Today I start thinking thin again.
Yes. This will fix me.

I'm tired, so can we just sleep?

I am so completely a mess. I don't even know what to say.
The words are too jumbled- in my head, in my heart.
The only thing I am certain of is my love, I will never doubt that. I just wish that were enough.

I wish I were okay with myself. As okay with myself as you are.
It's just hard. Harder than I could ever convey to you, to anyone. It's so hard to always know what she looks like, how beautiful and tall and then and made of porcelain. You know that's what my best friend looks like, right (the first time I ever saw a picture of your ex I had to do a double-take)? And that it broke my heart standing next to her, pock marked, soft, and round. It still does. It always will. I just want people to think we match.

That I'm good enough for you. I'm thin enough and cute enough and don't say stupid things and can drink enough and use all of the right terminology for booze and pot and shish. That I'm not some stupid girl a year younger than you from rural West Virginia who isn't as smart as she thinks and is sheltered and loud and uncouth. Do you know what that's like? I'm breaking my own back to not be these things, and I'm always just... wrong. Clearly, wrong and embarrassed and almost always crying. I bet you don't notice that, how I'm always almost in tears, no matter what we talk about or what we're doing. Always a single step away.

I really.
I don't know what to say.
I used to want to travel and shop and look nice and work out and ride bikes. Now I just want to sleep and be alone and attempt to get through this alive. I probably won't.

There are no words to describe today.
The President I wanted sworn in.
The boy I dreamed off napping off an illness in my bed.

And with those two things, I have everything I want.






I'm skipping class to watch the inauguration.

I am going to live with him soon and I'm not scared to do so.








That is all.

What a world it would be to survive, and thrive, on kisses.




To not need a blanket at night, just your lover's arm draped over the dip of your waist in their sleep; to not need thick, woolen socks that slide awkwardly away from your toes and layers of flannel and quilts. To survive, and thrive, on nothing more than the most innocent of flesh-to-flesh contacts. What a charming thought, indeed.

What a fantastical place it would be to not need pills for depression or inflamed tonsils or to regulate the chemicals in your brain and your womanry and heart and soul-- to instead be remedied with a few soft words and then tucked into bed and given a cup of tea by he who lives within your heart. Yes, that would be fantastical.


But we can't so we don't.
I'm going back to bed to nurse my tonsils, false suspicion and wounded confidence.

[. . . ]

"I will never forget these past few days, my sweet. And I will especially never forget these past few nights, my wolf. How we moved in and through one another. How we held each other so close and so in love, how we stayed up until morning's light naming children we don't have and and painting rooms of a house we don't yet live in. We lived our lives in a single night, my love, painting walls the many and rich colors of our loved for each other, and for love itself. We spoke of dance classes- ballet- and how we will raise our two, maybe three, little ones.  We had full conversations in a single kiss, my love, and lived a hundred thousand lifetimes in a single embrace- and we were in love in every single one.

We planned a nursery, my Adam; soft colors with the original Winnie the Pooh. We planted a garden in front of our house, with violets, daffodils, and peonies, all blooming in the dead of winter, surviving on the love that our house, our home, will be built upon.

We swore upon the involvement of music in our children's lives. Music, laughter, and unquestionable love, we will teach them all that we known and show them all that we have ever known.  They will know the sands of Puerto Rico and the mountains of copper and gold in October's West Virginia.

And admist all of the teaching, showing, and learning, we will still love one another with neither estraint nor lessening, my sweet.  Will survive everything. Everything through love.

With love, sincerity, and undying devotion,
Odana "

See you in January, folks.

Above all else I miss how perfectly we fit together. Pieces of a puzzle that we will spend forever building, piecing together trees and clouds and houses and love. Love and smiles and the stars above.

I miss your hand in the notches of my spine, pulling me close, closer, closest to your heart, so I can hear how it beats for me.
I do the same, you know, I hold you tight to my chest until I can't breathe, hoping you can hear the palpitations and sighs within it. They're for you.I'm for you.

You are mon loup, my wolf. My world. My beginning and end, and everything between.

I am hot and cold and steam pours from my ears while icicles form along my cheeks, my tears shining like diamonds. My back is searing and screaming at me to lie down and relieve the slump and the stress.  My little space heater must think I'm bipolar, turning it on and off a half dozen times in an hour, the same with my car's delectable seat warmers.

