Sentimental circus (no sideshow).

And if you think real beauty's on the outside
Well that's a far cry
From the truth

Maybe all the information you received
Well you should not believe
There's no proof

PJ returns to the house after a brief holiday and the house returns to a completely comical version of its unbridled self. PJ runs a tight ship. PJ lives in my boathouse, so no surprise there.

But he is never down there. Instead he stands behind me as I navigate my days, giving Caleb these looks that just stun him into total silence or incredibly obvious subject replacements because for some reason PJ's word is gospel where no one else has ever set their hands on such a scripture before. Maybe it's because I do so well when he is around. Maybe it's because of the full moon/impending spring. Even Lochlan follows PJ's directions like a spoiled but compliant little boy and Benjamin wouldn't question PJ even if PJ told him to go naked bungee jumping for a good cause.

For the record..we're not going. We do give a lot to causes we believe in, and we keep the organizations and the donations closely guarded for obvious reasons. It makes it easier to deflect those who flat-out ask for money (don't).

Besides, Bridget (at almost forty) versus gravity? Are you out of your mind? There's a risk I won't take and I won't even get started on the whole leaping willfully off a high place because it's just not the way today is and so let's close the flap on that tent and move along to the larger, more colorful, bustling hard-floored tent that you've been watching us raise up in the dust for days.

Which is that I've been taking a lot of supplements lately.

Not a lot, just a few. But many days have since passed and I've been noticing something amazing that sort of surprised me and pleased me at the same time.

Mental clarity.

(Oh, God. There's PJ, reading over my shoulder like a nosy transit rider, chortling to himself over precisely how much mental clarity I could possibly have left when my head is so freakishly small and I stumble over the children's names fourteen times a day usually and I write every single thing down so I don't forget and really at this point he is becoming a thug, like a volunteer bouncer/well-compensated security guard looming behind my shoulders snarling at everything in sight so what exactly would he know about mental acrobatics and really, you want to see something amazing, PJ? Come over here and hold this rope and I'll show you the trick where I slide down to the knot with one leg locked on it and then turn myself around in mid-air, supporting my own weight, while it swings at fifty miles an hour. Dizzying, hey? Now shut the fuck up.)

No, really! It's uncanny. I haven't missed anyone's name in three days. I have remembered to take my vitamins/put the laundry in the dryer/walk the dog/send a thank you card/call the dentist without writing down a single thing.

That doesn't happen, but it's happening. Now. To me.

I can't imagine the fun of being able to retain the pages I read or the continued success in having random conversations without fluttering, stuttering, pausing to conjure up the right words or that thought I had right before I heard Ruth/the helicopter in the sky/the windchimes/doorbell/ringing phone.

I also feel happy without a specific reason. Stupidly so.

So it's definitely either spring fever or the thought of a full-frontal before-and-after shot of any naked bungee jumpers in my vicinity, with their newly stretched-out limbs and distorted naughty parts.

I'll figure it out eventually. I'm off to infect the big lunk with a little 'clarity'. Because he's walking around singing that stupid Britney Spears song. The new one. Because he knows I don't appreciate popular music in the way most people do.

I'm fine with that, too. (<--Not Britney Spears but also a new video on the scene this week. It's awesome).

Jacob would tell me, Just say the day was challenging, Bridget.

The day was challenging, Bridget.

Kiss principles.

The resistance to dishwashers ran long. Not only due to living in the hundred-year old castle with the sketchy wiring and sporadic successful plumbing but because they represent the final hurdle into full urban routine and domestic complacency. Now that we have set up in a new location and the house is new and the dishwasher is RIGHT THERE, I have had to make peace with the thing, and still wash fully half our stuff (thermal coffee mugs, PJ's eyeglasses) by hand, thank you very much.

I am so feral and uncontainable and the circus still runs through my bloodstream painfully so, to the point where it was really quite a brutal moment last week when Lochlan's mother saw the dishwasher flung open and pulled apart so that the fresh clean dishes could DRY already and mentioned that I could buy rinse agents to speed that along exponentially.

Oh.

Really?

Must I?

I bought the little bottle of 'jet-dry' when I was buying apples and carrots and coffee and birthday cards and I brought it home and regarded it suspiciously for several days and this morning I had to search 'adding rinse agents to dishwasher' online in order to see where exactly I had to put it and how much and what is that dial for with the numbers on the inside and let's go halfsies and see what happens and I wish someone would hold the flashlight and really...

