Sharp things, probably part 1 of many

Nah, I never really did get around to offing myself, and you weren't expecting that, were you? (Yeah, I know you don't exist, Three Constant Readers. If you did, I'd never ever  bother with the pathetic self-stroking egotism of blogs. And before I come to A Point, which I intend to sometime a few paragraphs down, let me just say this: Twitter sucks, and Facebook sucks, and I can't be the only one out there who tries to lose followers. Right?)

Anyway, a not at all funny thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago, the kind of thing that gives you every reason in the world to start carving up your own flesh, burning the cuts with cigarettes, and planning your own suicide.

I guess a few years ago, if someone I trusted had raped me in every possible sense of the word, my answer would have been to reclaim my personal power by (you know this one already) making myself bleed. Marveling over shiny new mat cutter blades I probably would have stolen from the craft store instead of paying for them (because reclaiming power), testing their sharpness with tentative, light little grazes over my ankles and my thighs (and fuck knows where else, given the stressor), watching those little lines of blood appear and pool up and waiting for the pain with a kind of detached religious euphoria.

That didn't happen, though. I don't know why it didn't happen. I don't know why I'm acting halfway sane. (Could I be halfway...nah, let's not go overboard here.)

No, I'm not halfway sane, not by any stretch. It was two weeks before I slept a whole night, and now I've done that three times. Every time I wake there's another horrific detail I'd shut out. Do you know how fucked up it is that I can count on one hand how many of you know who I am, and I can't even bring myself to type those things? That I'm shaking just thinking about typing them into existence? It's easier to say out loud, really. Spoken words just disappear into the air. Words on paper can be burned. But this...no, it feels like an official statement. The one I didn't make. (You wouldn't have either, in my position. Maybe I'll be able to say more about that later.)

I was kind of okay Sunday, though. See, there's someone in my life who's just the opposite of rapist dude, who makes me feel bigger than I really am. I decided to think about him when I woke up with the residue of another horrible moment of a late Thursday night when I should have just driven home drunk. (Did it really last for hours? It seemed interminable, but it couldn't have been as long as it felt. You go somewhere else, you know--that part is true. You really decide you can't stand to be in your body, in that moment, in that actual hell, and you go somewhere else in your head and wait. It is the longest I've ever waited, even though I've been to the Public Aid office before.)

Then it got dark out, and I realized I couldn't put off going to the grocery store any longer. And it had been an okay day, sort of normal, tweeting in my pajamas and doing laundry. I grabbed my phone, my wallet, my keys, my glasses, my lip balm (shout out to Zum Kiss, always), my Xanax, and my lavender oil.

I glanced at the little green shoulder bag I'd been carrying with me lately, saw a makeup brush sticking out of it, and couldn't think of any reason in the world I'd need makeup.

Here's the thing: rapist dude lives between my house and the grocery store. For about three days once, we thought this might be cool, before I realized I'd completely outgrown him and he realized I'd realized that and that he was going to resort to drastic measures. Of course, he's such an exceptional con artist that he believes his own bullshit, so as I type this, he's probably thinking that everything is just fine. Or maybe that I'm a little annoyed still, even though he did apologize for hurting me. (I wish I could say I was shitting you there, Imaginary Constant Reader, but he texted me like everything was normal the day after HE SAID HE WAS SORRY FOR RAPING ME IN THE ASS.)

This is pretty diffused, I know, and I'd apologize for that, but no, fuck that. I haven't missed a day of work, and I haven't broken down crying to my either of my parents or even my sister...or whatever she is.

My knife is in the little green shoulder bag. I didn't remember that until I was close to his place, of course, and that's when the sick panic set in. I locked my doors, even though I was going 45 mph. (I don't even know how much good the knife would do me, though I do know at least one person who's alive today because a knife was within his reach when he was attacked by a small, crazy Irish-American dude he thought he could trust.) It's just the idea of the knife. I walk different when it's with me, just like you walk different in a black leather jacket and Docs.

In a t-shirt and capri jeans and FUCKING CONVERSE, I was just that same girl who should never have thought that refusing to take off her dress would save her from any indignities. Since my brain is almost never pragmatic, I tried to reach the wonderful someone. It's always helpful to get in touch with someone who's 15 hours away if you fear for your safety. Good job, me. Scare the shit out of the nice man you like.

