This morning, I went to Sam, the bluebird box clutched in my hands.

With his help we broke the seal and I slipped my wedding ring off my finger and put it inside. Sam resealed the box for me and then gave me a hug and said a few words that would have been comfort had I been able to feel anything with my ring removed.

I wasn't ready for this. I should have left it on.

He asked me to stay for morning services but I took the box from him and fled.

A life in words (Bridget is rambling, please ignore).

Ben is not forthcoming with his writing. He's encouraging but he won't share. He never shares until the public gets to devour it first. I let everyone I know have first dibs. Even though it's two different things altogether, the process is still the same. Be inspired, fulfill the steps, be happy with finished, working product.

Like two mechanics side by side, each working on the same set of identical brake shoes, he'll offer up help or advice or stimulation but never once tell me how his is going, or show me his already-long-finished wheel. He's moved on to the exhaust and I am still struggling to get the shoes bolted on properly.

Yes, that's my complete and succinct knowledge of car repair from years of sitting in cold garages polishing chrome with the Never-dull can beside me while the guys put cars back together. Wait, I can refill oil and washer fluid and I know how to jump start a car. I can't be the pusher but I can drop a clutch.

I'm so happy the days of cars that we couldn't afford to fix are behind us, for the moment.

Though that doesn't stop the tinkerers and I was left to my own devices today because bike season is just around the corner so I will not see many of the guys on the nicest days, they'll be out on the Open Road which is where you go on bikes, and Sam will be back entrenched in the fray and Ben will be the daredevil but maybe that will be interesting, for he says he feels less inclined to break his neck trying fruitlessly to impress me now.

Ah. Isn't this where you begin the rapid descent into being comfortable not brushing your teeth before bed? I hope not. I like holding out on him and doing my very best to have brushed hair and a cute outfit on and be conversational.

It beats the wrapped-in-a-sweater, hostile, brittle writer-girl who only comes out of her turret for food and sex.

Or maybe it doesn't. I'll have to ask Ben.

I'm having a very hard time with said third novel and I only took the gig because it meant a payday down the road and I'm not one to burn career bridges because I find life as a writer tenuous at best. My style is hard to swallow, but easy to read. I take people to uncomfortable places and sometimes, on weeks like this, my heart isn't in it.

When Jacob and I got together I had just come off finishing up the second book. I was down to easy editing and a few changes and then I wrote a bunch of short stories and sold a few things and dabbled in some other stuff and put forth a lot of effort into Bridget. This. Saltwater Princess, the journal, giving it attention I hadn't before and it surprised me, never having written as myself or for myself, never having given any sort of voice or importance to a female character of any regard.

I have voiced many audible doubts over the past week that there is even a third book inside me at all, or maybe I'm just tilting at windmills. I began with a female protagonist. Only she's me, Bridget. But she isn't. But she is. Try telling her she's not and she clams up and marches off. I'm getting nowhere fast. I tried to let go a little and give her some growing space and she held up a mirror.

I feared this would happen, I really did. Writing is an incredibly personal experience, your characters wear your blood on the outside, it's almost painful. We'll tell you they are inventions and we lie when we do it.

Ben suggested I just keep plugging away doggedly. Keep working at it, eventually it'll fall into a rhythm and I'll return to the cold-turret girl that I am, when I can't even pry my head out of the story long enough to make dinner and we order in for weeks on end. When it's on my mind night and day and I'm preoccupied and miserable with glee over how I can make these people do whatever I want instead of waiting for fate. I am God in my novels.

What I'd like to do instead, is turn Saltwater Princess into a book. Maybe the general entries, weed out the useless ones, maybe add in some essays from my handwritten unpublished journal that lives under my bed. Maybe spruce it up a little so it makes more sense, replacing every place I called Cole by his nickname, Trey Anastasio, maybe replacing some of the harder parts or the drunken parts with better explanations and clearer intent.

Maybe take this down and make you buy the books. How evil.

In a perfect world, that's how this would end, a perfect set of volumes maybe categorized by year, because there is far too much for one lousy paperback here. This is a life you're talking about here, not a year in Provence. I would have to start with pre-2006 and then lump in 2006 and most of 2007 and then hold out for a while and see how 2008 and beyond pans out. Maybe there would be a comeback bestseller years from now to bring everyone up to speed on how the princess (hopefully) gets her happily ever after. I don't even know because it's autobiographical and I'm only thirty-six years old. No one is that egotistical as to publish their entire life story before middle-age, are they?

