Hard Candy Christmases

December 7

Niagara Falls came to mind a week ago, as I sat on the floor of my high school bedroom, sobbing...  I found a notebook with notes, random reminders, fragments. Notes about responsibility to the material, plans for that garden, what I envisioned planting when I grew up: Sweet Annie, Melissa, Lemon Balm, Jewelweed. Sage. Sorrel, lime flower, mint, marigold, lavendar, basil.  A magnolia, maybe, crepe myrtle. 

Then I found this photo of my dad. I remember this house. I remember the feel of the carpet under my feet, the feel of the corduroy of his chair. I remember when he came to tell me about my dog Peaches, the cocker spaniel tha that been a stray was infested with fleas.  'we took her to a farm...' I remember looking at him, my eyes huge. 'Aw, shit, baby girl. I cain't lie to you. Honey, I had to shoot her; she was dyin'.  We don't let things and people we love suffer.'

I knew people died but I didn't really know what that meant outside of the miscarriage my mom had had at 6 and a half months. The fetus that came out if her was in pieces. Definitely dead. 

And the birds I occasionally saw, or road kill. 

My dad's words came back to me last night, just before the sleeping tablet I finally allowed myself to take worked it's dulcet, pharmaceutical magic.

'Rachel, why am I here?'

'Here, like in your room?'

'No...in this hospice place.'

'Ah...well, because you're dying. At 82 pounds, your body can't take much more.' I said more. Maybe I should have said less. I was in a panic afterwards, almost hysterical. 

He sounded resigned, hurt, and frail when I hung up. I panicked. 'I've done it this time,' I sobbed down the phone to a dear friend. 'I think I killed him.' The terrifying thing was the relief but also the realisation that I was blurring situations. He's so tiny, I treat him like a child. My child. My dead child. That realisation of conflation started off another round of hysteria. And I leaned into a dangerous patterning: I leaned back into my old patterns of using alcohol to block out the searing pain. And now I have to turn away from that habit. It isn't even a craving, it is an automatic behaviour. I know what happens, how it lessens the edge. It fills everything, pulls me away from everything, puts a nice buffer between the reality I would to avoid and all of self-worth. Because weirdly, right now? I don't feel entitled to self-worth. I'm shipwrecked and I don't remember how it happened or how I got here. I am not even sure where 'here' is, I just know I am falling into a terrifying state of disrepair and it has scared me straight. 

Lately, I wonder what I will do after.  Where will I run to. Cuba comes to mind. The luxury of a British passports makes that a viable option. 

When my son died, my former husband and I went to Italy, to Florence. It was early March, everyone telling us we needed to get away, to put distance between the Situation and Ourselves. In my head, Italy would be warm and sundappled. 

It was sundappled but was not warm, Florence in 2010. Every where I went, I was surrounded my artistic renderings of Madonna and a plump golden haired boy child. Iconography overload and it felt like failure and aching emptiness.  I longed for a blackness beyond sleep.

I went to a movie yesterday and did something that I have not ever done before: I snuck a bottle of champagne into the cinema and I drank the entire thing out a paper cup whilst watching James Bond make choices no one should ever have to make, compromises that no one should have navigate. And I felt a kinship to this fictional hero, jaded yet hopeful. It reminded me of when I allowed myself to be deliberately naive and honestly, I miss that. I want to allow myself that luxury again. I want to be my freaky self, sober and unapologetic, clear-eyed in the complexities and nuances that make me whole, even when I am heartbroken.