Crushing it.

Today is Write-off Wednesday. Which means it's like a Monday but instead it fell on a Wednesday which are historically known for being great days backsliding into the tail end of the week, marking the middle, making everyone groove to their own routines, only somewhere along the way we messed up and today is Monday and I'm sorry because as usual, it's probably all my fault.

For starters, they did finally go ahead and cancel the Black Sabbath show tonight. I was so excited even though it's not Ozzy but Ian Gillan who sings my favorite song by them that I'll never hear live (Keep It Warm) and because our last tour stop was cut short by illness. At least they didn't try to power through it but I was looking forward to us dressing up in our finest and living loud. Those of you who would have been lucky enough to meet my entire famjam in public all at once today will have to wait for another day. Hold your tickets. They will reschedule. Hopefully before one of them dies.

Hi, I'm morbid. What's your name?

But it's okay. Because I have a fucking headache anyway. Which means the latest round of experimental guinea-pig pills probably aren't going to work any better than the last ones. To add insult to injury my period started and so I'm dragging my black cloud around low over my head today. God, it's so heavy as I pull it from room to room, comically stretching my arms behind my back to drag it with me, bleeding to death along the way. Jesus Christ, run for cover. You've been warned.

Batman continues to try and discredit Caleb out of the blue and I'm attempting to live in a civilized fashion between both of them. It could be worse. A few years ago they both opted to draw their weapons in a glass tower with me standing in the middle and amazingly they didn't kill me or each other. So if the backbiting and underhanded sabotage work any better for them I would be surprised.

New Jake is not fresh meat for the record either. Fuck off. He was a moment and the moment is gone. If I really wanted to fuck up my life I'd hit closer to home. Like a tornado. A sex tornado. Aw fuck, can we just move on?

Caleb called me a good girl last night for shutting Batman down. I love nothing more than to win his approval. Hate myself for it but if I admit it that is half the battle, says Claus. The other half is me fighting without armor, clearly, because that's what I tend to do.

Fully at least ten years old today.

I can feel your breath
I can feel my death
I want to know you
I want to see
I want to say hello

Batman has no patience this morning, cutting me off and asking me to put Caleb on the phone. Caleb bites his lip and nods at the phone as if Batman can see his acquiescence and hangs up, telling me Go.

Just like that I am squishing across the lawn from Daniel's to Batman's (because we smartly put in a paverstone path at least that far, to next door), passing New Jake on the way in who stands up from where he was leaning over his bike, tinkering. He smiles and my heart thuds but just once in return and I shake my head and rush into the house. Never keep a man with money waiting, I hear the advice echo through my child-sized brain from way back when I was just starting out learning how to read people to get the very best of them, or rather their most valuable part. Their wallets.

I leave my rainboots at the door and stalk-slide through the main level looking for the man of the hour. I'm peeking into the study when he comes up behind me, asking me what I'm doing. I lose my footing and almost splay on the floor like a deer learning to walk for the first time.

I need some runners for the floors?

Probably. I look down and he's wearing shoes. You ever kick those off when you're home relaxing?

If I were relaxing I would. He smiles though. He's a tough nut to crack most of the time.

What can I do you for?

You sound like a truck-stop waitress.

That's 'server'. This is the twenty-aughts.

It's what I can do for you.

Listening.

I have his number, Bridget. 

And? 

It's bad. 

Then leave him be. 

But you don't underst-

I'm not going through this again with you. Please don't touch him. 

You have to hear me out. 

I'm going now. You could have called me. 

I wanted to give you a chance to flirt with your latest victim. 

Nice. You bring me over just to twist my pins? Have a great day. Seriously. 

Bridget, stop! 

What? 

Don't move. 

WHAT IS IT? (I'm thinking spiderweb? Or maybe a storm of locusts.)

Nothing, I just want you to stop and pay attention for a minute. You don't and you miss valuable information because you let your heart override your brain. 

It's the way people are supposed to work, you idiots! 

