Round tables with square corners.

Updates for today are light. My ankle is fine. I can walk on it all day or climb and it throbs a bit at night but otherwise it works. I haven't run yet but I'm hoping to get back to it midweek.

The gym called Christian last night and told him he was stripped of his privileges there. He's fine with that, he says cockily that he can climb anywhere, there are tons of outdoor venues. Jacob asked him who would trust him for a partner and Chris just shook his head, knocked down a peg and apologized again. I don't think he really meant to do it as much as he meant to try to prove he is as strong as Jake.

Jacob, who is built like a blacksmith on steroids.

Those guys, geez, they're so busy trying to outdo each other the room invariably fills up with testosterone and chokes off their common sense. Nothing has changed in the last decade. The good news is it wasn't malicious and once Jacob cooled off a little he backed off considerably.

You see, Cole let everyone get away with murder. Jacob lets them get away with nothing. They're all still feeling out their boundaries with me, with us, with everything. Really, I give them credit for sticking it out. Most friends would have just drifted away when things get too tough. Not my guys. This army is going to ride it's own dissension until everything gets ironed out. Infighting knights. Kindhearted and fearless. Fierce and slightly hellbent on making a new and better history for these ages. Fools on errands.

When we went to bed last night before it was even dark outside Jacob took me into his arms and kissed me long and hard, to put his heart back from where it rose into his throat yesterday afternoon. I returned his kiss with fervor, cementing his heart exactly where it should be, held aloft by love and not by terror. I'm safe. I'm fine, but still he never rests.

The fragility returns, like it always does, to form my unwelcome shadow. I can't hide from it, I'll never outrun what seeks to keep me brittle and precious. I think Jacob likes things better this way anyway. He wields the sword, I'll stand behind him and he goes right back to being In Charge. We always return to this.

Because it works.

Today is church and then the park. It's cooler today weatherwise too, a perfect day for a walk and an ice cream and then maybe a movie late tonight. Some quiet times for four, then two.

Have a nice weekend.

Always use two hands, Chris.

Christian can be such a jerk sometimes. This afternoon he let me fall twenty feet to the heavily-padded floor of the climbing gym, only I didn't hit the floor, thank God, I landed in Jacob's arms. Because for once he was standing under us yelling repeatedly to Chris to use two hands. Chris got cocky and used one hand, making some joke about feathers and angels which ended in an oath of fear and surprise and one of those moments you wish you could stuff back inside whichever hole it crawled out of.

Jacob.

Caught.

Me.

One of those rare and wonderful moments where he's right where he wanted to be.

They made it out to the parking lot before Jacob went at Chris. They went down in the dust, and I stood watching until I saw blood and then I dryly asked if we could go home now. We arrived back in the house and cooler heads prevailed as I managed to fill PJ in on what happened. PJ barely had time to remind me that trusting Chris with my life probably isn't such a great idea when Jacob decided he wasn't through and launched at him again.

Sigh.

I have now locked them in the backyard and I can still hear Jacob swearing. It's great to see the summer sports going as smashingly as the winter ones do.

Jesus on a skateboard.

Jacob's secret to long life and how to gain fifteen pounds in a month flat? Because he's gaining weight along with me, which only makes him more of a wall of man?

Dunkaroos.

He's got a raging addiction to them, which I just found out about after wondering how half a case disappeared in less than three days. I figured August was a serial snacker so I didn't say anything and then I caught Jacob red-handed. He swears they're vegan, and so that makes it okay. I think he just likes the blue packaging. When I look in my bag it's full of blue Dunkaroos and blue keys.

The day we attended our final counseling session with the marriage counselor we kept firing and rehiring, I saw a older man with super long brown hair and a long beard on a skateboard and he looked like Jesus to me. A stoplight savior, I guess he was.

I rolled down the window and stuck my hand out to give him one of those blue keys from the stopgap program we have here to help feed the homeless. Instead of cash we can buy keys to give that they can exchange for a meal or assorted services and Jacob does not like it. He would rather see the money expand the shelters and get people off the streets at night and into rehab programs during the day.

