Wizard of Awe.

I keep tripping over the same hole in my brittle, dumbstruck, beautifully vacuous way. Or so I am reminded.

Barely-there, Bridget. Now pay attention, please.

I get tired, the doubts crowd back in and everything goes straight to hell. So nevermind me while I trip and stumble my way through life for a bit. I'll get wherever I'm supposed to be, eventually.

Possibly sooner than later, if you can believe it.

I'm sitting in a Veyron at a stoplight. The car can do it, I'd be at the ocean by lunchtime.

(Go, Bridget, go.)

I just need some gas and a little courage. Not that stupid thimbleful I usually hold, but a trunkful of the stuff. Perhaps I can buy some, beg, borrow or steal a little strength just for the hard parts and I promise I will return it with interest when I get there. I would roar off into the sepia horizon while a ticker-tape parade heralds my departure. Don't think for a moment that I won't.

(There she goes.)

Last night Ben brought me home a present. I seriously think that instead of paying attention when he's driving he's surfing my journal from his blackberry. He needs to not do that. But still he did and he knew he was walking into a bee's nest and he knew it was late so he stopped into a store and he brought me a candy necklace.

He didn't say a thing. He put it on me and I sat with him while he ate dinner and then he peeked in on the kids and turned out most of the lights and took my hand and led me all the way down to his end of the house, pulling the blanket over our heads and leaving the light on his night table on and he ate the necklace right off my neck and I didn't get any at all. He never touched the light to turn it off, he never said a word, he never let me get more than an inch or two away from him at any time which was amazing to me somehow.

When I was sticky and exhausted and near tears because he can be so sweet without saying a thing he burst the bubble once again.

I'm not in the Veyron suddenly, he pushed me out and took the wheel and left me standing by the road again. Do I get back in the damn car or do I turn away and go home?

(Wait. Which way is home? No one will tell me.)

He asked me to marry him. Again.

(Bridget, where are you headed?)

He didn't say why but I think sometimes the patience isn't as easy to hold on to as he says it is.

And I know why, I don't need him to tell me.

No, there is more. I'm also very tired.

There is no relief today from the dark self-doubting, fumbling, bumbling, scared, freaked out uncomfortable miserable girl who lives in my head. None at all. I am supposed to swallow pills and talk this stuff out and then it's not supposed to be so bad but some moments I can't get out of the way fast enough and it steamrolls me flat. Some moments I'm just so afraid.

Of what?

I don't know.

I don't even know who won the games. Someone will tell me.

Instead of a weekend filled with hockey and football and friends, we had a weekend filled with frightening fevers and a trip to Emergency Saturday afternoon and I was so scared I was relieved when PJ took Ruth out and they went shopping for musical instruments while I sat and tried to keep Henry awake for the long wait.

Ben was on the ice, I had asked PJ to leave a message for him only there weren't enough details and signals got crossed and it was close to seven Saturday night when Ben came charging through the waiting room at last after trying four different clinics and saw us coming out. He and Loch promptly went at each other and were kicked off hospital grounds, thanks to Loch using his 'I have it under control' attitude instead of realizing at that point that Ben didn't even know who was sick or injured or what the fuck was going on and he panicked.

Yes, lovely.

Henry will be fine. His 103.5 was quickly relieved with tylenol and he has a whopping aggressive case of strep. Henry is the sort of child who will tell you he's fine when he's miserable and Saturday around lunchtime I couldn't get him to sit up or wake up long enough to get him to answer a question. It was an incredibly oddly scary moment for me and I'm the sort of mother who only panics if you pass me your severed limb.

In any event, much understanding and patience was shown on Ben's part, who wound up left out of the loop so completely I expected him to withdraw, to be bitter and resentful and instead all he did was ask PJ to take his truck so that he could drive us home instead. He and Loch are presently seven years old and not speaking to each other. Never a good thing.

I went up four times the last two nights to check Henry and I didn't do it alone, to give him more water and more Tylenol while the penicillin began to work. He is fine today, he keeps pointing out how great it is that he's less floppy.

