1983, 2006, 2007.
I would erase those years from the page if I could. Struggling to make the marks vanish, tearing the paper, licking the end of the eraser and then trying again so that dark grey smudges remained and what used to be underneath the marks is unreadable, unpredicted.
Then I can burn the book for good measures and bad ones too.
I don't know if it matters if it's healthy. I'm not healthy but I'm not green either. Today I struggled through an early shower and then crashed back into bed, setting the alarm for yet another hour away from right now and in my dreams Jake said he would get up and see the kids off to school and when I woke up again it was so real.
So real it made my head ache and I want to undo all of it.
But then Lochlan came in with a travel mug full of apple juice (I am notoriously uncoordinated when sick. No, like way more than usual) and a ipad full of Erky Perky videos for me to watch and doze. He told me he bought me Triumph's greatest hits album (LOVE THIS GUY) and I could download it to my phone whenever I felt like it. Then he pretended he was hanging by his tie and said he had to go, that PJ and Dalton (God help us he's up before noon?) would see the kids off this morning. Not to get up at all, for anything until at least lunchtime and that Sam would be home to see that I eat something besides Jack Daniels and Pixy Stix.
(Because I found a store here that sells them in bags of hundred counts. JESUS CHRIST IT'S THE HOLY LAND FOR CERTAIN. Not the Jack by the hundreds, the candy, you idiots, though...okay no.)
I think the bourbon was helping though. Certainly with the lucid dreaming.
And of course halfway through one show I defied him, dragging my sorry arse out of bed, pouring out the juice, looking at my hair in the mirror and laughing until I coughed up things I maybe could have named if I wasn't so horrified instead (Nyarlathotep, Balaur, and perhaps Sabazios would be GREAT names for what I saw) and then I pulled on blown out jeans and a soft sweatshirt and laughed again in the mirror and opened the door.
Ben was sitting at the top of the steps working on his laptop and he leaned back, looked at me and said I was disobeying house rules.
Then he laughed too, not sure if it was aimed at my hair or all these damned rules. Either way we're a comedy road show here at home.
He put down his machine and got up and blocked the door so I coughed in his face except he's very tall so it didn't accomplish much of anything. He frowned and asked if I wanted to go to the doctor and I waved my hands at him and said if I got much worse I could just summon my own personal scary Soviet medical team to my bedside with their cold war strategies (get it? Get IT?) and then he said I was talking absolute nonsense and he walked over the bed and held the covers up.
I stripped out of my clothes, got back into bed and he stretched out beside me with his laptop again and told me to sleep while he...types really loudly and listens to music on his headphones which I can hear far too easily. If he isn't pickled then he'll surely be at least profoundly deaf before he's fifty.
But eventually it all faded away and Jacob came back in and leaned over me, one hand warm against my forehead. He swore lightly in his native unintelligble Newfiespeak and pushed my head under the water until I couldn't breathe anymore and I finally stopped fighting and lay still.
Ben didn't even try to stop him and Lochlan was too far away by then to even know what was happening. But true to form I resurrected myself because that's what I do, day after day after day.