He collapses laughing into a chair. At least I can count on you to always say what you're thinking. God, you're such a breath of fresh air. You excuse everyone. You give out too many chances. You leave yourself wide open to heartache and disappointment. 

Exactly. That's what I'm meant for. 

Even if it kills you in the process? 

Naw. Haven't you realized it yet? It doesn't kill me. It makes me stronger. 

So now what? 

I was being facetious. I'm not any stronger. I wish for that but it doesn't happen. 

That's why I want to talk to you about Cale-

STOP IT! I told you to leave him alone and I mean it! 

I squish back across the lawn. No one follows, of course. He doesn't chase anyone and New Jake is no longer outside when I leave. I told Batman not to pursue this but he just keeps going. I'm starting to understand what they mean when they tell me I don't listen either.

Who's practical? I'm not practical.

Mondays always seem to begin with three loads of laundry,  a flat tire and an empty larder. A smile over the fact that every single episode of Sons of Anarchy now begins with a discussion on whether or not Tara looks good or bad and why and some Evanescence on the stereo, played at full volume at the Boathouse until Caleb gave up trying to talk over the music or turn it down and sat silently at his desk, tie already loosened, pen in hand but not writing, not reading, not doing anything.

Probably plotting something evil but I think I've gotten a leg up on him at last with this 'game', and no, that's not a literal leg up. That was last year.

How long do I have to stay?

Is everything ready?

Of course. 

I don't know what I'd do without you. 

Well, instead of sitting there you should be off trying to figure that out. Next year I'm passing the reins over to a new driver. I don't even like doing taxes. 

It's most amusing to watch you rant and rave about the calculations though! Besides, I don't think the boys will trust anyone else. I know I don't. 

So you're all happy to have a college dropout circus freak do your taxes because you don't trust anyone else?

Precisely. 

Wow.

Well, it's not as if you get nothing out of it. 

True. He nods toward my arms. Bracelets up and down. I wanted to dress like the fortune teller when I was young. She had bracelets up and down each arm and now I do too, because these are my payments for doing their returns. I pick a jeweler and off we go. One year I picked Cartier. That was amazing.

This year, probably McQueen. Because skulls. If they still make them. I saw them on Pinterest but I haven't checked at the boutique yet.

Caleb just looked over my shoulder and tells me they have them at Saks in New York, that we can go when I'm finished and pick something out. I sigh inwardly. Oh and also, not to write about him online.

Fine.

Asshole. 

Rock, paper, fingers.

(No church today. The floors are being redone.)

Caleb comes over this morning with a stack of receipts and a breakfast invitation that was cancelled on my behalf, because I was upstairs still sleeping with Lochlan who wouldn't let me get up before nine.

Sometimes Loch is all-play, ditch the day, hideaway fun too, you know.

We finally consented to get dressed and show our faces only to head out for a long rainy drive in the truck that ended in the instant magical pizza place. We took Ruth book-shopping. We bought Krispy Kremes. I need bigger skinny jeans. Maybe just-right jeans or post-pizza and donut jeans. But not mom-jeans, because I'm horribly offended by that label, as if you have children and suddenly lose your sense of style. You don't lose it, exactly, it just gets buried for a while in all the other stuff and then when you unearth it again you find you don't care as much as you once did.

I care but if it doesn't have a thousand buttons, some ruffles and come in all black I don't exactly want it or plan to wear it, most of the time. The only thing better than that is naked, I think.

Naked is good. It's a style too, if you're being picky. We could have probably been a nudist colony if not for the children present. Maybe once they grow up and leave this feathered nest we can slowly shift into one, except then when Caleb would show up with more work for me to do I'd have papercuts all over the damned place instead of only on my fingertips. Ow.

Tiny little Saturday things/My Little Flyer.