But I'm not sick. I mean, I'm sick, I'm always sick, but that's not causing the restlessness of these God forsaken waking hours. It's this house, this place that I live. It's aging carpets and tungsten hues make me itch just below the skin, never stopping, never ceasing the crawling, writhing, bristling movements that keep me awake at night, at noon, and in the morn. I can't sleep, here, or anywhere. Not without you, at least. I lie down and toss and turn and kick out and lose my covers thirty-five times before I find peace, only to wake a few moments later, entangled within my own shirt and hair and bad dreams. I check my phone, hoping. No calls, no texts, no nothing. I am a know-nothing.

I'm freezing, bitterly cold. My toes and hands and body ache to the bone, the wind whipping and whistling around my house finding a home within my young joints, aging them. Aging me. I run a hot bath. Almost instantaneously, my toes are on fire and my fingers sting and burn and scream in protest. I'm too hot. I'm sweating and shifting in the water, yearning for a cold glass of water. Maybe a popsicle. Yes. A popsicle. Purple.

So I get out of the bath, perhaps a little too quickly. My head spins faster than the water runs off my body, and I wrap myself in a towel and lie on top of my unmade bed for a few heartbeats. I dress, finally. As little clothing as possible of course, I'm still a thousand degrees inside and out. Within five minutes, I am frost and ice and loneliness.

A-ha. That's it.
The loneliness. The absolution of this uninvited solitude.
That's what makes me tick-tick-tick like a bomb on the fritz, never knowing when it's disarmed or seconds away from chaos and blood and bodies everywhere.

Seven days, my love.
Seven days, my heart.
Just keep beating until then.

This is the darkness.



I went to the nursing home yesterday to visit my Nana.

My stand-in grandmother, replacing my mother's mother when she passed. The woman who raised me when my mother didn't have the time, and my dad still worked strict days as a delivery man. The woman who lived on my street, next door to my grandfather who had lost his wife. The woman who, when she can't remember exactly how her sister is related to her, let alone the rest of our family, never fails to remember me.

I don't know, maybe the story doesn't start there.
Maybe there was never a beginning, God knows there isn't an end, at least not yet. Maybe time and fate and the Alzheimer's have simply always been.


Maybe the story starts yesterday morning, and the rest is simplistic black-and-white back story, forshadowing that will be redundant to later plot paths. Maybe not.  Maybe it starts with a nostalgic and peculiar visit to my old high school, where my mother teaches. I sat in on her last class of the day- third block- for an hour and a half to just kill time after I called and woke my boyfriend up for a second time. A sleepy "I love you, baby" and groggy "Okay, I need to go get ready" wasn't enough for me yesterday. I really wish it had been. I really wish.

I guess I had forgotten the reason why my mom teaches at a poorly-funded high school in rural West Virginia: the students. They are so often taken advantage of by the teachers there, so often the second, third, fourth, and last priority to the educators and the system. The pay is terrible, the benefits shoddy, and protocol absurd. She does it for the students, to help them.

God knows we have our differences, and that we rarely, if ever, get along. But when it comes to teenagers that, well, aren't me, she is wholly an irrefutably compassionate. West Virginia isn't exactly known for test scores, literacy rates, or anything good. We're home of the deep fried Twinkie, 2,000 calorie biscuit sandwiches, and the largest single-payout lottery winner in America. Who was already one of the richest men in West Virginia.

This is common knowledge to us, don't worry. We suck, and if we care about it, we leave. She, however... stayed.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I'm a mess right now.
I just know that she helps rural teens actually understand the Constitution, and the law, history, and all it entails. She has kids "teach class" from time to time, helping them boost their literacy by reading excerpts from the elusive, annotated Teacher's Edition, sitting at the podium at the front of her class, which, notably, does not have desks, and instead has tables shaped into a large "U". She lets them talk, argue, and bicker- but never fails to have the final, decisive say or let it drift to topics unrelated.

She, as a person, cares.


And, last summer, I learned that I care, too.

My Nana hasn't been doing so well the past year and a half or so. Forgetful, increasingly frail, and unable to care for herself. Her husband divorced her and died. Her son died in "The War", though I am unsure as to which one precisely. Her granddaughter is a succubus, and her next closest of kin are in Texas and Iraq. The duty did not fall upon my mother to take care of her, she had every right to not do so. But she does. We moved her from a dirty, aging apartment complex a city far from her family into a brand-new spacious HUD development for the elderly in our own town so we could visit her and provide a pause in the heartbreaking solitude. It reached a point, however, that we knew she could no longer live on her own. She couldn't be trusted to take her own medicine, so we bought a medicine distributor. She broke into it daily and would self-medicate. We hired a nurse to come in from time to time to make sure she ate and was healthy and okay. The latter we couldn't actually afford, though, and was provided through some excruciating haggling and soul-selling to Medicare.

