Rice for the dog whose stomach is almost as sensitive as the girl who calls herself the dog’s mother.
I have cried three times this week. It’s Monday.
My car is a closet and an office and also a landfill and hell on earth and also it’s Eden. It’s that too. Because I am in it all the time and I think that maybe you know you love something when sometimes it is the thing you hate and also the thing you forget about or that you take for granted and also the thing that lights you up a bit. When you love the lyrics of a song, listen to it all the time, then you find a new one and you forget why you loved the other one. You still know the lyrics, you know them all by heart, you always will, but it’s not your favorite. Good, not great. And then, one day, one day you hear it, that song, the first one, and you remember that you love it. It’s your favorite and it always has been, even when you didn’t think it was your favorite anymore it still was. It’s like that. I’m not even sure if that makes sense, maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know, but it’s what it is.
I drive around streets that are also time machines; I am driving through and past and towards memories all the time. I was born up the road and if I turn right there I am two and a half and on my dad’s shoulders and we’re eating pancakes and saying “ta-ta” to the thing on the sidewalk and it’s all just three miles away from who I was when I lived alone and slept around and just over the hill is the me who died when Henry did except they’re all still alive, every second of me is pulsing and breathing in the pavement and on my face and also maybe just in the air because maybe that show James made me watch is right and time is a flat circle so everything is happening together.
When I drive with the windows down and the dog in the backseat, I think that I remember what it felt like to breathe for the first time and also to be so little that everything is scary and safe at the same time and also to be falling asleep in the back of the car when your parents are talking with their grown up voices about grown up things and also to be eleven and lonely and to be every moment of every age I’ve ever been and it’s mostly a beautiful thing until I’m at a red light and there’s a little girl with massive eyes and a head full of pigtails and she’s holding her mom’s hand and they’re walking towards a place I went to with my mom when my hair looked like that and my mom’s hair looked maybe like mine does now and we were both so young and little and we still are but not really and time has passed but not for the mom and her little girl at the crosswalk and I’m crying again and it’s still Monday.
I have therapy today, though, and I’m still trying to train myself out of thinking that crying in therapy will get me points or heal me faster.
I’m not even sure if there’s anything to heal, is the thing. Because I didn’t break, not once. I just cried a lot. And forgot how to sleep. I’m still crying a lot but I remember how to dream and so I do it all the time.
I’d clean my car, but it would just get dirty again and besides, I like having sweaters on the passenger seat just in case it gets cold later because Hen always used to borrow them even if the seat warmers were on (and they always were). Sometimes I turn the seat warmer on just for him, in case he’s visiting me in a way I don’t know about. Sometimes my seatbelt thing goes off for the passenger’s seat even though there’s no one in the car and nothing on the seat but my car howls at me, insistent that my eyes are liars and there is cargo in need of protecting, so I turn the seat warmer on and I buckle the seat belt around air that maybe is also my best friend.
It happens so often at this point that I don’t even think about it anymore, I just buckle him in and warm him up and sing the songs louder than I did moments before he showed up. I like to show off for him
I think I had something more spring-like planned for you all this week because I am a girl who was born in the spring and this is my season and my other, starry season also, so I was going to be triumphant and fiery and in full bloom, but this is what I’ve got for you all this week because yes, the sun’s coming out for longer now, but I’m still used to the dark so bear with me here, my eyes are adjusting and I’m still making rice. I’ll blossom when I’m good and ready to do it.
Gorgeous