I'm not. Be grateful. All of you would get angry and boycott having to purchase a book after reading the daily segments for free, at your convenience. I know. I would, too.

I'd hate to see it end. I've grown fond of public-me. I didn't hate her as I feared I might several times. Nothing is a mirror like black words on a white screen. Nothing says accountability like real names and real events and real violence and really bad decisions. I got comfortable writing under some guy's name that doesn't stand out but you think he's a creep because only such horrors would come from the mind of a monster when in reality it's a somewhat fragile young blonde mother who has known a few monsters but otherwise has a weird tactile addiction to affection, bobby pins, Mexican food and being scared to death.

Only maybe not to death, because death is final. And I know I have more words in me, and more stories and more to show to you, but those words are about me, and maybe there's a reason for that, just like there's a reason for everything, even death.

I know you're disappointed, you expected this post to be about a lapdance and an epic one at that. No worries, it's still in the queue, I just needed to unload a whole jumble of professional self-doubt first. Sorry about that.

Wait, no I'm not. I'm not sorry. It is what it is-just me again, breezing through with another litany of fears and hesitation while Ben ignores my pleas to let me in just a little, to see his madness so it would make my own that much less glaring.

Outrunning the cortisol.

I'm typing today from the outer edge of wakefulness, where I hang by my fingertips, thanks to a heaping dose of Nyquil last night and the sleep of a thousand princess-comas. I daresay a freight train named Ben could have barreled through the bedroom and I wouldn't have opened one very heavy eyelid.

It's almost three in the afternoon and I really have no recollection of buying groceries this morning or of waking up at all. I don't recall picking out this outfit, and I swear someone else is keeping this house clean, though I do remember watering the plants because I did that like, twenty minutes ago.

I'm making banana bread now because it makes me feel productive. I'm doing little else, at this point but waiting out the hour until the kids are finished school for the week. It's snowing out and that's making me cry, and I should be cleaning a little more but really, the dust can wait a bit. I'll get it next week. I really don't even care right now.

I asked Ben what he wanted to do this weekend and he said he'd really like to have a lapdance because he's heard about them and read about them but he's never actually had one.

From me, he meant.

I was all for it up until he said that. Now I just wonder how I'll rate. I mean, some of the ones he had before were from professionals (at a strip club). As in, they get paid to do that. And the customer isn't allowed to touch them, either.

Sounds dull.

And if that's the case, I will totally come out ahead.

Pun intended? Maybe. I'll let you know tomorrow, when I'm actually awake instead of just pretending.

A good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures.

This morning I went somewhere new.

Ben took me to see someone he knew of, he cashed in a favor the likes of which he'll never see again, it was worth that much and he offered me a simple sort of help that feels promising. Not a therapist, but someone who takes all the standard therapeutic platitudes and boils them down into a simpler stew from which you can find your nourishment. An approach that is about as natural as it gets and the one used to get Ben to stop drinking, after a year of him trying virtually everything else.

And as private as Ben has been about his recovery, this was a very generous thing he did in taking me to maybe see if it might work for me. I left feeling drained and I have a headache now but inside I have those quietly excitedly-jumpy feelings you only get when you're afraid something might be too good to be true. If it works I'll eat my own leg.

So for now, I'm not going to say any more about it. I go back in a week and then the week after that. Ben made me pinky-swear promise that I would give it two whole months before I started complaining, and that I would try really hard to get to the spot where I am happy in my own skin but otherwise he won't be going again with me and he won't talk about it with me any more than he talks about his own sessions with me (he doesn't) and so we can run parallel, intertwined races that have no finish line but, as he said earlier, the view gets nicer the longer you run.

I'm also not going to say much more about the parallels of life with Ben from life with Cole and how things are always what they seem. Ben going back to being an artist is simply a way for him to not dread going to work, to have more money and more fun and less responsibility and as he says, the grass was definitely greener on the other side. And then he laughed maniacally like the freak that he is. He isn't stupid, and he readily points out that he's always been jealous of Cole and what the fuck is the difference if he was, because he's not any more. But he stops short of saying he has everything because that's when the curse begins.