So she moved in with my 95-year old grandfather (her brother), and my 70-year old aunt, who had a kidney transplant a year ago and still is somewhat ailing. Clearly, this was temporary. My mother and I were on the search for nursing homes, something we all knew we could not afford.

We pulled into Sunbridge one afternoon just before my senior year of high school ended. It's an old hospital, really, you can actually see the new one from it's parking lot. It is still set up exactly like the hospital, too: yellow and aging with machines and tubes everywhere. The only difference, though, was found in the people who inhabited it. There weren't any visitors, and really, it was obvious as to why. We took a self-guided tour around the square-loop hallway, poking our heads in the television room, the dining hall, and unintentionally into the rooms.

Everywhere you went, everywhere you looked, small, frail, old women scuttled themselves along in wheelchairs, cradling small dolls, tears running down their faces. Old men sat staring at televisions that weren't on. One woman slid out of her wheelchair at dinner, and was unable to right herself. It took two nurses to put the invalid woman upright again. Dozens of people wandered the halls, none walking, none knowing where they were, or where they were going.  Men and women alike lied catatonic in beds inches from the ground, their lips gone and their mouths agape in a strange and terrifying "O", eyes wide, watery, and focused-but-not-really on the spackled tile above. Nurses ran and walked all around me, changing beds, changing clothes, and changing diapers. These people who lived here, were no longer people.

I still cannot escape the yellowness of the building. It's a beyond tungsten-glow. The smell, too, permeates the skin. Death is far from no one, but it is certainly closer to those who live in Sunbridge.

I cried that day, much as I cry now. Hard, viscious sobs tore from my chest, as I walked behind my mother because I could not see where I was going. My eyes became red and angry, my skin slick and painful to touch, and still the tears and choking inhalations did not cease. I left the building and sat on the curb, and cried harder still. I cried until I threw up between my knees onto the pavement; cereal, the only meal I had eaten that day. I cried until there weren't any tears, but still continued to gasp and shake and sob.

This was it.
This is what we could afford, even with the loophole in Hospice we found.
Even with the state's help.




This is where my Nana lives, and this is where I went yesterday in the dull and gray rain that was as much environmental as inside my heart.

This is where my mother took me last night, though she had never told me where my Nana actually resided. As we turned onto Hospital Drive, my heart would have hit the bottoms of my feet if it hadn't been beating so furiously in an effort to withhold the tears already traveling down my cheeks to their destination on my sweater. This is where I sat in the car, eyes wide like a four year old and said "I can't do this, mom," and where I got out of the car, gripping my coat tight around my chest like it would keep the death from my bones.  This is where I walked into my Nana's room, past bedridden and unresponsive Beula, with her eyes wide, watery, and focused-but-not-really on the ceiling, and saw the framed picture of me hanging directly over the little, low bed with quilts. The only picture that had not come in a distant relative's Christmas card. This is where I cried again, shaking and sobbing and unable to breathe as she told me how she thought of me, the night before, at my Grandmother and Grandfather's last wedding anniversary before her death, running up the aisle from one side of the great room to the other, into her arms. Yelling "Nana! Nana! Nana!" the entire way. I don't remember this, of course. But she does, when she remembers nothing else. This is what she says. This is what she tells the nurses when they ask her questions of her past, and of her present. This is what she told me seventeen times while I stood in front of the unlit mirror, watching myself age and cry and want and need. This is what she told me five times while I went through the stack of Christmas cards in a basket by her bed, hanging those from close family on her bulletin board, leaving tear stains on every sheet of paper I touched. This is what she told me as her coffee grew cold and forgotten, her doughnut left untouched, reflecting every other memory and part of her past. This was the soundtrack to my dreams, later that night, as I cried myself to sleep at an early hour, and still the soundtrack to my waking nightmare earlier that morning, at five am when I awoke and could not sleep again.

This is where I needed you most, and again in the hours following. This is where I broke my back reaching and stretching for you, and again later that night. I just wanted to talk and hear the love in your voice that I know is in your heart. I never meant anything else in the words I said, I simply wanted and continue to want. My love for you consumes me, my wolf, and in this consumption I am sometimes still scared of the crashing, falling world around me, because you are all I have to protect me from it, and without you here, I experience all of the pain that led me to those things we no longer reference.

So, here I am. In my bed, where I have been all day. I haven't eaten, I haven't slept. I've cried and screamed and written and torn my words into shreds. I've lashed out at my mother, my father, and my dog. I've spat in my own face with my words to you over and over and I'm sorry, because I love you with ever piece of me. I am, without a doubt, yours, mon loup.