Skateboard man smiled at me with his faded brown eyes and one dirty tooth and said,

Bless you, my child.

I smiled at him. Jacob looked across me and smiled and blessed him right back but that man never took his eyes off me.

The skateboard man has become a ritual for me. He hasn't left the corner where I make my left when I leave downtown and so if he is a summer fixture then I will be a fixture for him. I've given him seventeen keys so far this year, the equivalent of taking him out to dinner each night on a shoestring budget so he can rest with a warm belly full of food. He looks past my easy smile for him and sees other things. Maybe he sees things I don't even know he sees, as if we are both on level of madness that is only discernible to others who suffer the same grief. Some days I want to ask him how he ended up here, why he doesn't have someone, but instead I give him his key and receive my blessing and move on when the traffic dictates that it's time to go.

He's my daily reminder that things could be worse, but they're not.

Jacob brought home ten more keys last night for him, and suggested we park and walk to him to see if he wants further options. But I don't think he's real. I don't think he'll be there if we try to approach on foot. I can't explain it to Jacob because he might think I've gone off it but I think the skateboard man is Jesus and he's appearing to me and focused on me because I'm the one who needs help. Sort of like God sent Jacob to me but maybe God is frustrated too with how long it takes me to react to things and how long it takes me to accept the signs, take the help, make the changes. I have triggered a monumental flood of sympathy and support from those around me willing to help save Bridget. The army, I suppose.

I must be meant for something great. I think I even know already what it is.

Love, silly. It's love. I just need to stop fighting it.

Just stop it, baby, please.

I don't know what to do.

Be yourself.

Who the hell is that?

The girl who could breathe when she came to me. You didn't bottle it up, instead you let it out. You relaxed around me.

So why can't I relax now?

You're afraid.

Of?

Life, maybe? Change? Afraid you might like it if you did let go and embrace life without guilt or grief?

I suppose.

Could you?

Possibly, I don't know. Nothing works.

Then let's try it. Because bottled-up you isn't you and it isn't healthy. I don't care how unperfect you feel, it only makes you more perfect to me, princess.

My God, I had no idea how low your standards were, Jacob.

That's just the point. They aren't, Bridget.

Oh.

Yes, oh.

Wow.

Strip it down to the basics, for they are the important things.

I had a feeling one day late last week, well , last night anyway, of not belonging. The sun looked strange, my belongings alien, and I felt like if I lifted one foot off the earth the other might go with it and I would be yanked up into the atmosphere and no one would hear my cry. Then to cement the unusualness of that evening, after we went to bed, Jacob fell asleep instantly and I stood in the window watching the lightning strike the ground and the rain beat down so hard it have to have left dimples in the pavement. It roared through my head like a jet engine and it took subsequent hours afterward to get to sleep. Hours.

I didn't feel connected. I didn't feel present. I didn't feel like I had anything to call my own, not even an emotion that didn't end in fear and self-loathing. And it's dumb not having trust in things I'm supposed to lean on but won't and it's positively ridiculous how spending several days in the company of new perspective can pull the rug out from under so many things you thought were carved in stone.

August afforded me a view of Jacob's other side, a side I know less well, having experienced the less-chaotic part of Jacob, the part that rests, the side of him that's domestic and calm and settled. August has seen, traveled with and experienced Jacob in the wild. He's talked with Jacob in a way Jacob and I will never talk, because we always had the weight of our mutual attraction holding our conversations hostage. We could so easily just be together, and spend time we had saved, and yet all of our talks were stripped of their pertinent information and facts and innuendos about each other and filed away in our locked hearts to keep safe, because we knew.

August, of course, has never seen the side of Jacob I know, to be fair, though he arrived and saw how incredibly perfectly we fit together. How, despite the difficulties and the baggage and everything else we've two halves of a whole. Even with our doubts or moments where we really think something is going to blow up in our faces we know it won't, a trust I was looking for, a promise even Jacob isn't capable of making but he made it. Oh, he makes it daily. He wouldn't go if I sent him, he'd stay until we were shredded with pain and agony and then he'd stay on longer. August somehow showed me that Jacob most definitely is not the kind of man who stays when the going gets tough. He ducked out of life early on, considered a monastery far away and then opted to explore a looser ideal of God closer to home. When pressure mounts, he runs, having traveled to the ends of the earth on a shoestring just to get away from imaginary and real difficulties.

