October rust.

How do I fill the time, holed up in the shadows of the ones who have left, only to forget those shadows leaving these huge dark spaces where so much light used to be? 

Learn something new, I tell myself automatically, finding solace in working with my hands, keeping my brain so focused on perfecting the task at hand that it remains present, failing to wander away into the night, mistaking that ever-present darkness for a simple shadow, time after time. 

How do I not stay in the past, refusing to move past the dates seared into my mind? How do I not become hypnotized by the flames, so beautiful even as they burn everything to the ground, leaving nothing but a smoky darkness that looks like shadows but with more destruction, more decay. 

How do I put it down when I can't let go?

***

I wrote that a few days ago and didn't post it. It feels like me. Sounds like me, looks exactly like me, a spitting image carved in granite of Bridget's forever psyche, like a greek tragedy represented in stone. The leaves have turned red, the moon orange and the bats have returned to replace to chickadees now rare in the cold October winds. I wrap my sweater tighter around my bones, sip my coffee and listen carefully as the boys talk in their low voices. Sometimes I zone out. Sometimes I sleep sitting up. Sometimes I strain to hear and still can't and other times I want to break out of this stone and run down the grass, leaping into the saltwater, and healing the scratches and scrapes from the days keeping their hold on me. Sometimes I watch Netflix for days on end, another video up on a second screen, teaching myself continental knitting or so I hope in order to be faster at it, since the English way is slow. I'm pretty certain the Irish way of knitting is to say fuck it and pour whiskey over the whole thing, lighting it on fire, but I want to become a fine knitter as it's a brain-calming activity the likes of which I rarely find and it's an easy creative outlet when I don't want to write or paint. 

The pumpkins and leaves outside are soaked. The grass so green now it looks as if someone turned up the saturation on the world and the army has begun to draw close yet again as the calendar rolls around to the truly sad bad anniversaries we can't seem to forget if we tried.

Decade-old cravings and not being able to help them.

What wouldn't I give right now for a bowl of tumeric coconut curry with pineapple chutney and chunks of chicken with roasted roots? Don't ask me that when I'm hungry, but the only place to get the one I want is downtown and no one will drive there and get me some even though I am on day five of the first cold/flu of the season and somehow only Ruth and I have been struck down by it. Ruth goes like a bat out of hell as it is, working like a maniac and then doing extreme sports and escape rooms and day trips on her days off and sees a lot of people so it makes sense. I live in my ivory tower and am not allowed to go anywhere except the superstore and occasionally the yarn or potter supply shops in Surrey so I don't know how I get sick. 

Oh, yes, Ruth comes by to show me things and then I get sick. Or maybe I had the luck of someone breathing on me in the aisle where I let out a mighty expletive upon discovering that, while they took away all of the Stouffers and Lean Cuisine frozen dinners, cosmic brownies and Little Debbie products, they gave all that space to more Global foods and so I can buy pakoras and masala vada and stuffed naan whenever I want. 

When I swear in the grocery store people look so alarmed. It's nothing, I just get excited about new stuff. Grocery shopping is such a chore. Also we have on average only five varieties of pop-tarts in Canada now and I will never understand why. 

Yes, I do. Everything is disappearing from the shelves because supplies can't afford to parse out their wares across the entire huge vast land that is this country, especially ironic when we all live within a stone's throw or an hour's drive of the border. 

My new passport is here and I am sorely tempted to drive down to Bellingham and go to Trader Joes and Target but I also don't want to shop near people with automatic guns so I might stick with Superstore and uhhh wherever else I can get what I need. I don't want to leave the country anymore. Thanks to Amazon I barely want to leave the house and don't have to. They're driving down my street every day anyway, may as well put that to good use. 

They won't bring me the curry though.

Lift me up to the heavens (I can't hear what they're saying).

Your princess finally got to see Atreyu, seeing Drowning and more importantly, Watch Me Burn live were parts of my brain I didn't realize were puzzle pieces and now that section of this weird science experiment that lives inside my head is complete. Or mostly, anyway. You can still see right through it but I love live shows and I'm happy they opened, as when I originally got the tickets for Maiden it said Raven Age was coming back again and I rolled my eyes. Again? Nepo babies in music are a given but after one tour it's a problem. 