Oh, and I asked PJ what he wanted in return for showing up to babysit at six in the morning because he is the best friend ever, he told me just to post a picture of the damned tattoo already because it makes no sense to talk about something (here, here, and drunkenly here)when no one knows what it looks like.

(*poof* since I never leave certain photos up for long, sorry.)

He already got his payment besides, he ate all of the eggs I had in the fridge. I believe there were eleven. He'll be sick the rest of the day. He's a curse unto himself, that one.

Change is good but consistency is better.

Things are better today. I woke up smiling.

Oh, please, you're all as perverted as Benjamin, aren't you? Okay, fine, I woke up smiling for two reasons then. Somehow it was relief to hear from more objective sources that a few rung drops on life's ladder aren't the end of the world.

If you've emailed with an I told you so, I'm not venturing into emails today. Bawk, bawk and all that. Don't tell me you told me so, I know. But overall I'm still standing firm that I do better when I ignore it all rather than focus on it. Short term gain, long term pain. Why is it easier? I don't know. Someday I will know and I'll tell you.

What I haven't told you is a long list at this point. There is so much on my mind today. I never ever told you about Cole much, really. I've never told you about the Movie Star. I've never told you about my all-time favorite blog. I've never told you that in the past few years my friends have gone through things in their own lives and I didn't share it only to give them the privacy they needed and they feel as if they are given too much credit here without me ever telling you what I did for them. I never told you my plans for this journal or for life after death. Life from here on out.

I've never told you things that would probably make a difference in how you see me. I barged in here one day in 2006 and just decided to stop writing bullshit like I did for the first two years and start to tell you how I feel and it works and it resonates and by gosh, it HELPS me and yet you don't even know me and if you did you would love me and since you don't you hate me sort of and you sort of care and maybe you just read to kill the time and maybe you read because you need help, I don't really know and I could have had a private blog but if two people out of thousands feel better about their own lives than who's to say it isn't worth it? So maybe I do write for you as much as I write for the princess.

Kind of like the time someone stole Ruth's umbrella stroller and I was eight months pregnant with Henry and I wound up carrying her seven blocks back to the car in the pouring rain after a doctor's appointment. I wasn't angry or disappointed, I was glad. I felt as if someone needed a stroller that badly that they would steal it then I was happy it was there for them to take.

Yes, I'm strange like that.

But maybe I'm also just like you.

In news closer to reality Ben is home today. Ben is actually taking a leap of faith today. He's going back to work for the little company that could, he'll be going back to making art. Said company has been asking him back ever since they lost Cole, and then when Loch jumped ship the offer doubled and Ben has decided that before he turns forty (this December. He is sadly not allowed to forget it, and will be the first of our friends to make it to forty which is so incredibly poignant) he wants to do all kinds of things and one of those was to be happier in his day job. It's funny too, he left the company originally because Cole and Loch got all the best gigs. He'll be coming back into Cole's position. Life makes me laugh.

And so he has a few days to breathe before going back to a familiar haunt and in the meantime he took me to the new bookstore and he's such a calming, happy influence to be around. He would prefer to be all hardcore and coolly standoffish about it but really he's happy I didn't leave him out once again and he's secretly happy he makes me so happy and he's really happy to have gotten almost all of his own shit together at last in the meantime so we can be here for each other instead of me always being here for him and him always being shielded from me when I need something.

So, yeah, it's a good day. Just quietly good. The best.

Co-morbid princess chainsaw massacre.

I keep trying to edit this down. I'm having no luck.

Emotional setback. Compounded by personality disorders a through c. Coupled with denial in heaping spoonfuls and a failure to exist as a zombie in the world of the living. I'm one hundred percent convinced that that's what they put on my chart this morning. Oh, and runs with chainsaw, because scissors just aren't destructive enough.

They don't know what to do, no one does, because there's no one else like me. Humans with spirits this broken usually don't survive long enough to get help or keep going.

I am still here (whispered quietly and with determination).