August pointed out that Jacob is still here.

And he was blown away by that, once he understood what our life together has been like so far.

Jacob shrugged and told him that I was what he wanted and now he has me and he needs nothing else in this lifetime. Something he has said to me privately but it's pillow talk, reassurance, or his charm, so I thought.

No, it's simply a fact for Jacob. He found what he was looking for. Now that he is here and I am here he is complete. He no longer requires a bible and a trail mix bar and a harness somewhere unpronounceable in the Himalayas to keep him going, to renew his life zeal, to give him adventure. He has it in a stormy little blonde package.

And then I was blown away too. He's an open guy but he gets teased by most of our friends for his apparent infatuation so he doesn't expand, well, not anymore. They know. With August it was easy for him to feel more comfortable and he could say whatever he wanted without a backlash or frat-boy retorts.

I have it easy. I can wax and wane about Jake and everyone just smiles. I had talked myself into it, wanting the trust and the comfort to magically appear because I hope it would. And then the trust came.

So the comfort cannot be far behind.

Don't get me wrong. There's an ease with Jacob I never had with Cole. As if I even need to spell it down here. I don't fear for my safety or my life with Jacob. I don't have to anticipate mood swings and rages directed at me or live in Cole's tumultuous emotional battles. The difference, for me with the comfort lies in knowing Cole would just step in front of me and fix anything that went wrong in our lives. The car, the house, the money, the furnace. The strap on my bag, the binding on my favorite book. He bought me trinkets and cried exactly four times in twenty years.

Jacob is even, his mood is perpetually jovial, buoyed by being in love, in having it all. He has no mood swings. He rages, but not at me, more like on my behalf. He will step in front of me if there is danger but otherwise he places his hand in the small of my back and forces me to confront, fix and repair weaknesses in myself. He gifts me daily with romance on epic scales and saves his tears for his despair over our difficulties, over the bitterness of having to struggle after having won each other's hearts for good. His tears come easily and are unashamed.

He won't rest until my feelings of disconnectedness are gone, until I am used to him. Until I am used to good things. He tries to hurry me along, which he knows is bad, but he just can't help it.

I still look at him and have to catch my breath. I find myself twirling my necklaces around and smiling when I think of him, I turn goosebumped. All tousled blonde hair and sinewy strength, his pale blue eyes crinkling right down to his dimples which are such a rare treat under the crazy blonde beard. His huge white teeth. His strong hands. The rolled-up sleeves and always bare feet at home. The watch I gave him that he never takes off unless he's making love to me, the watch with the darker blue face that compliments those endless eyes. I always wanted blue eyes but instead I got green. He loves my eyes. I love his. He loves everything about me except for one thing and that is my recklessness.

And I'm not the reckless one. I don't run off and do dangerous things. I park my ass in stasis and I wait things out. Which is interesting to be thought of as reckless and I'm not. I simply had a death wish. A self-comfort to the extreme. Things get too hard? I can check out.

Would I check out?

I don't know now. That's why I said I had one, instead of saying I have one.

I was visiting a friend with Jacob last week and this friend offered us a peek of his view on the fifteenth-story balcony. Jacob walked out easily. I could not. My knees went to rubber and my hands shook. I had the feeling of falling from that height. That was all I could picture, jumping, and still Jacob encouraged me to come out, as if to prove that I didn't have to courage to even walk out there, so how would I ever have the courage to climb the rail, and so my great escape is a moot point. No net. No safety.

An unspoken dare, maybe, because Jacob isn't sophisticated enough to see that that my fears won't protect me. Because he is simple in that way with his life ironed down to the basics: need, want and waste. He needs God, he wants his family and everything else is a waste, save for some beautiful sunsets, an endless horizon and a larder full.

I will protect his simple wants because it's what I work toward. Being less complicated. Being less difficult.

