We’d eaten chile rellenos, seated high over the street where the people walked; people with places to go and money to spend, lives happening. The sun was shining, maybe birds were singing. It’s how I see the picture, but I don’t remember and wouldn’t hear. I ate and was surprised that I could. It feels so wrong to eat, like eating on somebody’s grave, which is ridiculous. Who’s grave? Mine?
Nobody died. I have to eat.
I am ravenous, and I eat over the grave, the one no one but me knows I am sitting on or in. His long legs brush mine, a comfort, safe. His blue green eyes look at me, never deeper than what I can stand. The most they do is turn dark once.
We look like any couple, maybe slightly more interesting, better looking than some. People that don’t quite know think we are, because they know there’s something, just what they can’t figure.
He is beautiful, but he is not mine, and I am not his. He is the impossible friend, who couldn’t know the broken girl I am, who’s never seen my world, who doesn’t know darkness, who needs nothing from me. He is the impossible friend who I would love if the universe was different. But he is just a friend. The friend who brought me to the water this day so I could think, or not think.

I turn the music up. It seems so trite, lyrics that meant something a lifetime ago, now just a feeling that doesn’t make sense, nothing more. I am nothing but feeling and confusion; it seems fitting, none of the words making sense. And then the Norah Jones I’d given him gives me a lullaby and finally something feels right. I sleep the half trance of temporary peace. This moment, it’s all I have.
I ask him to drop me off and I don’t bother to retrieve my own vehicle. I know I will have to walk for blocks later, and it will be night, but I don’t care. I have borrowed time and now there isn’t anymore. I’ll worry about it later. For right now, I can’t give back one stolen moment of peace.
There’s nothing to be said when I leave, only his eyes dark once more, and my quiet thank you, and then I’m gone, carrying my stolen peace in a bag with a Norweigan flag to say it’s so.
I hang it over the calender in my office and sit in the dark, watching people through the window again. The calender says May. I don’t know when this started, what day my self slipped under the door and ran away. I don’t mark things on calenders and I’d rather forget. But I look there all the same, trying to figure it out. Which day did this happen? Which day did I realize I couldn’t get away from it? Which day did someone tell me “You have got to get your mind together”? When did I stop being able to get my mind together anyway? Have I gotten it back together at all?
I play with things on my desk. The tiny pewter tray with the viking ship. The pocketknife I forget to leave in my pocket and always need then. A rubber band, so useful. Nothing looks familiar, does the trick of making me make sense to me. It’s just stuff.
I go back to my closed eyes and see ripples on the water, see a pebble falling into depth, see a small fish making it’s way. I only know this, this moment of stolen peace.

I can’t tell. Or if I do, it will never be the whole truth. No one really knows how it is with me, how I feel my soul ripping out through my skin and my mind is flying away a thousand miles an hour. How my heart thumps so hard I can hear it, or then it’s just hollow, cored out. How I feel shamed, awed that I could ever feel such embarrasment that I would literally hide under a rock if I could.
Instead I go each day where I need to go and I face people that don’t know and they wonder what’s wrong. I’ve taken to sitting in my office with the lights off, watching people from my chair where they only see me there if they know to look. I stay there until I can’t. I get some illusion of safety there, of separation, and I can’t bear to get closer. I interact when I have to, and then go to my place I came from and cry. It hurts my skin to talk to people.

“I know a place where there’s no one, a beautiful place. It’s very remote, and there are a lot of trees and a beautiful valley. No one would ever hear you. You could scream. I’ll take you if you want to go.”
I imagine this. Try to see it as a comfort, a safety. I try to see him being there, keeping me safe. I don’t know if I can feel safe again, anywhere. With anyone. It’s so far away, or so far behind me.

I want to say it wasn’t that bad, that I’ll get over it. I want to say I’m stronger than this. But I don’t know how to be. I don’t have any marks on me. How can it be this bad? “No one beat you up.”
There are so many ways to violate a person, if you know how.

[Special thanks Al]

Dreams can come true.

[PS-I love you Leon!]

For You…
Gone, but not forgotten.
Love You, forvever.

For Anyone…
Missing Someone gone.
The Love is forever.

All that said, I wonder where and when my “quirkiness” has become apparent, when I’ve learned to be quiet about it. This week, I heard it on two separate occasions. Quirky. Different. Pioneering. Visionary. Various elaborations on that theme.

It was said like a compliment, a recognition of something good. Inside I cringed, just a little bit. I could only think of all the years I worked so hard to just fit in, lay low, not make myself a target and not be a challenge to anyone lest I offend them.
And not paint myself into a role I don’t want.
Another part of me heard the affection and admiration, the statement of appreciation in it that I did or had something “different” and that that was good.

Here’s some of what Merriam-Webster online says about “quirky”:

Synonyms:
bizarre, bizarro, cranky, crazy, curious, eccentric, erratic, far-out, funky, funny, kinky, kooky (also kookie), offbeat, off-kilter, off-the-wall, outlandish, out-of-the-way, outré, peculiar, quaint, queer, queerish, quirky, remarkable, rum [chiefly British], screwy, spaced-out, strange, wacky (also whacky), way-out, weird, weirdo, wild
Related Words:
aberrant, abnormal, addlepated, flaky; extraordinary, fantastic (also fantastical), freak, freakish, freaky, phantasmagoric (or phantasmagorical), phenomenal; atypical, rare, singular, uncommon, uncustomary, unique, unusual, unwonted; conspicuous, notable, noticeable, outstanding, prominent, salient, striking; atrocious, outrageous, shocking; crotchety, idiosyncratic, nonconformist, nonmainstream, out-there, unconventional, unorthodox; baffling, bewildering, confounding, mystifying, perplexing, puzzling

I’m not sure how I feel about this….