I was woken up at four this morning, thought the room was on fire, because the fireplace was on and Ben was all Hiiiiiiiiiiiiii Can't sleep let me molest you half to death okay shhhh and he did, pulling me right out of the dream when I saw Lochlan's face after my first practice on the swings and I don't mind one bit though I feel a little sheepish for maybe not being fully awake to reciprocate sufficiently. He smiles this morning and says he doesn't mind either as he pulls the quilts back up over my shoulders and Lochlan's too as he slept hard and hasn't let go of me much since five or so. We slept in for hours this morning. Much needed. Profoundly appreciated even though it meant waking up to cat vomit all the way down the basement steps that Sam somehow missed? Or tracked? Or something and other assorted fun items like a standoff between Duncan and PJ over the last cup of coffee in the pot, considering we...forgot to buy coffee on Friday on the weekend snacks/bank run.

Oops.

Ben, still all smiles, fixed that before it got out of hand. Crisis averted. Duncan gets his endless coffee pot and I get..New Jake to accompany me to the church to pick up Sam, who probably still has cat vomit on his shoes but no car because it's being detailed as per the old schedule Matt set to 'treat' Sam and just left because the half-year was paid for.

I am not permitted to drive yet until I suss out how the pills are going to work for my inner space cadet, who's a lot like Ben in that she's all Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii let's distract each other when I should be staying on my side of the road and actually going at green lights and such.

But none of that matters. What matters is when I opened my eyes after eight this morning (the barest luxury I would actually kill for, no joke) Lochlan was there with his arms around me and we weren't fighting and I didn't wake up in flight mode and I didn't know about the lack of coffee or the cat vomit but the bed was still warm in Ben's spot thanks to the heavy quilts and it was just..

Perfect.

Junk drawer.

When PJ passed my my Friday coffee this morning it was half Irish cream. I said nothing save for thank you and I'm sure no one else noticed. I love this man, truly I do. It's Friday, after all and I'm hoping for a weekend with endless pizza and maybe a screening of The Revenant. I'm hoping to sleep in. I'm hoping for a little less rain and a little more sunshine and I'm hoping for a little peace and quiet the likes of which we haven't seen in several weeks running.

The pot light is ticking like there's a grasshopper stuck in it. It will burn out within days. The dishwasher sprung it's springs and has been fixed. The rain turns everything to mush and the darkness is pushing away from five o'clock like a little kid on a swing. Yesterday I saw tulips busting up out of the ground in a neighbor's garden and I have all of our tax receipts out and organized by hard-sided folios, one for each, including Ruth, who now has to file taxes because she's got a job too.

I need a job.

I also saw that Sephora Canada now sells Anastasia makeup-makeup and not just the eyebrow stuff so I really need a job though I have a drawer full of lip products and a definitive problem already that precludes me buying any more until I use up some of what I have.

Sam is being a prince of a guy to take up the case of me finally again now that the dust has settled between him and Matt. Barring their emotions they have remained friends, even going out for lunch together yesterday so Sam could give Matt some photos he wanted him to have. Argh. If only the rest of us were so civilized but we aren't. We're heathens. We're feral. We're lurking in the woods, dirty and damp to chew on the first person to cross our paths and we hardly listen to reason most days.

Bear with me while I try and find a way around or maybe through the fog. As usual I'll do my best. As usual, you prefer me at my worst.

Glacial Awareness.

There is nothing that I would not face
With vengeance and annihilate
Sever off the hands of fate
If it were to keep you safe
If a million reasons came my way
None of them could take your place
You will never be alone
I will never let you
Let you go

Pinned watching the old man flick his newspaper to his lap every time the young children across from him yell and run down the hall. One lady is knitting a sweater in the corner with round needles. She looks unhappy but satisfied she is using her time well enough. The young woman with her phone buzzing incessantly transmits every movement, thought and feeling into it for validation and the man beside me is wearing shoes and carrying a bag that belies his young minimalist approach to life, highlighting maybe a trust fund or merely a comfortable upbringing. You can tell a lot about a man by the shoes he wears, both size and make. I don't know why that is but I'm bored and constructing life-stories of those around me, based on flash judgements, based on nothing.Weighing as much as these clouds but no more. You can't put any effort into something so light.