You know what?

Life was not so hard living in a camper without a clean dish and hanging off the bar in the lights by my knees, being passed a chocolate chip cookie from a well-meaning rigger and calling it supper and really I would have balked quite magnificently at paying $7.99 for a bottle of something that makes my dishes pretty, unless I could have used to to wash down the random meals I was given as well.

So there.

If time was never on our side
then before I die I want to burn out bright

I had my head against the plaster, facing the wall. Away from the windows and the doors. I would have been smack in the corner if only the big plant stand wasn't already there. I don't rearrange furniture in order to find escape, I simply turn away from the light so you can't see my face. I close my eyes and wish myself into oblivion.

And yet I am still right there and his eyes are burning holes into my back. I can feel the cotton of my shirt burning away. Dammit all anyway, Jake. I really liked this shirt.

Why don't you just wait and see before you panic, pigalet? He asks. He is not taking me seriously, which is a good counterstance for the fact that I take myself too seriously and I am always full of expectations and abilities I don't have a hope in hell of fulfilling but then when I stop expecting so much everyone else starts and it's frustrating that when I am sick I should stop but when I am afraid I must keep going. Who made those rules and why do they need to apply to me anyway? If they work for you, great. I'm not interested. We've come to the point in the lecture of life that doesn't apply to me so I will excuse myself now and go and wait facing the black wall in the dining room with my head pressed against the cold cracked plaster and my brain screaming at me to get a grip.

Sometime during the night things were removed and replaced. Cast changes when the show isn't going well.Don't think your admonitions don't reverberate from inside my brain as well and I'm afraid the noise is never ever going to go away, drowning everything else out and the only thing that quiets it is the music and even that seems more difficult than it should be sometimes.

You don't speak so much as condemn, stacking your words against the top of my skull until I can no longer take a step and I am frozen in place by your disappointment but I know it's your own fear reflected in my eyes and you don't want to see that, ever because then you'll have nothing to hold over me.

Regret comes slowly, like the sunrise. And I only ever wanted a chair but I'll warn you, I'm still going to turn it to face this wall too because I'm not sure about you. You don't seem to have earned the right to judge my expressions and I'm incredibly angry that you think you have the right to evaluate my fears and discard the ones that shame us all. I didn't intend for that to happen, hell, I would just give them all away if I could and be like everybody else and instead I can't stand up to you in case you respond poorly so it's easier to find the disappointment in the pores of the wall and give my wishes to the stars, who will in turn absorb them until I have forgotten what they were and the noise and the dark will continue forever and ever, amen.

My patience is wearing thin, like the paint on these floorboards. I should fix this but I really don't care.

Queen of Hearts.

I feel like a giddy fool today, and not because Ben and I forgot to wish each other a Happy Valentine's Day. Give us some credit. At 4:45 am I'm lucky if I can remember to put my underpants on BEFORE my jeans, so really the extent of my skills are not social at that hour. Besides, he brought home flowers last Thursday night because he didn't want to forget the holiday and I gave him a card last night after we indulged in our favorite Chinese take-out. The sexual favors were traded all damned weekend and really, we are not lacking for romance in this house so don't worry about me. Besides. I can always go mack on my boyfriends. (Since you persist in being so awful, I'll join you. My, the water is warm in the gutter here, isn't it?)

In other news, I have eight hundred billion things to do today, I just noticed the floors are a DISASTER after rain all weekend and I am so not awake yet and really I don't care about the Radiohead album but I am patiently waiting for the Switchfoot one (GRAMMY winners now, DID YOU SEE?) and in the meantime I am...

...birdwatching.

Okay, headphones, dog that doesn't say much, absent bears, deers and cougars aside, the only interesting creatures we keep running across on the four or five long dog walks I take with the dog each day are yellow-breasted chats. Cute little fat yellow birds that live in the woods of my neighborhood. They are obnoxious, loud and adorable (now I know why the boys love me) and they're a little shy but not all that much. The dog doesn't care to eat them the way he seems to want to with hummingbirds, sparrows and finches (hawks, crows, owls, cats, bugs, please name anything else that breathes here) and I'm really proud of myself for looking up their proper names, past Oh my God, Duncan! There's one of those fat little yellow birds again! Look! Fuck! You missed it! Argh!

So there.