This morning we slept in until nine again, Ben's arms curled firmly around me to show that no matter what happens, good or bad, he's here for the long haul, as he has always been. He took a couple days off, mostly so I can catch up on sleep. I'm completely exhausted and treading in dangerous water, but frankly I don't care. Henry doesn't have meningitis or anything scary but by 6 pm Saturday I had resorted to asking God for favors.

He listened.

Pecking orders.

Family meetings with my boys don't seem to work very well after no sleep, trips to Emergency and shoving matches outside in the snow. They also won't work if everyone is going to pull rank, refuse to listen and be jerks in a general sense.

It's par for the course. It's Supertestosteronebowl Sunday. And no, I'm not blaming them because they're men, I'm blaming them because they need to have a little more patience right now. This isn't about them and we really don't need this shit right now.

10 a.m. snapshot.

I'm watching Tool live and loving the raw voice.

I'm still eating red pistachios.

I'm in my favorite cardigan from Anthropologie along with woolen tights, because it's cold.

My new razor cellphone never stops ringing, though mine is a pretty silver instead of blue.

I'm looking forward to seeing Switchfoot live, later this spring.

I've become highly addicted to Reddit,  so much so that I had to join. I've never laughed so hard as I do at comments there.

I'm stocking up on over the knee socks, because they are the best ever. Should I get the pink or just stick with black?

I'm planning a Snowbeque tonight to coincide with the best day of the week.

I've had the words completely fucked out of me, I think. So nevermind posting today.





Have a great day.

Beauty and the beast.

    And all the roads we have to walk are winding
    And all the lights that lead us there are blinding
    There are many things that I would
    Like to say to you
    But I don't know how

I woke up this morning right where I wanted to be, under Ben's Maple Leafs blanket, stark raving naked, sated from a night of pushing our friendship past our own limits and finding we like it here. He never stops smiling anymore, it totally interferes with his angry anti-establishment rockstar vampire persona.

Wait, everything does that for Ben, so nevermind.

He got up around six, threw on a pair of jeans and wandered out to the kitchen and he came back and tossed my bag on the bed and I could hear my phone ringing as he passed me a glass of orange juice. As I sat up to clear my head, he opened the bag and started going through my things. If you knew Ben, he's a riot. He loves to play with everyone's stuff. He'll rifle through the pockets on the clothes you're wearing, pull out your wallet, flick your zippo, read your library card, organize your keys, call people from your cellphone contact list, try on your gloves. It isn't annoying, it's hilarious, but he saves the funniest explorations for my bag. It's always full of things that intrigue him.

First he took out my phone and passed it to me. I answered it and it was Chris. Ben frowned and took out my sketchbook, putting on one of my hearing aids. He drew a cartoon of Chris and I started to laugh. Then he put two baby-blue bobby pins in his hair, one on either side of the front to make his hair lie flat. Then he took out my black nail polish and put some on, just two fingers and then threw up the devil horns at me, so that only the polished nails were visible. I kept laughing while Chris asked what was so funny.

Then Ben found a Disney princess chapstick that was Ruth's and he read the ingredients and frowned at Belle and then took the top off with his teeth, spitting it onto the bed and then he smelled it (cherries) and put some on his lips. He smacked his lips together and then rolled the tube all the way out and bit the end off and ate it.

I know. You really have no idea. I can't ever leave him alone. He might eat the cutting board or one of the kids. Or wear one of my dresses out of the house.

He made another face and tossed what was left of the chapstick over his shoulder and went looking for more stuff. A spare tampon went into one ear. My headphones in the other ear and the hearing aid was handed to me. A second sharpie was uncapped and he wrote Property of B. E. N. on my arm.

All I could do was just laugh and laugh.

Eventually Christian let me go and Ben ran out of things to explore in my bag and so I hung up and he suggested he run out and bring home some breakfast. I agreed and off he went.

With the bobby pins still in his hair.

