Delusional older men and the women who tolerate them.

The snow has started, Neamhchiontach. Come to bed. 

I shake my head. I'm sitting wrapped in a blanket in the big wing chair by the fireplace. It's warm here. It got a lot colder at night in the past few nights and I wasn't ready for it. I practically tried to crawl underneath Lochlan and put my face in Ben's hair to keep my nose warm the other night and both kind of pushed me off so I thought I would give them both a break last night and stay with Caleb. Caleb who had the candles light, the fire burning bright and the whiskey in two tumblers before I got the request completely out. 

Anytime you need me, I am here. 

I'm just cold. You're burning so I figured you would be warm. Don't be flattered. 

Hard not to be. You're here and I don't have to wait for my dreams to visit me in my sleep when they're right in front of me. 

He's so good at this. I feel my icy heart melting just enough to create a sizzle around the edges and then I slept like the dead for hours. Until I couldn't anymore which is always in the early darkened hours of the day, the inky black silent morning before sunrise. 

Give me another night. You need a full night of rest before I send you back. 

I don't get any rest here.

It's a polite euphemism, he snaps, frustrated by my casual rejection. As always we both benefit from your late night wandering. 

I like to watch the snow. I'll come back when I'm tired. 

You always come back to me. 

I always want to catch you up before I restart and then I fall behind once more.

My ears are ringing today. I think I'm getting a cold. They've been randomly shooting sharp pains through my head. It feels like post-Halloween instead of pre-spring today. Wind and snow/rain on the way. The leaves are grey/tan and glued to the concrete. The trees bend and snap in the chill breeze. The water is that dull ominous grey punctuated with the odd cap of white foam. 

The Bridget? 

She is spring-cleaning. The usual stupid shit I get up to just as tax season rolls around and I am so busy but decide to do things like steam clean all the area rugs and curtains, scrub out drawers and cubbies and closets. Declutter and reorganize. I just delivered eight perfect tent pegs down to the garage to the camping supplies from their inexplicable year-long holding place in the drawer with the frying pans. 

Right. I don't know either but I am hellbent on finding a place for everything and keeping everything in its place. I am procrastinating, but doing it on an HGTV level here, as per usual.

I'm watching Alone this week. The Arctic one. It's so delicious. It's graphic and also somewhat staged. Like one minute the contestants are starving and blacking out and the next? Surprise, a fat perfect bunny in the snare that looks like every other snare in the show. Does everyone do the same type? I saw so many over the years. I would stick a ski pole or a walking stick through all of them because snares had no place in countryside light, and that was killing for sport instead of food, so fuck you. On the show they need to eat and they're doing a mostly poor job of it, though the suspense is good and the surprise is decent, as is the conveyance about how far away from each other they are and how cold and solitary it actually is. 

I'm reading Meghan Quinn's A Not So Meet Cute. Okay, sue me, it's adorable. I love a good long depressing story about grief and ghosts and vague unsettling occurrences the same way I love horror movies but then switch to Hallmark Christmas movies once a year. This is my Fucking Spring Literary Fling then and I love it. Lottie is a fun character. There's little depth and everything will work out. I believe. 

I'm rolling my eyes at the newspaper that has the nerve to try and snark on Lululemon's potential handslap for greenwashing while in the next breath putting up a news article breathlessly marketing their newest sneaker for them. I can't believe Lululemon still hasn't been cancelled as a nod to the shitty racism from its founder and then moreover for the fact that it makes stretchy nylon-polyester...gym wear?

I'm eating granola bars and poutine, the former of which is a daily thing, the latter of which was a first or second and soon-to-be-regret, as there was SO MUCH CHEESE and I don't get along with lactose. At all. 

Ha. 

I knit another inch on a sock for myself between lunch and post lunch. It's so zen, so productive and satisfying. I have an Etsy cart full of knitty things to help me make more things but I'm trying to be a responsible consumer too and only buy what I need currently, and that includes yarn, even as I found a beautiful seed-stitch cowl pattern that looks woven so I want to make it too. On a consumerism level though it will have to wait. Over the winter I even pared down the pantries from twenty years of weird overshop/prepping in order to be more mindful in cooking and eating and am trying to buy a wonderful meal or two at a time to savour. 

Speaking of savour. After Christmas we stopped for dinner at a favourite little spot and I ordered my usual Monte Cristo with ham and fries. There was no ham this time, and then the sandwich itself was on this bizarre commercially-produced french toast-type thick cake bread with no crusts, instead of my old favourite fried scrunched-up crackly sourdough. So yeah, I have to make french toast and then do Monte Cristos at home now. End of an era, but at least it's not like donairs from the east coast where you just simply can't recreate them sufficiently at home. I can do this. Going to make them every week. 

I feel like the sun is trying to peek through the heavy cloud-cover on its way over the horizon while the moon struggles to rise tonight. I feel like it's a weird long weekend but at last it's a completed week, almost and I feel like I might sleep tonight too. If only my ears will stop ringing, that is.

Earl grey donuts and cold blue skies.

I fixed all of my typos from the previous post, including the one where I miswrote Bucharest as Budapest. I've never lived in Budapest but sometimes my brain picks the first syllable and just runs with it and I had no time to edit. Caleb is demanding, cutting and in control when it comes to what I have come to call my 'outside time', that is the time in which I can see what is happening in the world or write here a little bit so that people understand that I am still alive, still happily ensconced in my Collective, frayed and worn as it may be. And Lochlan is world-weary and not interested in butting heads with the devil over something as inconsequential as the internet. 

An essential service, I venture and from his chair at the table PJ snorts a laugh. 

A mindless distraction, Caleb reiterates. 

Okay, Boomer, I mutter to myself. I have things to do online. I want to add to my Netflix queue. I want to start looking at my taxes. I want go back to doing online banking because I like charts on paper and being able to do all of my transactions on a screen without having to talk to someone. The OCD doesn't want to be explained and neither does anything else. 

The doctor is soon, for my checkup for the all of the not-easily-dismissable side effects of all these medications, including my poor busted heart which is going through the wringer with skipped beats and double beats and no beats where there should be beats. It's like a bad song, but as Lochlan whispered to me more than once as of late,

Any song is better than the quiet. 

And I believed him. 

He is human. We screwed up, or rather, he did and I took the brunt of the mistake. 

Once again. 

In any case, I think the doctor will send me back to soberland, back to anxious nail-biter hand-flapper, lip-biter Bridget. My drive to create will come back. My energy and sleep will come back. My vision and semi-regular heartbeat will come back. My stoic, pragmatic and silly husband will be back instead of the spooked rigid boat-steadier/passive guy who seemingly took his place. A stranger. In a strange land.

I told them I was an occasional benzo girl and this wouldn't work. It's been two years and I'm FINALLY vindicated. I can finally fight for my rights. For control. For access.

I understand why he did it. I hope he understands why I can't anymore.