My headphones are on very low. I'm listening to songs I love. I'm ignoring the words in favor of the near-dark around me. The grit and damp of early January. The cold/warm, sun/rain, wind/still sort of dirt-filter that hallmarks winter here in the rain forest. No one seems to notice how strange the sun seems after a week of heavy rain. No one notices my sketchbook or the flowers I'm drawing from memory. Not a lot has changed in my waiting in twenty-five years. I can wait for hours, weeks even, as long as I have headphones and a pencil. Lochlan once said one of those days we travelled I was going to be left behind in a bus station somewhere in New Jersey because I would tune out the world so easily. I knew that wouldn't happen because he was there to make sure I went with him when time was up.

The man to my other side shifts his legs and checks his watch. His pockets are stuffed with stolen memories. They fall out and people leave shoe-marks on them, a travesty under any circumstances. These are not his and so he pays them no mind but the person who belongs to each one would most likely ransom their own soul to have them back.

But then I remember that they are all mine, and that I have no soul to use for collateral to get them all back. In fact, Sam assures me I won't get them all back anyway and the ones that I do may be altered in order for me to be whole enough again for people to make judgements about my shoes or my waiting-style or the number of bracelets going up my left arm because that's what people do. He doesn't care that I worry about some of the bigger ones that get dented and roll away into corners and he doesn't worry that I care that he might miss something. He sits and waits with me, reading his notes, highlighter in hand, sheets of cheap paper balanced on knees. Just like Jake except for the fact that it isn't Jake, its Sam and maybe that's what he meant by changing memories. I don't hate it, exactly. It's easier even though somehow it weighs more than the other parts of the day. I guess that's part of my New Abnormal or whatever Lochlan called it last night when he told the story of the time he left me on the bench, caught up in my brain-music and drawings while he got on the bus, just to see if I would actually notice.

I didn't but he didn't take it personally either.

What if the driver had refused to stop to let me on? Sometimes they don't, you know. Sometimes they have a schedule to keep and no patience for teenage pranks.

He was an old guy, Bridge. Had pictures of his grandchildren taped up all over the sun visor. I knew he wouldn't leave a young woman in a deserted bus station late at night alone.

Risking my life with his own weightless judgements wasn't something I want to repeat, so now I make sure I look around in between each song, at the very least.

144/106

Another doctor visit, another smoothie reward from PJ, a little banking and the tiniest bit of tax filing this morning before Lochlan lost his nerve and called me in. Caleb went from looking so content to looking fierce, agitated and unamused as he escorted me out to the driveway where Loch was pretending to clean out the truck. Loch is in that sweater and his favorite jeans that hang off his butt and make him look too thin but somehow it's how I know him best and I smile as I make my way down the steps. He comes to the bottom and holds out his arms in case I go ass over teakettle again but it's too warm for the steps to be icy.

My smoothie was lunch. Breakfast was leftovers. I'd like to paint but I don't know what. I'd like to finish listening to Strawberry Swing, the song that was on when I left Caleb's house, and I'd like to have a nap in front of the fire because these pills make me a little drowsy and my blood pressure is still way too high for anyone to be happy. I was told to call immediately if I have any fluttering or pounding or faintness when I get up suddenly so I've become a little blonde turtle with my sudden movements, where before you would whip around and I'd be gone and you'd say Where's she go? It's how I managed to steal so many wallets on the midway back in the good old days. Though the ones I steal nowadays have far more money in them, that's for sure. I have to keep the boys on their toes and my own talents fresh, as it were. When we came back inside I put Caleb's wallet on the counter just inside the door. But not before taking all the money out of it.

I'm buying dinner for everybody, I think. Wow.

The Penny to his Medusa.