But really, other than the massive denial and running around unmedicated and untherapied they all think I'm doing 'well' to still function like a human being at all. Naturally I could do a whole lot better if I went back to life where I was a walking fog who went to therapy five times a week so that I could spend one hundred percent of my days focused on pain and not even be able to look after my own children. Instead I face this...unpredictability. Never knowing when the other shoe will drop. Never ever getting back to one hundred percent of anything, because there was never a hundred percent to begin with.

So what's the point?

The point, in this case, is sharp and it draws blood and I am most definitely not allowed to make jokes about it anymore.

Don't panic, Bridget. We're here to help you.

I think...I think the part where it took four tries to punch in the correct numbers in the right order was the giveaway. Endless fluttering of a bird up against the plate-glass window, banging repeatedly, looking for her escape and frantic with efforts that go nowhere.

I'm going back to therapy, well, tomorrow. The biggest April fool of all.

He is coming with me. Not inside. He'll wait in the little room with two chairs outside of a soundproof door but removed slightly from reception for privacy. He'll wait and he'll wonder what words I'm using to try and tell them they were right.

I made it so much further this time and one stupid tiny unguarded sentence tore it all apart. I didn't mean I would hurt myself because I won't.

But why would they believe me now?

It's okay. It'll be fine. Right?

Marked for life.

Confessions for a rainy Monday.

    I was waiting for my hearse
    What came next was so much worse
    It took a funeral to make me feel alive

    Just open your eyes
    Just open your eyes
    And see that life is beautiful.
    Will you swear on your life,
    That no one will cry at my funeral?

Hallo, good morning. It's Monday. Momday. A day to myself without the well-meaningsers and the only-concern-eds. I have told you I love my friends and I friend my lovers even. And no, I'm not drunk, just somewhat weirdly content today. Full of plans, full of hope, full of hopefully almost the next to last of the awful, overly-sweet cappuccino bullshit that passes for coffee today. Everyone else planned to get it on the go and Andrew didn't read my mind and bring any. Ben offered to make some but I don't think a whole pot to myself is any point noted today.

Tomorrow is April Fools. Does that mean Jacob will come back? Maybe to tell me that I failed. That I didn't wait long enough or grieve hard enough and I'm ready for that. I can just tell him I didn't start yet and then everyone can step back with their sympathetic horror and avert their eyes a little further peripherally so they aren't blinded by my amazing circus talents here. Those that involve perpetual pain and denial. He would understand me, and forgive me and then he'd probably vanish in a puff of smoke once again, for this is the stuff of dreams.

Instead Ben will replace my coffee grounds with earth and I'll get a potful of fresh-brewed mud, or maybe he'll say he has to work but spend the day at home instead, distracting me with sweetness while he sweeps the ghosts out the back door as I look the other way. He's good like that.

And he's even better with badly-kept five-year-old never-confirmed-but-long-suspected secrets. Like the ones about our tattoos and what they mean, finally admitted this weekend, publicly. The first time we went and got matching ones, his was a lowercase letter b and mine an uppercase B, both tangled up in ivy. At the time, when pressed, we both claimed to like slightly different styles and we both have names that start with a b, so why the hell not?

Cole left it with a 'to each his own' comment, since he thought art was art and as long as I was happy nothing else was important (pfft). Jacob always thought I got a B for me and then Ben got a b possibly also for me and it was one more reason for them to not like each other all that much.

In reality the big B stands for Ben, and the little b is for Bridget. We got them expressly for each other to honor this strange super-glue connection we have that holds in spite of just about everything.

Funny how things turn out.

Loose inside my head.

Tomorrow is going to be interesting. Andrew will be here bright and early to help Erin move what little she brought back to her apartment, where she'll live until roughly the new year. She'll have her things shipped out further into April. She's looking forward to getting back into the swing of things closer to the city in the meantime.

The kids go back to school as well, which will mean a hazardous jolt back into routine, which will take most of the week to sort through but I'm looking forward to it anyway. They've become wild heathens that I have had to use exemplary amounts of patience to wrangle. As it is, it's difficult not to let them get away with things simply on the basis of everything they have had to deal with, but one thing counseling taught me was consistency, limits and a firm, loving hand are what's best for them. Those who don't even know me who call me a shitty parent? I'm doing the best that I can, and the kids are doing very well, all things considering.

