Metal for breakfast.

Well, shit.

Proving how really immature we are, Ben and I just wrapped up yet another blisteringly painful and uncharacteristically loud phone call in which he said cruelly that I was impossible to love but under his skin so far he wished at this point that he had never met me.

I saw his wager and raised him one, pointing out that he was going to sound very fucking ungrateful when he discovered that as his Christmas present I had paid off the loan for his brand new Victory motorcycle. The very same loan that he otherwise would have paid off somewhere around his forty-fifth birthday.

I think I won that round. Or maybe I didn't.

(*The title is an inside joke for the boys, who always say they have metal for breakfast when they ride their bikes to work and then get coffee there.)

Ownership issues.

In a nutshell, I'm too tired and too busy to still be dealing with this.

Ruth is doing better, she's mostly napping and munching on toast. Henry decided he was sick too until Joel came over with a remote control snowmobile to play with in the snow in the backyard. The boys are now out there making Butterfield go crazy.

I'm tired. Did I mention I was tired?

Too tired for Ben to be jealous that Joel is here, seeing as how today is a day off for Joel, just like Ben had Friday through Sunday off and I am lucky that everyone wants to spend their days off with us instead of somewhere fun. Not good enough for Ben, who tried to pull rank talking about the trip to Canmore and made too many assumptions and said some shitty things about Joel and I asked him to stop, I asked so quietly just for him to not go there for once and yeah well, it wouldn't be a new week if Ben and I could ever be on speaking terms for more than a few days at a time.

Especially since I already told him I didn't think we were going to join him for anti-Christmas. Not because I have issues with it but because everyone else seems to.

I need sleep. Sleep and peace of mind, a couple of healthy kids and a magic potion for curing imaginary jealousy. In a gallon spray bottle, if you will.

More elephants you won't appreciate.

Flutters brought on largely by the little pink pills in particular, counted in their measure of the concentrations in my blood at any given moment, spilled and numbered like golden coins and a pat on the head and three more days of expected compliance to the pharmacy gods until the next test.

Emotions drawn out and dissected and balled up and stuffed back inside at the end of ninety minutes, as if they've somehow been improved, when really it's the equivalent of going to the Gap and shaking out every sweater in a neatly folded pile and not quite folding them again as you return them to the shelf. It's effective, but it looks like shit.

Watchful, kind eyes that wouldn't know a sign or a trick if it lit their ass on fire hoping just to make it through a shift without incident, nights punctuated in a huge sigh of relief that makes me fill with shame at what edge they must live on.

Fragility instilled through love, crafted into a tangible flaw that is now woven into my very core. The one thing I can't shake. The one thing I'm told they will never see me without. My shadow. Handle with care, but if you shake me you hear the broken glass inside. Maybe it's too late.

One single plea to let it go. To forget time, to forget history, to forget who we're supposed to be and just be. Without pink pills or therapy or supervised free time or baggage or any other goddamn thing. Just let it go. Just for one moment. Just breathe in the cold air. Just close your eyes.

Just get picked up and dunked into the deep snow on the front lawn. Headfirst.

Maybe it was necessary and it had the desired effect. It broke the ice I keep frozen around my soul and it led to a heart to heart talk that contained the one biggest conversation we haven't really ever had.

The Apology Conversation. The one that's required for Ben to eradicate his inner demons, become a better person and deepen our friendship back to the way it used to be. He is obviously in the lead here. He's surprisingly had this conversation with everyone except for me, because I scare the living daylights out of him. Anyone who tells you I am intimidating has to be lying but I somehow understand.

But last night gave him courage and he just started blurting things out. Excuses and then retractions and then more excuses and finally it came pouring out in a muddle of I'm sorries and I love yous that had me sitting quietly for a moment playing it all back hoping I had heard it properly.

And then I looked up at him, I looked at him sitting there shaking like a leaf, pale and somber, uncharacteristic, looking less like the frat boy I've had such fun with and more like a man who is trying to straighten up his life and I smiled at him. I told him I forgave him and I know how hard he has worked to attend his meetings and be clean and fight his way back into my good graces and win back my trust.

He has my emotional trust but it all hinges on physical trust. Something he had in spades once, a long time ago when he helped me change my clothes around a sling and so many broken bones but something that vanished the night he got drunk and came looking for me. Something we have worked to build back and something he won't ever mess with again. I have to trust him in order to spend any time with him. He stands just a little bit shy of Jacob's height, one of the reasons he wasn't afraid of Jacob and would go down fighting any time. Except Ben doesn't have the same grace. Ben is all elbows and shoulderblades and cheekbones and flashing eyes and inexcusable energies. Ben is dark. Ben is passionate about all the wrong things and always overstepping his boundaries, and so his size makes him a threat by default. Or it did anyway. It doesn't anymore. Whatever desperation, whatever place in his head he existed through last year is gone now, never to return.