God love him, what a fucking freak.

The cult of Jacob.

Several readers have sent me notes of concern recently.

How I could forget Jacob so quickly, how I could move on? What am I doing to the kids? Why I can write so flippantly about fun moments after my husband died? And didn't we go through all this before and you're a fucking fake and Jesus Christ are you ever fucked up.

My therapists thank you. The bills for just one will cover the cost of a small villa on the French Riviera.

You know, if I had any idea my life would unfold like this when three years ago I was writing that Cole was working long hours and gee I hated shoveling snow but he came home and did it for me, I might never have started at all. Do you think it's easy having it all out there? I can't even walk away from it now because every last person who comes to read gets their update and if I don't write the assumption will be made that I finally did myself in.

Well, fuck you too, as long as things go well and I keep working so hard I think I can and will overcome that urge. I think I already have. How many of you are just waiting for that?

You're so smitten with Jacob that you forgot the central points involved in his takeover of my life. Encouraging poor opinions of Cole. He never let up the pressure on me. And then when I fell for him he took over everything. All of the sudden my friends were limited in their access to me. He encouraged me to drop several if not most of them. My car was sold. Cole was painted out to be a monster, when he was nothing more than a man with a violent streak a mile wide that was nothing I couldn't handle but he was dead so Jacob had free reign to paint him black.

I was stripped of my own opinions and reduced to a shivering, weakened doll while Jacob used his heavy handed charming approach to fix my life. He was going to take over and fix all of it. He would be a better man, a better father, a better husband and a better friend and God only help you if you disagreed with that. And then little by little it fell apart around him as I got worse with him instead of better.

He couldn't fix things, it just wasn't falling into place and his facade began to crumble. His self-esteem took a dive, he started making mistakes and he began to hate me for his obsession. His obsession with me, I don't even know how it began or what happened to it but it consumed him and then he decided he would drive me insane while still fixing everything and I would be fully dependent on him and it would hurt both of us and he could no longer make any sense of anything and he couldn't get rid of my friends and it got too hard and then he cracked and he stepped off a building and died and left me here alone, in amazingly poor mental condition and I've spent the last three months in therapy five times a week learning how to be human again.

He was my David Koresh, my very own Jim Jones, a live, in the flesh psychopath masquerading as the most amazing human being I've ever known. Of course he's still on a pedestal, I am mostly still under his spell even though it's been carefully dismantled piece by piece. I still love him. My God, had he not sent all these journals and the letters that he did I would still be in the dark. He knew what he was. He knew he hurt me. He knew he was a monster in his own right and he'll never be able to change that now just like Cole can't change the picture painted of him anymore. They won't get better, they're dead.

But I will get better. I want to.

I'm alive.

I want to be normal and I want to be in love and if that's with Ben, then it will be wonderful and if it isn't then that's okay too. If you can't handle reading or you don't understand how so much could go wrong in such a short while then trust me, you are not alone there, but please, for the love of God stop writing to me to tell me how awful you think I am.

Because I don't write for you.

I do it for me.

Find the road.

Yesterday's carnelian mittens and rose cheeks gave way to silver and gold notes from a lengthy before-dinner guitar lesson and then slid easily into blue and lavender dreams, restless sleeps for kids with colds (again).

Last night brought a new song and a new revelation, for if Cole was the keeper of the Zeppelin catalogue, Ben is the finder of their lost tracks, multiple takes and rare alternative versions, painstakingly seeking out every last recording the band has ever made. When he took me to bed somewhere around nine, early because I am trying to sleep enough instead of hardly at all, it was to the strains of a new and wonderful but old familiar song I knew well that I lay in Ben's arms while we did things that are new and different and so very right for us. Perfect for us.

The song was In the Light. Only this version is called In the Morning and I made a note inside my head to ask him about the song today, as I tried not to cry out as he easily found that one amazing place between not enough and too much.

