Hard Day's Night

This is a hard day. I wake so depressed that I immediately go make brownies to make myself feel better, which it doesn't. (I always tell myself that eating the almost burnt edges doesn't count.) It makes me feel as if I just gave Jb more ammunition to criticize me for. Then I'm chatting online to another person who is probably as fucked up in the head as I am sometimes, though he's far more passive-aggressive about it than I am. It's one of the few social things I get to do all day, and there's something in knowing he's as fucked up in his own way as I am. We're both in foul moods this morning, though, so the conversation is short, and that's fine with me, except that it isn't. I spend the morning listening to Pandora.

I am doing nothing. I am achieving nothing. I have anxiety about what Jb'll say when he comes home, about the mood he'll be in, about how much he'll hate me for the nothing that I do or feel. I cannot focus on any one thing, and the only emotional hit is music. "Ten Year Night" by Lucy Kaplansky comes on, and I'm triggered back to Michigan, flying down the highway along the railroad tracks far up toward the peninsula from a little town called Cheyenne where I braved a bar to get a cheeseburger that tasted better than anything I'd had. And the shifting of gears was so necessary to my running, the control of the down shift, the letting go as you up shift, the jump of the gas as your foot grows heavier, and all around you country you couldn't know. There's a certain face, too, that comes to mind with those times and that song, and it's as hard to out run that history and burnt bridge as it is to shift through the old melody line.

The tears are in my eyes before I ever realize I'm crying.

I remember what it's like to fly.