Tuesday 1 October 2019

Made of sunlight.

Ben pulled a fast one, kept us guessing, took a gamble and I fell asleep last night to the tune of his steady heartbeat, walking six paces away from the day, turning and firing from the hip at the lights and when it went dark I went with it, safely into dreamland where I dreamed that I cut my hair again and then tried to drive the Jeep but someone had put the steering wheel on backwards and it was facing away from me and it went from the occasional death-wobble to a whole new skillset as I tried to keep it on the road. When I woke up my brain was already four or five numbers into Miss Saigon, a spot Ben was able to jump into without hesitation, singing back the parts of Chris to my Kim.

It's always been a requirement that they be able to return the parts of the male counterpart in Once, Phantom of the Opera, Hair or even Rent. What's garnered an odd acceptance is not my love of musicals but the level of insanity that my brain displays at any given moment but most especially in the darker hours where no one is supposed to see. They do (they must have night vision. Goes well with my SLIder nonsense or the telepathic and telekinetic and psychotic tics too DOESN'T IT?) and yet they ignore it, or worse, feed it. Gosh, she's so thrilled to have a familiar and be able to sing the whole song without having to sing both parts, so it must be a sunny, gleeful and crisp Tuesday morning and I'm just about ready to be carted off to a farm somewhere, except the place I went to that one time (okay twice or three times shhhh) wasn't like Ben's five-star rehab and I didn't get a chef and nature walks and music nights. Oh no. There was none of that. I sat in a very ill appointed room and people came and talked at me and I slept a lot and ate shitty cafeteria food and they wouldn't even let me draw because apparently you can hurt yourself with a pencil.

Could I.

I would write myself right out of existence, I told them, confirming their suspicions. But that isn't what they meant and no, I never got the pencil. Now I have five mugs of them sitting on the island, a stack of sketchbooks nearby and we draw group photos or people draw beautiful things and I write words all over them, telling stories, describing beauty, letting it all out like the rain we're not going to have today, and it works a whole lot better than the soft rooms and bad food and endless, endless talking. If you're not singing, I don't want to hear it, I told them and it just made everything worse and I still don't know why.