To prove my good intentions, I have gained weight. I promised I would. Working my way back slowly to good physical health was my show of faith and I'm doing it. 107 this morning which made him laugh out loud with delight and clap his hands. A normal weight. Very normal. I can stop pinning my clothes again.

The other night he took me out for lobster and wine and I think I ate everything and I was so full when we left I almost fell asleep in the truck on the way home. Learning to bask in the content, while I wait for the comfort, because, like August pointed out, Jacob is still here.

She talks to angels.

Some lyrics, some metaphors, some predictions. Same old same old. Repetitive. Here's the contents of Bridget's head today. So much for living in the moment when all we do is lament the past to the point that we're denying ourselves a future.

Firstly, the ankle is better already, since it's a mild sprain, I think. I can walk on it. A little more slowly and it's still very swollen all the way to my toes. My cute little ballet flats that are going to permanently replace the heels? I can't get them on. I'm wearing my running shoes everywhere, which is ironic. I don't think I'll be running for a couple of weeks.

    The world we knew
    Won't come back
    The time we've lost
    Can't get back
    The life we had
    Won't be ours again

    This world will never be
    What I expected
    And if I don't belong

    Even if I say
    It'll be alright
    Still I hear you say
    You want to end your life
    Now and again we try
    To just stay alive
    Maybe we'll turn it all around
    'Cause it's not too late
    It's never too late
August left yesterday, to be home to his home-away-from-home in time for a rollicking fourth of July party he is planning on attending. I daresay I'm relieved he's going, not only because he and Jacob are so much alike except that August is More, Louder, Extreme-er, but because at the end of the day an extra full-sized adult in the house is a hazard, and I am sort of back to eggshells but not. It's funny how when you let me go off and run around and don't bring anything up that isn't right or isn't good, I can go for so much longer before I crack. Bring it up alot and I'll struggle so much it's a wonder I can brush my teeth without assistance.

He left my house chock full of organic delicacies. Wasabi peas, green tea, chocolate bunnies, miso by the truckload. Just as I was leaning Jacob back toward regular food.

One thing he did do was give Jacob a very private and sheltered arena in which to blow off steam of his own. Sometimes late at night I'd wake up and hear them talking quietly into the night. Probably sitting at the dining room table with tea, I could never make out the words but I know August came at a good time to help Jacob fortify his own strength, reminding him of who he is, of what he is. Of what he can do.

Jacob defuses bombs.

I'm well aware I am standing here watching the calendar inch closer to a whole year since Cole died and I'm not marking the day. Not that day. Any other day but that day because I was there and I lived it for him when he died because he couldn't. And knowing he was gone in the moment he left me for good even though he was still there, his warm hands, his warm cheek, his hair in his eyes, as if he would just wake up and life would go on and maybe I didn't hurt him and he didn't hurt me and we didn't make a mess of everything but I left that room alone. I walked out of our life together alone. I cannot get past the alone part and I never will.

It's stupid. Jacob is the angel. The savior. The protector. The man I always ran to for something. It was comfort, wasn't it? No, it wasn't. I don't know what it was. Attention, affection, reassurance but not the same kind of comfort.

Comfort is scattered all over the beach back home, so long gone now and mixed with the sand and the sea and the air.

August made it out of here just in time and I wonder if Jacob knows of the low to come. I think he does, I think he suspects but bless his heart, the magnitude always escapes him. He sees what he wants to see and waits out the rest now because he's running out of ideas and dips heavily into his perfectly and lovingly saved store of patience and understanding. He keeps the cognac full, the knife block empty and his ears open. He sleeps holding me not because I love the affection but because he is scared I'll get up in the middle of the night and try and become an angel too.

And yet comfort is still up there, somewhere in Jacob's unexplainable heaven, somewhere just beyond the reach of this small woman with a broken heart and no patience, no understanding and no way to crumble the final battlements that lie between us.

Because time doesn't move fast enough. Because we fight about such big things that no amount of comfort in each other, no amount of the hot calm of his hand sliding across my back under my shirt or on the back of my neck as we stand or sit together will manage to eradicate the lack of comfort from a history he was never a part of.