He's a lot like me. Flawed. Making mistakes but refusing to be crushed by them. Maybe he's my best friend now at last, maybe he always was, maybe it wasn't Cole that he had so much in common with. Maybe he's smart enough to backpedal and ease off and disappear at the perfect moment when we're too close and too familiar and too grateful for the company close at hand. He's not the bad guy. He's my friend. It's too easy for me to dump on him. If you don't know him in person you might hate him and that's not fair.

After that conversation, an offer for him to stay the night in the guest room (still! with the LOCKED DOOR at the end of the hall for those of you who think I'm awful and am doing things I shouldn't be) was on the tip of my tongue but he got up, grabbed his coat and scarf and then grabbed me in a hug and said he had a very good day and he felt better than he had in a very long time and he was happy to have a fresh start with me.

And he went the hell home.

Just like a good elephant should.

Of course it won't make sense. Ruth has been up throwing up now since midnight and is finally asleep again. I have four loads of laundry and a long day ahead of me. I'm allowed to not make sense.

Leave us alone.

I almost made it to church today. I knew it was a mistake but part of me wanted to go and I got as far as the side door of the building when a reporter appeared out of nowhere and kindly asked how I was doing. I thought maybe he was just a friend of Sam, to be so familiar, until I realized his hand was holding a recorder. Ben gave him a shove and asked him what his problem was and tried to block him but I had already turned, taking the kids and going back down the steps back to the truck. I could hear Sam calling out to me and I didn't turn around and I could feel a hundred eyes on me so I didn't look. I just got back in the truck and belted the kids because they can't manage with mittens on and then I got into the front and locked the doors and drove home, pulling the truck into the garage and sitting there, with the kids asking if we were going to find a new church or maybe can we go inside the house now and I didn't move until Ben pulled on the door handle and pounded on the window, asking me to open the door.

Too tired for this. I can't deal with this.

Not tired.

Coffee at 8 pm, after the movie probably wasn't the smartest plan but it helped bring me back down from the zombiefest that was I am Legend. It was pretty good, I always like Will Smith's serious turns, and God knows Bridget loves her zombies.

They're like, my peoples or something.

I will be up all night now. Alllllll night. Thanks Joel!

Lawyer tag.

    We're all in
    So begin
    Just remember I win
    I win,
    I win,
    I win,
    I win,
    I win,
    I win,
    I win,
    I win.

Never underestimate someone with nothing left to lose.

A treasured book with missing pages.

    I am a lover hater
    I am an instigator
    You are an oversight
    Don't try to compromise
    I'll learn to love to hate it
    I am not integrated

Early therapy this morning (again), squeezed in because I pay well.

I'm not dumb. Money can buy just about anything I don't need.

This morning when I woke up both of my worst nervous habits had moved back in to stay. My friends thought I was dead when I abruptly stopped doing one and then the other but I was quite pleased and then this morning I was told one never even went away, they have simply learned to ignore it.

That would be the head-nodding. I nod, gently, almost imperceptibly when people talk to me and I choose not to listen. It makes me look intent, agreeable and it's unconscious. I didn't even know I did it until it was pointed out after one too many misunderstandings.

This morning my Queen CD went frisbeeing out the passenger-side window, across the field toward the tracks less than a block from my house. Who wants to live forever, indeed.

I sat on my hands the whole way in. On the way home I sat on them again and it was only when I sat down with a fourth cup of coffee that Ben pointed out that the fluttering was almost welcome after not seeing it for a long time. He said it's more endearing and less frightening than when I sit like a statue. He grabbed my wayward hand and kissed my fingers. They're already cracked and split from the cold, from handling wood and washing them a billion times a day, from holding tissues and pictures. From wiping tears and from locking doors seventeen times an hour on my way to bed. And from not caring.

I snatched my hand back, scowling at him. He laughed quietly and changed the subject.

I refused to talk about Jacob today, in therapy or otherwise. I started to sometime this week but I can't so back in the box he goes inside my head and I will touch a memory when I can do it without blinding pain flooding in. It makes me angry. I need those thoughts and I need them now and I can't be forced to confront them. I was doing so good and I have to protect myself and they no longer call it shock or denial. I forget what they said. I was too busy nodding and thinking through the names of all the Warren Miller movies I could name in my head. And not fluttering, goddammit. It's been too long for shock and too far for denial and they tell me I can't outrun it forever.

