomore year of high school. I keep it still; it reminds me not of the time I tried to kill myself, but of the time a dog was so sensitive she launched herself in a desperate cacophonous tempest at my bedroom door until I regained consciousness and had my WTF am I doing moment.(originally read: realized the full magnitude of my erstwhile intent. Pompous… Told you I wouldn’t be brief…)

Callahan seems to know things, more about my body chemistry and the flow of my mood than scientists will ever be able to delineate no matter how hard they may try. And I’m actually one of those believers of science.

Resorting to chemical dependency has been mildly efficacious at best in dealing with grief and loss. I basically just didn’t feel those feelings for a while, all the while understanding that, given the type of person I am, I’m likely to get more upset due to the memories substance abuse pilfers from my mind rather than take any sort of comfort in using a crutch to take the burden for a spell.

This is as much of the story as I have the energy for at the moment. I will crank out the next installment forthwith. I got my Remimgton Noiseless desktop typewriter working again after the landlady threw it when they were moving my things as I lay indisposed in the ICU of a psych ward for three days. I want those three days back. I don’t remember them, I was so heavily medicated. They damaged almost beyond repair my dearest typewriter, and stole three days from me. Not even going to get started on the computing equipment that no longer functions. At this point I’m just glad that bullshit is over. A+

Disclaimer: the below is not erotic. I just had a moment and needed to articulate everything I was feeling in the moment. Read on if you wish. As a side note, Apple should really have a slider button so one can turn off just the Christmas music. I am certainly not an adherent to the belief that a baby was born somewhere and all that, and the music is familiar and traditional, but come on. I know I used to be able to uncheck in iTunes so the unchecked ones weren’t synced, but now we have the cloud. And the cloud doesn’t allow it. (cue thunder crash) I wonder what it says about me that I’m able to type this way even though five minutes ago I was a wreck. Well, I still am. But it’s duller. You wouldn’t be able to cut dead wood with it. Green branches maybe… see this is the problem. This is prolix. I seem to do this, but the below paragraph is actually the start of the post.

I have thought for at least a year about whether or not I’d really have it in me to date and be intimate with another person. I’ve had sex, of course, but I mean the kind of person you’d share illnesses with. The kind of relationship where one of us is in the tub and the other feels comfortable using the toilet. The kind that takes years to develop. The kind that terrifies me.

I’m sitting in the hot tub after slightly dozing wrapped in a blanket on the red swing bench under the treehouse in the back yard. And O Holy Night came piping through my headphones and I started to crack. I didn’t realize I was at the moment. But that is where the fissure started creaking into a yawning chasm of emotion that came to a head just minutes ago, shortly after getting into said hot tub. Because it lead to thoughts like:

I have no one. Nobody here. With me. When I have my hatred of myself. When I miss the past. When I feel overwhelmed by paperwork and pay stubs and letters and insurance and bills.

While I may have resented him, perhaps nigh hated him at the end, I had a partner. He was there. At least he was there then. I don’t mean when someone says to you, “I’m here for you.” I mean present. Able to console and touch and be.

Just fucking around. I was bored. This is just a photo from a few days ago. I don’t know, I thought it looked interesting, worth posting…

I have been trying to capture the color for years. Is it true that eyes change color with emotion? Because if it was light, you’d still be able to see the color that is not being brought to attention by varying types of light if you looked closely, right?

For someone like me, eye contact is supremely uncomfortable; my attraction and slightly creepy obsession with eyes is (I think) an anomaly. Unless… we are sometimes fascinated by things we fear?

Took these the other day in the north-facing former. Usually the grey/blue is more prevalent in cooler light and this was only edited to obscure my huge face acne volcanos of doom. A bit of sharpness because I wanted to accentuate stands in the iris.

Took this a couple days ago. I forgot how much I missed having a device with a front facing camera. It makes it a lot easier to sort of just play around with placing and light and stuff.