I realize it's foolish. I realize it will eventually go away. And while we wait we fight, softly, gently, bitterly.

Oh so bitterly.

I never once threw it in his face that he wasn't there, that time moves slowly, that he doesn't know me the way Cole knows me. Oh no, Jacob looks after that part all by himself. It's practically a one-sided debate as he paces up and down the room, gesturing, pleading, demanding, praying.

I just stand there and don't say a word. I look up at him when he passes me and I think to myself,

You know me in a completely different way and it's better, I promise you it's better.

It's better because he is an angel. And someday I'll find the comfort I seek. When our patience comes. In the meantime we fall back on our friends status. Friends who have sex a lot because they can now. Friends who have spent the past year cementing themselves together in life forever because it was meant to be. Only we never measured to be sure of the perfect fit.

We guessed.

We cut once.

We were off by a little. Not a whole lot, just enough to make it wonky and so we've shimmed it up as best we could and we'll probably have to plane a little off one side and then with a fresh coat of paint and some selective amnesia, eventually no one will ever know it wasn't like this the whole time.

No one.

So there you go. The barometer for today is a fair warning and a reminder that we are friends first and lovers second and that somehow helps because sometimes I can hate his guts and still love him a s my friend and sometimes he wishes he had never met me but can't imagine a life without me.

The one hard part about having married a minister, as laid-back, idealistic and casual a minister as Jacob is, he is the biggest spin doctor ever. He tells the children such wonderful things about Cole being in heaven, comforting things, things that let them fall into sleep easy, things that make them smile and feel better and less afraid, less alone.

Me? He tells me none of it. Cole is not in heaven, there is no comfort in his after life, and I don't sleep easy, I don't smile nor do I feel less afraid without him here. Jacob's comfort to his own wife comes from a selfish black heart in which he contends that Cole is no angel, never was and never will be. That there was a reason Jacob spent ten years working to be my own savior.

Yes, there was, and it has nothing to do with Cole.

We can explain it away. Jake is angry. He's angry at Cole for not stepping aside gracefully. He's angry at Cole for Cole's unprovoked violence. Unprovoked? No, only possibly misdirected, but barely. The routine violence he was ill aware of makes Jacob red with rage. Cole and I somehow wasted ten years of Jacob's life trying to work everything out, trying to coexist in a world of unchecked emotional timebombs and sordid lurid flaws, we fought so hard and it was for naught and Jacob resents that all to hell.

His obsession now extending to include time we can't go back and fix, my God, for someone who tells me every day to let it go, to just stop, he has a heck of a time taking his own advice. And why not? He can simply fall back on his faith and cry out that he is a wounded man, broken by life and failed and everything is gone so now he can begin anew. Oh, but he is so wise and sacrificing.

And very very good at what he does and oh it drives him up the wall that it took that long for his charm to work on little Bridget down the road to shore because she, oh, she's mine. I's needs that one, b'y. She's 'is forevs.

But I am the one holding all the cards. And every night when I fall asleep in the crook of Jacob's concrete arm that is safe but not the same comfortable, I understand that we haven't had enough time. Soon, but not yet.

Repetitive, aren't I?

Short and sweet.

God has a sense of humor, and Jacob hates high heels.

Touch my shoes and I'll kill you.

Wear those again and they might kill you.

How are we supposed to dance?

Hey, we'll get by. I'd rather dance with you and get a crick in my neck than not be able to dance at all, like right now. We'll get you some new shoes you won't break your legs in.

Alright. Alright. Take them all.

And with that exchange he cleaned the closet out of every pair of high heels Bridget owns. And threw them out. Literally. I am one of the clumsiest people you will ever meet. If there's a door? I'll slam my hand in it. If there's picture on the wall, it will swing when I walk by and bump it. If there's something heavy in my hands? I'll drop it on my toes. Wearing high heels? No problem! I always have the arm of some large man to hang off of, and I've been slipping and tripping through life for decades on that theory.

So the issues I have had with navigating the front slightly bumpy, crumbly concrete steps of the church on rainy mornings when they are slick with water and I have on my cute high heels?