Last night's whiskey and courage went long past dark and into wavery, drunken, dangerous territory for some of us. Including the Devil, who watched us closely, me and Loch, proclaiming us adorable more than once. We sat quietly by the fire sometimes, and sometimes danced and sometimes laughed at the radio play on the stereo. We went outside to watch the rain and we almost gave in to his invitation to extend the night when somewhere we found a crumb of self-control (learned so recently but maybe not) and politely declined.

Tomorrow I'll come by and we can swap Henry things and look at the taxes. It's almost February. Time to do up T4s for the locals. I catch myself trying to make things up to him to soften the blow.

Or just stay on.

Sorry. Not a good idea.

On the contrary.

Nothing changes, does it?

Again, on the contrary, Lochlan is learning to roll with it if you step outside of your boundaries.

No, he isn't.

We should test him. Better yet, bring him with you.

And let you eat him alive? Never again.

Caleb shows his teeth briefly and then the levity is gone in a flash. Sam is standing behind me. I can feel it.

Bridge, come back in. Loch, you too.

I'm having a great time being talked about, Sammy. Loch is lit from within. He's in slow-motion, liquor is mud to him. It paralyzes and calms him like nothing else.

Let's go.

Ah. I should give you a stipend for being her keeper now?

If no one else is around, maybe. August and Joel have gone home. PJ made sure the kids were ready for bed and then crashed in his room. Duncan is watching TV downstairs with Ben. No one would have saved us, truth be told.

What is she worth to look the other way this evening?

Far more than you might guess. She's been working hard. Don't try and mess with it right now. The newness of it has barely worn off.

Sam, the newness of you hasn't. This is dogma. She belongs with me.

She belongs with them.

I was first. I'll be last. You shouldn't stick your nose in where it doesn't belong.

Bridget, you ready to go inside? You've got to get some sleep. You too, Loch.

We nod but continue to stare at Caleb. I always wait for the figure as he tries to buy his way in.

But he doesn't. Not tonight. He's right, Doll. I'll see you tomorrow. Get some rest.

Sam looks relieved. I reach up and kiss the Devil's cheek and burn against the stubble. Oíche mhaith, Diabhal.

Neamhchiontach, coladh sámh.

Lochlan snarls mildly at Caleb on his way past but says nothing. By the time he thought of something, he'd be upstairs anyway and saying it in a language near no one can understand. The midnight ramblings in English/Gaelic/Romanian/Scottish Outrage are usually broken and lose their efficacy quickly when pickled.

Caleb smiles. Still adorable, he tells Loch. See you both tomorrow. 

He never is happy when I'm out of his sight.

(Back to business on a Monday morning and damn. These drugs though.)

It's Robbie Burns Day which means Ben has been interrupting this day with horrifyingly regular recitals with his bagpipes out on the telescope platform and PJ and I spent half the morning procuring haggis and finally found some thanks to the creepy butcher who said he makes extra for the last minute types like us.

Huh?

I'm not last-minute. I swear I remembered just after breakfast instead of three weeks ago like I should have. I went and got some fresh scotch and some fixings to go with the haggis. Like steak because..well, haggis. It's cooking now and it smells delicious. I just don't...well, like eating the parts you're supposed to throw away. I tried to negotiate down to veal-stuffed pasta but he wouldn't budge.

Daniel and Schuyler went and offered magnificently to lead the dinner after I abandoned the procedure halfway through last years Burns Night on account of the overbearing thought of having to eat this meal when for me, eating turkey is a feat of courage only reserved for the most special of occasions, like Easter and Christmas. I also had the flu last year this time. Go figure.

But this is a special occasion, he insists. Lochlan is so excited. He put on his kilt instead of jeans first thing and is already coming up rash, more red than usual thanks to the rough wool. I won't go near him or I'll be red too but I will cook this if he wants it and organize this night to rival what I hope will be an equally exciting and revered St. Patrick's Day later this spring. The war is on.

My girl, she's airy, he begins.

Oh, shut up already.