Maiden was nuts. Though Bruce looked older than his years at last, and he has grown his hair back out (I saw him last in 2016) and the bangs were my favourite part of his look and they are gone in favour of a white half-ponytail. He also had a bad cold and hid it amazingly well. I was pleased he didn't call it off but also he still hit all the notes and it was the final Canadian date on their Future/Past tour. 

Also the merch was so much better this time. No more disembowelled moose on t-shirts, instead the actual band designs/album covers on shirts. Cotton shirts, one hundred percent. Love it. 

They trotted out Eddie a couple of times. A big inflatable thing came up for all of five minutes before they stuffed it back in its crate. It looked like a red dragon but it's probably not. I don't know the lore. I didn't even know some of the songs this time, but they did play Fear of the Dark and Wasted Years so it was good. I had a sore throat and crowd-fear so it was a challenging night for sure. 

The beer was cheap and plentiful and the crowds were fun. I do have to give a shout out to the gorgeous girl with the black hair, black tank top and black shorts who I saw crowd-surfing not once but twice. From my ivory tower suite I wanted to be down in the pit beside her but also not, as those days are long over. It's not often you see girls surfing. It's not really a safe thing but she ended each round with a huge smile so watching that was as fun as the show itself. Thank you for the added magic of watching your profound joy.

Bruce swears they'll be back. I hope he's right. They range in age from 65 to 71 and it shows. Will I go in seven years again? I don't know. I felt old.

Pumpkinhead.

My, my, those eyes like fire
I'm a winged insect, you're a funeral pyre
Come now, bite through these wires
I'm a waking hell and the gods grow tired
Reset my patient violence along both lines of a pathway higher
Grow back your sharpest teeth, you know my desire

Is it obvious I show up every couple of weeks? I don't know, you tell me. I thought it seemed obvious. I would be here all day if not for the Rules. Rules that work, I guess. For who and why? 

I don't know. I'm not in charge.

I scrubbed bathrooms today and did some fall garden cleanup and caught up on laundry too to help Dalton and I talked to Ruth for a long time on the phone and also talked to the old man up the street that also walks his ancient dog each morning.

My reward was the dog sleeping blissfully for most of the afternoon and a date with Daniel and Ben for nails and hot chocolate. Daniel gave Ben matte black polish and I got a really nice french manicure that he did when I said it was his choice. Usually he puts on Chanel Vamp if he gets to pick but this is really nice. Chaotic neutral, as it were. Vamp makes me feel as though I should be putting on winged eyeliner and scowling at everyone and I don't scowl much these days. 

The hot chocolate was really good too. I got it at Wal-Mart. It's a big can and it's really cheap and for some reason it's just good and not sickly sweet like the take-out stuff. 

Lochlan says I am depressed and it's probably just the daylight lessening that is doing it. It's a well-documented problem that I have and very little helps. I have given away half my wardrobe. I don't want colour. I never actually sleep. I can watch movies and clean but I don't do a lot else. 

I don't know. Jacob's anniversary is coming. His birthday is coming. Thanksgiving is coming. The dark is coming. 

Oop, the Devil is coming. He's going to be pissed off. He loves the Vamp shade.

Oh Lantern.

So busy today and we went into downtown Vancouver for a change of scenery after lunch but the traffic. The people. The lineups. Crazy. We went and had Japanese food at our third-favourite place. Went for Tiramisu at another and then went to Starbs and had coffee (I didn't, it was four o'clock! I had a frozen mango-dragonfruit lemonade-thingie). We sat in traffic on Hornby for a stupid amount of time next to the ever-empty bike lane and Lochlan asked me if I wanted to bail on traffic and stay at the Fairmont tonight. 

No, I wanted to be home. I had my empty sticky plastic cup and my paper shopping bag from Saint Laurent and my patience flew out the window on the Iron Workers Bridge at some point just before sunset and it's time for this princess to turn back into a pumpkin. Time to fire up the Netflix and knit for a little while as the boys fire up games and books for the evening. 

It was nice though. Reminds me of old times and cements why I like it here so much, tucked out of the way, down the long driveway past the big black ornate iron gates. Back to having the Devil within reach and the army keeping watch, but not letting my guard down. 