Legendary, my friends, legendary. Jacob is never present when I am exiting that building.

The elderly members take it slow. They hold on to each other. They wear sensible shoes. Me? I skip down them looking over my shoulder for Henry, talking to five people at once, and never paying attention to where my feet are in my cute little four-inch heels.

Down she goes. Oh dammit.

Only this time she didn't get up. Oh, joy, it's a crowd.

I finally got up, I left my pride on the pavement though, since I didn't need that anymore. Jacob was coming down the stairs so fast I thought he'd fall too but as usual his look read a mix of Oh shit oh shit is she okay? and I didn't catch her. I wasn't there to keep her safe.

Before I was fully vertical again and someone passed me my purse my ankle was starting to swell. Jacob's look changed to Oh it's time to get my princess to the hospital.

Thankfully the charming masochist in me kicked in and I was able to use his mountain climber self-rescue sensibilities to point out it was a mild sprain, look, range of motion! And let's consider some ibuprofen and ice and then wrapping it and we'll see how it looks in the morning because I am not spending Canada Day nor am I spending August's last full day here in the ER.
I can talk Jake into anything. I bet if I ever have a pitchfork sticking out of my back (oh, the threat's been made to this heathen girl but not by Jacob) I could convince him it was a flesh wound and I needed only a bandaid. He will believe anything I say. Even the part where I said I was still crying because I felt stupid (when really it was because it hurt like hell).

The good news is it is purple and black and my ankle is a puffy circle this morning but I can walk on it and it doesn't hurt so much as long as I go slow.

There's a metaphor for life if I ever saw one.

And enough with the jokes, God. I totally knew you were in cahoots with my husband to get rid of those shoes. I only hid a few pairs. I swear.

Ours, mine and yours.

PJ called me late last night to see if I had written him off. He's coming over for breakfast and to go to church with us because he misses us. He's feeling the sting of Loch's exposure of all these dormant crushes, of the fact that there's a reason most of my male friends are single, and of Jacob's blatant attempt to fill our tentative social calendar with his own friends. From his life. And changing everything to become his. His rampant ownership issues that all lead back to me and how he's still pinching himself.

PJ wants reassurance, he wants a hug. He wants time with me and I can't give him anything that will soothe his discomforts. Jacob doesn't want to see affection that isn't propagated or instigated by him. He doesn't want me spending time alone with any of the guys. He's not jealous so much as he's wary, it's hard to explain. Wary without attempting to launch any demands that I chose, which is lucky for him because I won't stand for that. He wouldn't do that, we already did that, with Cole, and it's not required of anyone else. Besides, PJ is one of the people I love most in this world. Absolutely and without hesitation, whatever he wants I will try to give it to him.

In any case, we're all six heading out to buy breakfast makings and it should be fun. Church will be short and then Canada Day gets underway officially, in spite of the threat of thunderclouds, both real and imaginary, as we figure out how to move on already.

It's July now, and that means something. It's been long enough, this bullshit of no knowing who stands where and who means what. My boys have to grow up now and get over themselves, just like I did. Or am attempting too, anyway.

Happy Canada Day, everyone!

I should be thrilled to see the return of my periods. But really, if you're a girl,  it's just ick.

Can't take me anywhere.

A word of advice: If you're going to take your wife to a patio/outdoor living boutique where they have windchimes, including windchimes taller than she is, so tall that they require their own stand, then please don't be embarrassed when she proceeds to vigorously trigger each and every single set of chimes for sale in her effort to find the one that sounds the prettiest to her nearly-hearing ears.

Don't pretend you don't know her when she claps her hands and decides she's buying the ones with the stand because they were the loudest.

Please don't spend twenty-six minutes pointing out how loud they will be in the yard and how the neighbors will come to despise her, sweet as she is.

And whatever you do, don't turn the windchimes into any bizarre metaphors or examples that will serve to kill time and frustrate her to pieces.

And lastly please buy them and bring them home and promptly set them up in the backyard and apologize to the neighbors in advance, because your wife likes the sound of the big chimes and if she's happy, you're happy because yes, that's exactly how life should be today.

Yay!