About the only thing that makes me feel ok about it is when I read this-

Near Antonyms:
average, commonplace, everyday, garden, normal, ordinary, prosaic, routine, run-of-the-mill, standard, typical, unexceptional, unremarkable, usual, workaday; conformist, conservative, conventional; expected, familiar, knee-jerk, predictable; common, customary, frequent, habitual, regular, wonted

I guess I’ll take being the opposite of those…

A good friend once told me “If I were you, I’d wear it like a fucking CROWN.”
He was speaking about my “differentness.”
I couldn’t have thought of anything that sounded more uncomfortable.
Maybe I’ve changed.

I still don’t want to wear it like a crown. Not literally. I like my freedom, even if it doesn’t seem like freedom to some people. I still want to be able to move through the world wherever I see fit, for me, without assigning a label or a character to myself by being “different.” I’m not in a box. I sure don’t want anyone putting me in one based on a picture I gave them.
But yeah, maybe I’ve changed. A little.

How about you? If you’ve ever been considered “different”, and it wasn’t what you were trying to be, did it feel good? Or did you say, “I’m not sure how I feel about this…”?
Maybe you had the alarm go off inside you, the one that said “Beware! They’re on to you. Now you’re in for it!” Maybe you worried that you might be cast in a role; “The Different One.” It happens; it happened to me, long ago. I wanted some room to be, whatever. No one wants to play the same part, over and over, like there’s nothing else. They call that typecasting in the movies, and it’s kind of a dead end. People need to name things, and they’ll name you too, sometimes.

Quirky. It was said affectionately, admiringly. But that little cringe was there when I heard it. The small voice inside that warned, so long ago, “Don’t be different.”

Your life will never be the same now, but I doubt you’ve totally grasped that. I doubt you get that you won’t be able to just pick back up where you hadn’t even started to go. I don’t think you know yet that you won’t be able to return to old relationships as they used to be, or that you can never “go home”, or ever turn back the clock.

I doubt you know that I held your four year old boy on Christmas day, and that he announced to the room that his Mommy will be out of jail by his birthday. He’s not sure when that is, but he’s sure Mommy will be out of jail then. She won’t be, but he’s been convinced.
I doubt he knows that Daddy has 41 months. I doubt he knows Mommy’s not far behind. Of course he doesn’t know. He’s four.
Your three year old, remember him? He’s a baby. A baby holding a stocking. They both are. There’s a picture of them both in my phone from the day, holding Christmas stockings of goodies.
They don’t scream and hit as much, and they seem to like being held more. They’ve been away from you for so long now, they’ve calmed down alot. No one’s driving them around, smoking meth and oxy in the front seat while they sit strapped in their carseats in the back seat.

Healing is possible. There’s always that hope. It takes alot for some people, but it happens.
What stops some people, isn’t even a blip on the screen for others. I don’t know what it will take for you. I know it isn’t losing your kids, and it isn’t ten arrests. I can tell you it takes alot of determination to change, to get clean and stay clean, to learn everything anew. It takes alot. There are still drugs even in prison.
But it takes something more than just determination as well. It takes surrender, and a changing of the heart. Some people must become completely broken before that happens, some just never will find it. Many just die first.
Sadly, they take others with them, too. Some of those they take don’t lose their whole lives, just find themselves derailed into a wreck not of their own choice or making. Some of those they take end up heartbroken, or with a broken spirit, and some grow up with a twisted notion of what love is….”Mommy will be out of jail by my birthday.”
Mommy won’t be out of jail by then. Mommy is going where you went when you “got out of jail.” She’s going to prison.

This is your chance. It’s the only one you have left. You can choose what you want to take from prison; who you want to end up being, what you want to become now. No one else can choose that for you. It isn’t going to be easy. You gave away so many of your rights, but you do still have that choice. I hope you choose well. You may not get another chance to choose.

PS- B? I can’t forgive you yet. I know I have to, but I’m not there yet. And I don’t want to see you, or write to you. I don’t want to think about the fallout that’s in all our lives from your selfish actions. You didn’t care what you did to us, and you would have taken everything if I didn’t get this way. I am responsible for protecting so much for so many others, and you would’ve taken it all; you would have ruined me, and them. As it is you took so much, and I don’t just mean the shit you stole and pawned and sold. You destroyed things so much deeper than that.
And you know what? People felt sorry for you. But you didn’t feel sorry for the people you hurt. Good people who worked so hard for what they had, people that were trying to do the right things. And I don’t think you feel sorry for them now, either. I think you feel sorry for yourself.
I can’t forgive you yet. I can’t pray for you either. But I know others do, and I believe in the power of that. I don’t begrudge you that. Maybe one day I will be able to pray for you, too.
What I can say is that I wish you well; I wish you a better life than what you’ve made yours into. One in which you can use what you have been, to be something better. And I guess that is a kind of prayer. It’s the best one I have right now.