My guard is Lochlan and I made a promise.

It always ends the same way.

I know. Ten days without checking in again and the internet moves along at such a frenetic clip my cycle of news for you barely exists for a moment before dropping you into the next tidbit that you seek out online.

What's happening? My grapes aren't quite ready, the red ones anyway. I eat the green ones by the handful, barely avoiding certain death by the giant bald-faced hornets that seem hellbent on making another summer memory for me. Lochlan says I am hilarious and he lives for this. I go into every summer marvelling at the long light, the warmth, the sting of salt on sweat, the gardening possibilities, and then I run screaming from it just as quickly, resenting the oppressive heat, traffic, tourists and the sheer work of gardening involved. The bugs. The endless mowing. The endless cleaning of the pool. The endless ruination of all of my bathing suits so quickly as the chlorine rips them apart and I tend to sleep in the pool. PJ called me a human sous-vide once and I cracked back an insult about fetishes of sealing people in plastic and eating them later and all he did was laugh until he started to wheeze. 

(PJ doesn't like the heat either.)

By the end of summer I am spilling blueberries out of a mug in a race to get them all, the bottoms of my feet are black from the dust, from the sand and the pavement and the dirt and my skin is faint golden, buried under a million freckles that appear seemingly out of nowhere. I am wild-eyed and now offended by the early end to the evenings and the tourists leaving the town high and dry far too early and the Back to School adverts and the Christmas displays in stores. 

He said it's like the five stages of grief but I go into it mourning summer and then finally find acceptance and even enthusiasm. 

Even as he yells at me to go back outside and scrub my toes before I leave little sooty footprints all over the white carpet, something I categorically denied until he pointed out my feet are size six and the next closest is him at eleven so it's pretty obvious it was me. 

I just shake my head and keep eating blackberries. No wasps in these ones. Only spiders. Yum.

I have four suggestions that might make the world a better place. (Vancouver and LA I'm looking at you!)

1. Lower your goddamn expectations. Expect to wait. Expect life to sometimes not be perfect. Expect other people to have problems too. Expect some things to go wrong sometimes. Be patient and prepared and you'll have an easier time. Do it for your own mental health, which, like physical health, should be looked after.

2. Let's eliminate Air BnB's! If you stay in a hotel they have better standards. And if they have cameras you can get a nice payout. Air BnB was supposed to be for when you were away you would rent out your own home and make a few bucks. Now it's stealing from the available housing supply as people buy up stock for short term rentals. Fuck off with that. Shut it all down. Forever. 

3. Cap rent amounts (and maybe sales too) by square footage. The joke of a video about a 200 sq foot room in an SRO here going for $2000 a month wasn't funny, it was devastating. There should be a maximum rental price you can charge if a unit falls under a certain size, or have a graduated scale in increments. Why the hell not? Nothing else is working and prices are through the roof.

4. Let's get Sam Asghari and Meghan Markle together!! Come on, it will be fun.  They can write books on their experiences and fade away together. Even better, someone introduce Britney to Harry and she can have her life and eat it too. What bullshit. I am somewhat heartened though. Up until a couple of days ago I was beginning to think she was dead.

  (Also whoever said to fill a small water bottle with water and freeze it and roll your feet on it is a fucking genius. It's my new favourite thing. I can't get cool. I am cranky.)

Safe Haven and halfway points.

Devilled eggs and sweat. Bad documentaries and worse romance movies. Nicholas Sparks who never fails to sweep my feet out from under me, even though I am so jaded at this point my skin has a green cast and is cool to the touch. 

I love Julianne Hough. I freaking love her. Even if Footloose didn't need to be remade, though her background means she shouldn't have fallen off the bike at all. Safe Haven was a weird one, though I got chills when Josh Duhamel told her she was safe, and gave her all of that white-knight bullshit romance-novel reassurance women fall for so damn easily, without prejudice. Every single fucking time. 

And it's hopeful, optimistic reassurance at best. Because in the end Julianne (Katie/Erin, whatever she wanted to go by) saved herself. As one should. Or something. Not sure if that works for or against Mr. Sparks but it was a twist I didn't see coming. 