Oh, but wait, me! The guy you trust the most in the world, who happens to be kind of big and pretty buff, lives half a block from you. This is what I've come to: I won't be afraid to go to the grocery store alone after dark, so my friend has to talk me from the doors til I'm safely locked in my truck and I've checked the back.

He was waiting outside my house for me when I got home to put my groceries away. I did that, then grabbed a beer from the fridge and went outside to join him, where I could sit and visibly shake and sweat. 
I think I might have just figured out why sharp objects don't serve the same purpose they used to for me, and it doesn't have much at all to do with me alone.

It's not about you...I mean, me...unless it really is.

If you made it to 30something and you don't look like Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, on the inside at least, then I think you either won the cosmic lottery or you've been hiding yourself very, very well.

I don't envy the laundry list of wishes and regrets you might run through on your deathbed if you're the latter: the conditional past tense is my worst enemy, not caution, I'm sutured back together with embroidery floss, duct tape, and even in places, real stitches. You aren't part of this, and it's not directed at you.
As for the cosmic lottery winners, I actually know at least one of you. I'm good with your kind, if and only if you know just how damned lucky you got. Or you give God the credit. Whatever's cool with me, as long as you know you won something.

I'm not digressing into that; I have A Point this time. I think so, anyway...sort of.

I have about 11 things I am dying to tell a friend of mine, who isn't so much hiding at the moment as retreating. There is a difference, Imaginary Constant Reader. I'd like very much to be 19 for half a day so I could...
No, no, I wouldn't.
Okay, so he's retreating, this friend, and this is acceptable behavior. It's kind of my fault. I made the easiest mistake to make if you actually care about someone else, the person-kind of someone else: I tried to stitch up his wounds for him. Of course, that's scary. 

My first clue that something wasn't right was not his sudden silence, but a slight case of stigmata. No, that's not all that figurative: in the middle of a day of way too much mutual self-revelation, a ten-month old scar of mine started bleeding. I didn't even scratch it, but so what if I did? Those eighteen stitches were perfect; I went to the professionals for that one. 
I took a picture, but anyone I've tried to send it to just gets a blank message, not this picture of the blood on the spot where Stitch #17 once held my skin together. Don't tell my shrink, okay? 

My second clue was a two-sentence day, followed by another. I was completely cool about this. I put all the pieces together immediately, overnighted some dental floss, rubbing alcohol, and a sewing needle to the frightened friend, and...
I'm fucking with you. I panicked. It had to be something I said or something I did, right? Or better yet, a great and terrible external force of evil was trying to fuck up one of mine, so I'd better get all the details so I could sew my fairy wings back on real quick like and get to the rescue. Or transform from a (reasonably) regular girl into an old god--that could work, too, but I might lose a smidge of emotional intelligence, and I think we bipeds are shy on that, anyway.

It's starting to seem really obvious now, isn't it? Yeah, that's because it's not your cautionary tale, asshole. 

Buffy once said that a cry for help is yelling "help" in a really loud voice. He didn't do that. On the contrary, he said in the nicest possible way that he wants to be left the fuck alone. (Read: he left "the fuck" out of that statement.)
And that is far, far out of my area of expertise. I like fixing things, and ending fights, and making people laugh and drink the tea I made on really bad days. 

Now count how many times I've used the word "I" thus far, not even including the me, my, mine. And don't give me any shit about the fact that I'm living in a neverending television series, 'cos I won't be making an appearance in this episode. 

Well, that frees up at least one day this weekend. 
Maybe I should go take a CPR class, then hang around places that serve fatty food. Or look into some EMT classes. 
Or use that dental floss and sewing needle on myself, since my sweet friend just unknowingly ripped the duct tape off a very old and nasty wound of my own.

I'm not done, but I am tired of sitting in the same spot, and I want a cigarette, so we can come back to this later. Not next year, but at least after I retract my wings, sit the fuck down again, and stop trying to be a Comic Book Hero.
Thanks for that, Little Gypsy.

Sometimes I give myself the creeps...

then I remember MMc saying, "Nah, she's just crazy when she doesn't sleep."

Voices in your head can be a good thing.

Tuesday, I've got nothin' to offer you.

Monday, Captain Expensive the chinchilla, aka Jonesy, was supposed to go to the vet for her very late (5 months late) liver values re-check. It was at 5 p.m., so I slept right through it.

This is her in all her one-eared, pissed at the world, love of my post-poodle life, glory. 

She has her own chinchilla, an NWI-bred extreme mosaic named Miranda, and she stole my Christmas baby, Blue, the minute we walked in the door from Connecticut with her. 