I will see Benjamin at supper time and the rest of the boys over the course of the day so I hope you have a lovely day. I am off to attempt to duck under, outrun and generally stay out of reach of Satan today. Because Satan can do a holiday like no one else and really he needs something else to focus his attention on, so if you have a recently-infected zombie or spare mushroom cloud or a giant man-eating bird I can distract him with, please hook me up ASAP.

Dangerous new pasttimes.

While they fight over me, I have a tendency to disappear. In my dreams at night I look for Jacob, and Ben will pull me out of the night and take what he wants from me and then leave me to fall back into the dark where every sign sends me in loops and the map is washed and faded, illegible and the way home is something reserved for after I have found what I need. It will be interesting when they do my autopsy someday. Not only will they find the pieces of my heart strung together on a tangled black cord but they will discover my shrunken pie-chart of a brain, divided by name, given to forgetting what the right hand was doing while the left hand took control.

I think I found him last night. He's been gone again for weeks and I want to yell at everyone that they are awful for living without him. Forgetting him. For pretending that life goes on because it doesn't. I am still waiting for him. When he was here the only one I missed was Cole, namely because whenever I touched Jacob I would think this was just insane, that I was finally able to not be afraid of his jealousy. But I keep waiting for Jacob to talk to me, to try and make everything better. To keep the boys in their corners and to keep me from sabotaging myself every waking moment of the day and sometimes of the night too.

In my dreams I listen to him sing. I watch his eyes as they smile or show concern when the rest of his face is stone, and I watch as they fill up when he is sad and slowly close when he is tired. Never once did I get to watch him fall asleep. He would not sleep unless I did first, and then he would lie at the ready to fight any demons that appeared in the moonlight, whether they be real or a product of my vivid and quite insane imagination.

Ben does not fight demons in the night, he sleeps on through, a novelty still from years of sleeping all day, or worse, not sleeping at all. He loves the routine of being home but he still loves to work too and I have entirely too much time where I feel the familiar sting of forbidden actions and instead I poke around the unused corners of my brain looking for dreams that are left behind.

A moment or period in time perceptible as intermediate between past and future.

I heard Ben's truck because he always beeps three times when he pulls in. Otherwise he has a tendency to sneak up on me and that isn't a good idea. I scream so loudly.

He came through the door somewhat slowly. I made it down the steps and into the front hall in time to see the door open. Ben looked at me and he smiled softly. So softly. Hopefully, almost. He closed the door and turned to face me.

I have a Present for you.

He looked defiant, almost. Cynical. But hopeful was edging those both out in a spectacular finish and when I thought hard about his words, I nodded. He may not have as long a history with me, but he has Now and he'd like to keep it.

I nodded. I ran and threw myself into his arms. I did not let go. I won't let go.

(The present, not the past. You people have no imagination. I give up).

Yeah, wow. All taxes. No time to arrange the words. I'm sorry. Just take it and pretend you never read it. Thanks.

I'm praying for rain
And I'm praying for tidal waves
I wanna see the ground give way.
I wanna watch it all go down.

I have words lodged in my ears this afternoon and rain in my eyes. There is a storm building in my head and my heart has gone on an extended vacation and I am left to marvel at Benjamin's ability to throw himself into project after project, regardless of the consequences or the song and exclaim over Lochlan's actions (always the same since 1979). We are in such a weird place in that I went out of my way to not Do This and Here I Am anyway.

Fuck.

The homesickness arrives with twilight and descends over me as I turn on lamps around the house, closing curtains against the coming night, listening to the quiet hum of the furnace or the fridge if I am close by, closing windows from the evening chill and watching the clock for the inevitable crush of boys looking for dinner, for hugs and for confirmation that I did finish their taxes and yes, everything went smoothly for all because it always does, we see to that. It's too bad no one can see to smoothly on Bridget's behalf but they try and perhaps that's better than nothing at all.

When the sun went down on the show, Lochlan would wrap me into his sweater against his t-shirt and hold me until I fell asleep. If he was performing he would leave his sweater with me and I would wait just out of reach, incentive for him to throw harder and take more risks and then he would shove fistfuls of cash into our pockets and we would spend it and hide it and eat and then he would grow up not to care very much for the man and things like taxes and deductions and retirement savings. He says when he retires from art he'll go back on the road, busking across Europe for food and lodging and go out the way he came in, hungry for life in such different ways than everyone else. I have heard his dreams. They have not changed in thirty years and still I hope he realizes them. Out of all of us he is the least responsible and still the most likely to have everything he ever wanted, for it is so little.