Somewhere around midnight we fell asleep to the strains of The Rain Song, and it occurred to me that not only do I not feel homesick when I'm with Ben, but I also don't feel frustrated by him, I'm not trying to force him to do things he shouldn't, nor am I trying to get him to stop doing things I don't want him to do. Sleeping with him is a perfect match of skill and experimentation, of want and energy, of just the right level of perversity and gentleness. We match. Uncannily so.

Which leaves me kind of speechless, actually.

    Though the winds of change
    may blow around you,
    but that will always be so
    When love is pain it can devour you,
    but you are never alone
    I would share your load.
    I would share your load
    Baby, let me

    In the light
    Everybody needs the light.

Ambient noise.

    It's all wrong
    Don't cry
    Clear away this hate
    And we can start to make it alright

Today is a much better day, though slightly low-key, between my hands being sore and burned from the cold and the slow dissipation of the sleeping pill from my body I'm not going to do a hell of a lot. I'm all foggy but rested and loved and ready to not wake up on the low side of Bridget again any time soon if I can help it.

Can I blame this on Ben? No? It's okay, I didn't think so.

Last night was the first night I went to him since we came home from Nolan's. I crawled into his bed and right into his arms and told him about the pill and kissed him and unfortunately maybe fell asleep before the kiss was over. When I woke up he was already gone, off to work at dawn so he can leave a little early to come home.

There was a note on the table.

I love you, bee. You drool. Sleep well.

Heart-stopping dinner conversation.

Do you know why I stopped drinking? I stopped drinking so that you would take me seriously. So I wouldn't be known as the irresponsible party animal anymore. I stopped so that you would see me for who I am. I stopped because I knew that you would need me and I wanted to be able to be there for you one hundred percent. I didn't stop so that you would spend the rest of our lives thinking I can't handle anything difficult. I've been handling this and it's the most difficult thing I ever did and I did it because I wanted to show you how strong I am. Jesus, baby, to find out what kind of shape you were in at the end of an entire oblivious work day pisses me off because I could have been here. I'm here for you, why won't you come to me?

Because this isn't your responsibility. You can't fix this, Ben.

I never said I could fix it. But I can damn well hold you while you fix it yourself.

The world at night.

Sometimes I think that while I sleep, night seeps in around my edges, looking for a crack, any flaw or opening, a way inside. When I wake up I am filled with dark, with black, and I cannot see and I can't feel anything good and it hurts like hell and it takes forever to get rid of. I even tried to let a little of it out with a dull knife on a scarred thigh and I set myself back a good twenty months progress-wise but I was at the end of my wits, if I ever had any left at all, and I didn't dare call anyone for help nor would I let on that anything was wrong while Ben was still home this morning.

It wasn't until Loch phoned to tell me he had made a new template for this page and I just asked him to leave it like it was before and he asked what was wrong and I didn't know. I never know, I never have words that come out loud to tell anyone what it is. I just know that it was a black homesickness, a feeling I wish would stay away. I'd like to get better but then it comes to remind me I never will and then the hopelessness gives the black more weight and Bridget suffocates underneath it.

Loch was adamant that I share this feeling and get some help and he's pretty much been after me all day now as I flutter around the house with no words coming, the silence taunting me like a ghost.

Of course it's a ghost. It is two.

I could rest in the cold snow at the foot of the bench all afternoon, sitting on my knees, legs long asleep in the freezing wind, clutching the tiny copper box with the enamel bluebird painted on the lid in my frozen bleeding fingers wondering how they fit a man as big as Jacob into something so small but eventually someone that Loch called makes me come home and then they sit and stare at me and wonder how one little human could go so left of center and how in the hell do we bring her back and keep her here? Gosh, she doesn't weigh much, she's pretty complacent when it comes to direction, why in the hell is this happening?

It's the dark. It covers everything and I can't hide from it.

I can keep it from finding Ben, that's pretty much all I can do some days. He has his own things to deal with, I have always kept him from this.

It took forty-three minutes to pry that precious little box out of my frostbitten hands. Whoever said I wasn't strong should have really been here this afternoon.