As soon as I figure out what to do with those domains I bought, expect to see installments of my first comic (I use that term loosely) about her, Captain Expensive Goes to the Vet.


In case I didn't mention it before, I excel at being an unemployed slacker. Even 23-year old me wasn't this good at it, and she is generally my watermark for all things lost up until the current 40-year old me was told in January that my job of seven years of fantastic benefits and intermittent dead-end misery was no longer a job. Libraries don't get much money these days, sadly not even private academic ones from their own people, and if someone had to go, better me than anyone who had actually bothered getting an MLS (yes, Library Science is a Master's degree), or even worse, my near-70 daytime counterpart who devoted her high-strung life to this last library of mine. I do miss the college kids who worked for me, but they had a tendency to graduate and leave me behind, anyway.

Lovers of words, I have an important piece of advice for you: remain a library patron. Never believe that a life spent reading in libraries means that you should leap to the other side of the counter. At first, you'll save an insane amount of money checking out instead of buying books, but after a while, you'll forget that there's any magic or wisdom at all inside them. It isn't at all like getting the employee discount at your favorite store.

Maybe public libraries are different.

Now, when I say I excel at being unemployed, I don't mean I excel at being idle. In fact, I suck at it. My binge-watching habit, while interfering with the amount of music necessary for life that I listen to, allows me to knit an accessory or two a day, sell a few of them, look for impossible-to-find jobs that look like fun in movies (lawyers I've known have convinced me that said profession is not one of them): I want to work for a PI. I wanted to join the FBI, but in spite of all my other societal errors, it's defaulting on a student loan that prevents me from that career path. 

I can't find any more indie record stores or indie arts/crafts/picture framing places to apply at. 

So I make things, mostly hats of late. And chinchilla toys, which I don't sell, because too many of my friends are already toy vendors. 

Unfortunately, today requires terrifying practicalities, such as finding out why Marketplace turned me down for insurance. The thought makes me feel deeply passionate about doing laundry.

Yeah, Tuesday, you are no friend of mine, not this time.

This is not a blog, because I don't even write much.

This is really, really not my scene. When I write, I do it on paper (the stuff made of trees, not the app), and I can't say anything more significant than what you'd put on a Post-It at work unless I use a medium-point purple Flexgrip or a pencil (not the kind you click, but a proper Ticonderoga that you have to sharpen after every page).
I have an iPad Mini so I can draw badly, play word games, take decent pictures, and find out who That Chick in That Movie is and why I recognize her (Jena Malone, because of Stepmom and Donnie Darko), but I don't own a computer and haven't in three years or so. My phone isn't even smart.
So it's unlikely at best that I'd start another blog, let alone buy two domains, but I did just that this past weekend.
I really, really want to blame my sister, the writer who actually writes, but if I want to do that, I have to blame 23-year old me first.
My sister was just north of 30 when she had her daughter, and so,e months later, she announced that she'd never write again. That part of her life was over. She was a Mother, not  a creative conduit. Now, I was very good at being 23, even better than I was at being 22.  A kind of What's My Age Again, quintessentially 90s slacker-rock girl.
Slacking did not, however, apply to my creativity. At one point, I decided eating and sleeping were interfering with my ability to fill two or three notebooks a month and cut back extensively on both. So not surprisingly, the idea that the big sister I'd trailed after mimicking every move was "done" writing was not acceptable. My friend Jeff and I had just started an informal writers' group, so I insisted she attend. Somewhere along the way, she actually started writing again. Then she stopped showing up, stalked Rick Springfield (in a very professional manner, though), wrote a fairly successful biography of him, became a stringer for our  local newspaper (teaching a lawyer the inverted pyramid in under 30 minutes is not challenging, in case it ever comes up), wrote more stuff, and kept getting paid to sit around in her pajamas writing things.
In the meantime, I went back to school, the 90s ended, I became unnervingly likely to succeed, worked for and learned from one of my all-time favorite writers (Laurence Gonzales--if you missed him, you missed a lot), watched the Clintons leave office and my friends start pairing off and mating, and finally sank into a no chance of living up to everyone's expectations/best years of my life are over depression.
A lot more stuff happened in between, but not all of it is worth mentioning. The car fire is, but that's another story, one that didn't happen on 294, though it was a Chicago area car fire.
So now I have some domains. I wonder what I'm supposed to do with them. Pending a clue, I think I will go knit another hat.