Kind of like Cobie as a ghost. No idea. Completely shocked by that one.

Smash Um forget Um cookies.

 It's cool today. Jeans and no shirts for some, simple linen sundresses for others. I'll let you figure out who's wearing what. The pool and the air seem to be the same temperature, the skies are a pale blue that remind me of Jacob's eyes. The clouds persist, but just a little. There's a blanket folded on the back of the swinging bench on the porch and one on my favourite egg-chaise by the pool, just for me, just in case I get cold and want to wrap myself up like a burrito. 

I've been strolling the neighborhood picking blackberries and picking up litter, petting everyone's cats, dogs and children, talking to Ruth on the phone half the time and my dad the other half. My dad has gotten old suddenly. Gone is the stubborn, unfeeling mean giant of a man and in his place is someone shorter, frailer and more understanding, somehow, as if the wind has been taken completely out of his sails. He's almost fun to talk to now, and I almost want to go back on my vow to feel nothing when it comes to my folks, as they never felt anything about me, other than some sort of smug satisfaction that they could just lie about my life instead of being horrified by it. 

But as I said, I have made the choice not to care.

At all. 

Cole's anniversary came and went. The clouds came and went. The rain came in briefly and then went. I watched like seven dozen movies and documentaries and true crime dramas on Netflix and I don't think I liked any of them. I loved the mom in Run Rabbit Run but not the story. I'm watching American Psycho now just to remind myself that Patrick Bateman is a construct of a construct and Caleb took some stupid cues back in the day, though I feel like men like Caleb are more then inspiration for the writers instead of the result, especially since this movie is only twenty years old. 

I haven't 'done' anything. A little gardening. I stalked a very big beetle yesterday. I cleaned out one of the Jeeps since it was downright filthy and I scrubbed the inside of the pantry (shelves too). I hung more lanterns. I cleaned some baseboards and windowsills and I painted an old set of bookends that my grandfather made and I have carted around ever since and they're holding the cookbooks. I found a copy of Kim's Cookbook for Young People, a treasured first cookbook that Bailey and I studied and copied and cooked before I was one of the boys. I bought it and am waiting for it to arrive. I'm going to send it on to her for her birthday. 

 I haven't made much progress in my own reading. I want to do a lot of sewing and painting and reading and resting but the dog is dying and he needs me. I can't leave a room without him anymore and it's breaking my heart. Fifteen years of having an ever-present shadow and when I don't have a shadow anymore I don't know what I will do. This dog is my constant and my comfort, even sleeping up close to my head when the boys moved here and I was left behind and I watched 30 days of night and got weirdly scared.

I needed him and now he needs me so if he needs me to sleep up by his face I will do it. It's the least I can do for him. His spine is sharp and his eyes are cloudy. He has no idea what his name is anymore and he rarely eats. But it's okay. He can live out his days on love.

I didn't mean for this to be sad. I meant to sit down and tell you how reluctant I have become to be reasonable. I'm back to living in my own head and maybe it's the pills, maybe it's the dog, but it just feels like someone dropped a concrete block between me and life and only Lochlan and the children can get around it. 

That's not a bad thing. Just a thing that I see. But my eyes are cloudy too. Cloudy and rainy, more often than not.

Dumb bitch.

Cole (Trey to me and the boys) died seventeen years ago today. 

Huh.

It seems like it was a movie. It seems like another lifetime. Maybe it was just a lifetime movie that I caught at the end on a fuzzy cable channel back in the day when we had channels on the television instead of apps. On the upside, I don't miss anything I want to see now because I can start it when I please.

Seventeen years, and this weekend Henry turns twenty-two. And he's finished university and already working away in his chosen field and his bosses are very proud of him. 

Cole would have been proud of him too. 

Everyone is. 

Would he be proud of me? I don't know. Maybe. Probably not. He always had this disdain for me, as I deferred to Lochlan forever (and will forever) and Cole felt as though I was marked. That he would always be second place. 

So tonight I raise my glass and pour it out in the grass for another year gone by and say things out loud I never would have dared to say with him present. 

Third. You were third place. Ha.

I still say it quietly. He's probably around here somewhere.