Ben goes back to work tomorrow, to the bland and not-exciting-in-the-least day job, running numbers from his cubicle on whatever floor they've put him on now. It changes every time he goes away. He and the insurance company coexist solely for cheap health plans and fighting off boredom with steady paychecks, something to do while everyone else toils in their less fortunate universes. He puts on his Clark Kents and hunkers down over spreadsheets with a ground-down pencil between his teeth and then spends the rest of his evening complaining that his neck aches.

And me? I'll be content to write and drink coffee and rattle around, with the music up loud and the pets sleeping peaceful in the sunny spots on the floor if there are any to be found, and you will hear from me at least once and the phone will ring and eventually Andrew will come back and take me somewhere for more caffeine and a break from the walls of my mental prison and then suddenly it will be closer to dinner and everyone will be home where it's warm and we'll put on a few more lights and for a while it won't seem like such a prison in my head, but a refuge.

One in the same.

And in the less like Cole, more like Jake division of all things Bridget being love or death, Ben's adopted an old habit of Jake's that I don't think he really acknowledges as Jake's, probably because it's not like it was patented or copyrighted or exclusive by any means, but it's still disturbingly wonderful nonetheless.

He holds my hand. Tightly, constantly. To the point where, once again, I find myself repeatedly pointing out that I need to go to the bathroom or pick up a heavy pot or maybe I want to pin up my hair but my hand is tight in a vise of invisible protection and ownership.

And I like that.

I forgot how much.

Tickle me evo.

Earth hour in our household sort of almost was kind of a mini-disaster that turned out very well in the end.

We don't live in a city that sees a lot of power outages. Windstorms and blizzards are relatively rare overall and we've had exactly one brown-out and one blackout in almost six years. Our raging blizzard began as a glorious heavy downpour and changed gradually to snow and wind after dark. The boys night plans included switching to candles and guitars from 8 to 9 pm in honor of the planet and we were off.

Only the kids decided five minutes in that they didn't like it and didn't care and could I put the lights on ohpleasepleaseplease and they were oddly not fans of it at all. Which is strange considering their genetic love of horror movies, watched in the dark of the living room or a movie theatre, and I rarely have more than one light on in the whole upstairs at night and only a couple downstairs. They play spies in the dark basement.

I didn't get it.

Ben finally suggested we take a drive out to the edge of the city and look at some other neighborhoods and make sure everyone else had their lights out too. John and Andrew wanted to, so we piled into his truck and off we went.

They did. Neighborhoods were black, invisible against the driving snow. Companies had the barest of security lights highlighting only entrances of buildings that are closed on weekends. Apartment blocks were quiet, dark bricks, candles flickering through open blinds. The kids were impressed.

And then Earth Hour was swiftly shoved aside in favor of a new discovery. Because we had to pass the car dealership mall that lies outside the city. With the Mitsubishi place right on the front line. Ben pulled in so fast I thought he had lost his mind, swerving to avoid an imaginary car or something. Or a deer.

He just sat and stared.

I sat up and looked past him.

They had an Evo. A Lancer Evolution. Or as we call it, Ben's Emo. Because he laughs and said he would cry tears of joy as he quickly passes people on the highway.

His favorite car.

I thought he might cry. He's loved these cars for like seven years and you couldn't get them in Canada without making heavy modifications, if at all. Now they're selling them. A forty-five thousand dollar package of horsepower and Japanese muscle and an intercooler that could suck in small animals and children but strangely and wonderfully enough, a family sedan with good backseat and trunk space. Four wheel drive, for our brutal eight-month winters.

Yeah, I think the big white truck's days are numbered, and he's only been a truck convert for the past year, having given up his previous car (mustang) after seeing how much the other guys loved their trucks (read: Jake).

He came home and ran some numbers (pointlessly) and decided that he will buy the car, but not for a year or so, until they have a few more colors and he looks after some other stuff. He asked if I liked it and I didn't have to ask if that really mattered but he wanted to know. Really I think it's expensive for a car but in the end life is short and it's not like he just saw it and liked it. He's liked it forever and he was like Henry when I take him to Sugar Mountain-bouncing around not knowing what to look at first. That reaction alone tells me the answer to his question.

Twenty dollars says we'll be going back today to look at it again.