Want to be a winnerIt's the house of loud around here today, with old music vying with new for space in our ears, thumping in my chest, tapping in my fingers as I roll the big skull ring over and over around the first knuckle, fourth finger of my right hand.
Want to be the man
Want to drive yourself insane
Join up with the band
Want to fall in love
Want to make your mark
Want to get out in the storm
want to break a thousand hearts
It's not a bad day. I still have a mild leftover headache from the paint fumes/silicone caulking/lack of sleep/straight rum (oh, hush) but otherwise things have been better. This morning I did some outside chores and the children rode their bicycles up and down the sidewalk eighty-five times, then we went in to cool off for lunch and sacked out afterwards in front of the television with ice cream, watched a little of the X games and talked about which sports we would master when we grew up.
I think I would do anything save for skateboarding. My first trip, down a steep paved hill littered with gravel, on Lochlan's skateboard, no less, ended badly when I was twelve and I flew off it and landed on my face. Lost most of my front teeth and a whole lot of skin from my limbs and got to start Junior High School as the human road rash.
He is still laughing.
I am still glaring at him.
We don't tend to let things go. But better a skateboard accident then the three (almost four) marriages, three babies and the heaven in a drive-in movie theatre back field between us, he always says.
He thinks this house is his. Stole my newspaper twice this week, even after I pointed out I need it for the dog, so he goes in the right place instead of wherever he wants. Drank the last of the coffee I was saving for the four o'clock Narcoleptic Princess Experience, and erased the list of new albums by date from the white board in the kitchen that I was using as my guide so I would be able to make the weekly pilgrimage to HMV where they take my credit card and return it to me with scorch marks and I get new music to dive into like a fresh backyard pool, ice cold, coming up with wet curls, burning eyes and chlorine in my nostrils, bikini straps cutting against the slight sunburn of the previous day.
The X games got pretty old after about an hour, though. One spectacular moto x crash, and far too many qualifying drills to make an afternoon of it, and instead I'm trading messages with Ben and listening to Spy Adventures from upstairs somewhere when they take place right over my head here on the window seat in the kitchen and the dog is lying on the hardwood planks like he's just finished his own X games and really it feels like a Friday but it's not, not quite yet. I'm trying to do nothing for once and it feels rather weird.
I could clean the bathroom. I could finish raking along the side of the house where all the leaves tend to pile up and I could practice my spelling, since there are at least three words in existence that I use almost daily that I can't spell at all but I'm not sharing them right now, because I don't feel like looking them up and they never come up in spellcheck. I could file my ragged nails and paint them black to match Ben's. I could start dinner so that it's extra-awesome instead of just good, an effort I fight for mightily.
Or I could close my eyes for a bit, and imagine my arms going up around the back of Ben's neck, getting a coffee-and-cigarettes kiss which would be totally gross from anyone else and totally perfect from him. I could sleep for just very few minutes and then be awake enough to enjoy a movie or another evening spent out on the patio with boys and guitars and sleepy children, or I could just not move or do anything at all. And just wait for a moment. One perfect moment with quiet, with sunshine, with a light cool breeze and a little peace inside my head. A slow down and take it easy, Bridget moment that I never actually take, I'm stockpiling them in hopes that I can cash them all in at the same time, click my heels together and be transported to that resort in Tortola where they have a hammock and a view of nothing but ocean.
I'll lie in that hammock and spend my minutes with abandon, and I won't have to wash a dish, scrub up a puppy accident or break up a fight for an entire day. I won't get hungry or sunburned, and I really, really won't give a shit that I can't spell vaccume.
So there.