Once the stars came out I could get my bearings again because they follow me. I would lie in the trailer tightly held in Lochlan's arms (and because it got cold at night) and I would stare out the little round window in the door at the sky. I would count the stars inside the window pane. Six. Six was my lucky number, too many for wishes but enough to get a fix on location via echoes and friendly voices. Something, anyway. The noises. Some of the temporary people who worked just one town or sometimes two scared me to pieces and Lochlan would sing me to sleep to block out everything else and I still think to this day I learned to sleep that way and no other way at all and so I wake up every hour all night every night of my life since save for nights when he doesn't leave, when he stays with us and helps to fend off the ghosts and save what's left of my soul in exchange for my savage little bottomless needs.

He does this without complaint, and without effort, as he always has, tucking me under his wing or pushing me out of reach when he suits up in his armor to take out the fastest bikes, the ones I'm not allowed on. Fire on wheels, the ones that function as his words when words don't come and he needs to escape or process how we managed to arrive at this place without benefit of a map or spoken hint of direction from a well-meaning passerby. Things were so amazingly simple then and he took it for granted and decided it might be better to set free what you love.

I came back though, didn't I?

Just not in the manner he was hoping for. Or maybe his carnival sentimentalities will always extend to being able to easily disengage from his heartstrings and step into the flames and I am in denial that he loves me at all. Except that I know it isn't true. He does, he just has spent so long telling himself he doesn't that he's no longer sure if he should believe his heart or his mind.

His mind plays tricks on all of us.

I hope he gets his chance to perform on corners across the world. I hope he lives to see his dreams, namely because that's what he does. He dreams. Sort of like the way I will look up at the stars and plan my future, dismiss my fate and hope for safety in times of great risk simply because that's where my mind wanders, playing along ribbons of melody wrapped in bows from tree to tree, woven through the grass and blackened for standing too close to the fire. Always warned, always unable to hear the words that will keep me safe.

As usual.

Bridget will forever be wiping the soot from her feet and rubbing bits of ash from her forehead after being held by the fire juggler. It's all dreams just like the one in which I find a permanent cure for homesickness and this massively fluctuating heart.

Home, please.

Ooh. New Foo Fighters and Trews CDs releasing on the same day. Lets hope HMV can manage this epicness, not like it matters much, they're closing anyway and I'll have to buy my retro-media (read NOT digital) online at Amazon since there are no record stores left in this country that stock anything other than top 10 popular music and mediocre television DVD boxed sets.

But that's a rant for another day. Back to taxes. I have barricaded myself on the floor of the library with the stereo and a very good pencil sharpener and I am painstakingly working my way through the numbers, because I'm really good at it.

If I can't manage anything else in my life, at least I can manage the finances.

Go, Bridget. Big or home, at least.

You are so lost and the only thing I have ever done is try to help you and I may have gotten carried away and for that I'm sorry.

But not sorry enough to stop.

I have tried.

Real hard, hey, Caleb?

I'm not the only one, Bridget.

He is welcome in my life. There's a difference.

He changed you.

He raised me.

He should have gone to jail.

He isn't the only one.

I would arrange to remove myself from your life again but he would have to go as well, and then there is the matter of Henry. It isn't every day a man discovers he is a father. I want to be a part of things.

His life, not mine.

Both. I have a vested interest now. Maybe some things are meant to be.

And maybe Henry will grow up and learn the truth.

I hope not.

What goes around, Caleb.

Bridget I'm not trying to make your lives miserable but you push me and I have to push back. I'm making it clear that if you continue down this road someone will get hurt and I can assure you it won't be me and I'm not going to allow it to be you. Lochlan is on the hook and the only reason I don't take him down is because you have lost enough. That and recently you have been more open about admitting that you did love my brother, in spite of his issues.

I nod. Hard to believe Lochlan's destiny is on a permanent hiatus due to fate. Due to bad luck and death and angels and defective hearts and tall buildings and the roll of trick genetic dice.

He reached out and smoothed my hair away from my face. I didn't move a muscle, nor did I change my expression.

So if you're not going to move on this why not let it go?

What sort of king surrenders when he's not under siege? Remember that, princess, and don't ever try a stunt like this again.