Oh hell yes I can.

It's better to be perceived as fucked-up and cold.

It's better to be a bitch than a shell of a person.

It's better not to be alone. I don't have to be alone today. Today will be okay. Today is okay

Oh my fuck, do you want to know something? Something from the deep dark locked file cabinet inside my head of shit I shouldn't say out loud lest I appear to be ungracious or graceless or just plain selfish?

Well, then here's a big one.

I hate being alone.

I hate living alone.

I hate sleeping alone. I hate waking up alone. I hate showering alone and I hate talking to myself from the time the children go to bed to when they wake up in the morning.

Alone and I, well, we don't get along. I've never tasted it for any length of time, I don't think it's something I would enjoy and yet...

Here I am. Forever cursed to be alone.

Nice.

On becoming a day-counter.

Over a month has passed now. A month that in any of Jacob's imaginary travels would have brought forth a choppy, staticky-quick phone call or a hastily-written postcard on one of his trips, now entirely suspect in light of revelations from his letters to me. A month that in past years would have seen Cole settle into a relaxed-tense state, and everyone else drift off to their own space briefly as we lost a little of the brightest hues in our technicolor world.

Living in that moment just before the shoe drops.

I took that shoe and threw it right through the most beautiful stained glass window in my house.

I made a horrific mess.

The house is warm but it has to be plain now. It's a living museum where even the brightly colored toys scattered on the floor rest in the shadows and memories echo off the ceilings of loves gone by, with a tiny young widow who rattles around the halls high on pills and low on energy and the ghosts come at night when she sleeps. Mostly, anyhow.

I have had a long month of explaining myself despite not needing explanations, details which have already been duly noted and absorbed and it's almost time to fully process what I did the weekend after Jacob died.

And I have to be the one to tell it. I'd rather you get all the facts from me than from Caleb.

But not yet. There are more pressing matters to attend to first. There is the living to attend to, first.

Henry and Ruth both had brief speaking roles and they both sang in the choir last night and did a wonderful job. Three songs and some very bright eyes in the audience. Seven minutes in, after the lights went out and the kindergarten kids shuffled onto the stage, Ben appeared behind me, putting his hand on my head and kissing my ear as he sat down. He passed me my hearing aids. I turned to look at him and he shook his head and pointed to the front, as in, we'll talk later.

I turned back around and proceeded to immerse myself in the concert. It was so cute and funny. I felt like I wasn't going to fall apart for once and I turned around when the lights came on to talk to Ben, just in time to see him slip out the door at the far end of the gym. PJ said that he would collect the children and meet me at the truck if I wanted to follow Ben and so I pushed past a crowd growing at the exit and ran outside into the snow where Ben was walking down the path. I called out to him and he stopped and turned around.

Could you just stop, please?

I didn't want you to feel obligated to spend time with me. You wanted space, here it is.

I want you to be present without expectations.

I don't live without hope.

Me neither.

You're going to talk circles around me for the rest of my life, aren't you?

He didn't have the right, Benny.

It wasn't an instruction, Bridge. It was an inevitability. It was a gentle push.

Did Jacob deal in inevitabilities?

No, but I do.
He smiled and I wanted to kill him and hug him all at the same time. Instead I just stood there staring at him, expressionless.

Jacob wasn't a stupid man, princess.

You're biased now. Somehow you tricked him.

No, the inevitability of life won him over, he just takes the time to look for things most people will never see.

I doubt he saw anything. He was trying to help me.

Exactly. So why won't you let him?

Because it means giving him up forever and I'm so not ready to do that.
He was three inches from me then, because he could hardly hear my whispers.

You don't have to give up anything, Bridge. I wouldn't ask you to do that.

He puts his hands on my arms and I pushed him away.

Ben, you can't ask me for anything at all.
And with that I turned and walked away from him. Because the past month of my life went by in a dizzying blur and it went by in drips and fits and starts like molasses (morelasses). Taking forever, agonizingly, slowly. I can't figure out which end is up, which road to take or what to do next.

Ben, no, he has it all figured out. Jacob had it all figured out and Bridget, well, as usual she has no fucking clue at all.

Less like Jake, more like Bridget.

Wow. There's an abrupt turn. Joel just left an eighth message. He has cleared his (light) afternoon schedule and is bringing soup for lunch and the 2-pack DVD of 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later.

Since if you can't beat a zombie, you might as well join her.

Tonight is dinner for twelve and the Christmas concert at the school.