New(f).

I fell asleep with the Devil and woke up needing angels this morning, but instead I put on my thick dress and sturdy shoes and went and made time-and-a-half for seven hours at work, where it was raining steadily and everyone was in a mood, including me. 

I came home this afternoon, parked the car and went straight up the steps at the side of the garage and knocked on the door. An old familiar voice said to come in and so I did, and yet only part way, hanging back by the second french door that separates the hall from the kitchen. I press the side of my face against the cool door and wait for him to say something nice. Or anything, frankly. I haven't seen him in days. 

Still in your work clothes? What's up? 

I just want to say...hi. 

Hi. 

Hi. 

He stares at me for a while. 

We talked about this. I let out a breath in a huge rush and he laughs again. You're terrible. 

I'm not the only one. 

I'm attempting to salvage a good friendship instead of taking advantage. 

That isn't what you're doing here. 

Oh? What am I doing, then? 

Trying to not feel used. 

Who's using me? 

Me, probably. But I love you. 

Come here. I throw myself into his lap, shoes and all. I smell like coffee and strawberries. This is horrible. I love you too. And I don't feel used. I just want us to be healthy and we aren't. 

Who cares? 

Lochlan, for one. Any sane person, for two. Jake, for three. 

He doesn't get a vote. 

By proxy, he does. That's why you're here. 

Is it?

He tucks my head down against his chest, stroking my hair, humming softly. I fall asleep and when I wake up it's dark out and he isn't there but I'm still in the chair, a blanket wrapped around me. I slide off the chair and crash in the bed and cry myself to sleep because I hate myself and then I wake up because who can sleep through that bullshit. I leave the blanket and walk home. I don't know where he went but then I see his hair through the half-cracked door of the library and I don't even check and see who he's talking to since I know it's Lochlan and I walk upstairs and crash into my own bed. Someone changed the sheets. It feels like bliss.

Proof.

And when the surface of the water closes over your head God is there to lift you up-

Eyes closed, head down in the first bench I vehemently shake my head.

He's there. I promise you. 

I shake it again.

The proof is sitting in front of me. Sam's voice gets louder and I sneak a look and sure enough, yes, he's standing right in front of us.

Your doubt is obvious and yet he remains. Proof of his love for you, that you won't be abandoned. 

It was part of a series I have heard a few times before, Sam's recycled Two at the table, Two on the walk sermons, that he adapted from an earlier sermon by Jake that he wrote years and years ago.

It was bullshit then, it's bullshit now.

And they both know it. But I don't make any further outward attempts to debate with Sam. I can yell at Jake but it just goes into the wind now and I just want to get home, maybe make a cup of tea and avoid the internet where no one will shut the fuck up about Game of Thrones and I have fatigue from that already.

I do. Sorry. It's just a television show. I'm all caught up and I had to laugh at the worst, most pivotal and destructive scene in the previous episode because it was something I would do. Seriously. Burn it all down to punish one person because sometimes you're driven that way. Sometimes your emotions make the decisions and you're just along for the ride. My life is a scorched earth campaign and yet even in a fire-ravaged, blackened existence, eventually life grows back, beginning with a few bits of green poking through the ruin and before you know it everything looks the same as before.

Sam pulls me in close. Why you gotta ride my ass in public? He laughs softly, putting on a hard New York accent. It's an inside joke and I return the next line as always to make him feel better and show him I'm not angry with him, nor he with me.

Someone has to, cause clearly you ain't gettin' any. 

He laughs and kisses my cheek and lets me go to shake Lochlan's hand. Lochlan who is dishevelled and tired and doesn't want to be here but brought me because I did.

And we are home now. Sam will be home soon and then I will reheat some pancakes for him too. And bacon if Ben left any. Then I'm going to sit outside and draw by the pool maybe, or just sleep in the shade. I'm not feeling well again suddenly. I don't know why. I think anxiety manifests itself inside me as a low-grade endless flu and I hate it.

I get a text.

Okay, new plan is to head upstairs at one and crawl in with Caleb, who didn't go to church but has offered nap space (He's there. I promise you.). I love it when he smells like sleep and clean sheets and soap. See you tomorrow.

Try.

It's morning. I already had a slow dance by the fireplace in our room, barefoot and in my nightgown, Lochlan in pajama pants and nothing else. It's warm enough that the windows were open and Blue Rodeo blares from his phone, propped on the mantle as we make a slow circle in each others' arms.

He absolutely hates it when I travel without him now. Won't have it any longer, refuses to consider such a plain and vivid logic in that sometimes it will happen, will no longer let go, as it were and I couldn't be happier. This is my place. He is my person, and as hard as they try to blur history, to sand it down and hope it blows away on the wind, I figure it's what led me back around to him.

I took the long way home.

He smiles, but says nothing, holding me tighter.  I don't think he understands that I mean from life, and not from New York but that's alright. We venture dangerously close to my open suitcase on the floor. I haven't unpacked yet. I didn't want to miss a moment.

I'll do it later. Maybe. Or tomorrow. Right now I need this.

The best part is Ben, sleeping soundly in bed, covers pushed down around his waist, expression so peaceful. He is out cold, relieved to be free of some entanglements that shouldn't have been this hard to end, but that's what life is, as he pointed out in the offices as we left. It's messy and it's fucked up and we should all be working harder to make each others' lives easier.

In my birthday wishes this year that seemed to be the theme. That instead of debilitating me with their motions, their moods, their words, they're going to try to work harder to help me through. Lift me up, keep me safe from their own destructive thoughts and deeds, the ones that keep us mired in present-day quicksand, on the whim of the wind.

Don't you dare, I warned with a smile. Progress is good but we're creatures of habit. I love them for trying but I also don't expect sweeping changes overnight. We are the people we are because we've been formed this way and change is a freeclimb, a drive up pikes peak with an obscured windshield, a battle I've been fighting forever, and I run ahead, looking backward to see how much I've left behind only to turn around and run into it again.

Try morphs into Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road and Lochlan's done it again. I couldn't make progress if I tried, for he triggers that twelve year old so fucking easily it isn't even surprising any more.

Notes from the hammock, drunk.

Mark Knopfler's True Love Will Never Fade is the year-apart twin of Jon Foreman's Learning How to Die. Tell me I'm wrong.

Also, Halsey's new song Nightmare has the chorus from a Tatu song from the early nineties. Don't believe me? Go listen.

And I still can't understand what the fuck Till is saying but I can sing along with him now too. At least on Rammstein's Radio, Puppe and Halloman.

Getting there. Getting somewhere, anyway. Okay, actually getting nowhere. Scheiss drauf.

Critical darling.

Sorry, Bridge. I didn't realize. 

Ben and Schuyler had me tag along for a (brief) trip to New York. Ben is entangled in a thing he's been trying to get out of for close to a year, Schuyler's his muscle. Brain muscle, if we're being specific because Ben gets mad and flips tables and says things he can't when he gets frustrated and Schuyler understands the law and works around Ben's emotions.

I went because they promised me a couple of hours of rides at Coney if I would be their assistant, and honestly I understand the law and can read the paperwork and am able to keep Ben level with some secret code words we use.

And it's not like we were going to bring Caleb, though he offered. So we took his plane. Thanks, Diabhal.

The whole way back we dissected the new Rammstein album because my German is broken and Ben's is as fresh as the day he learnt it all. Thanks, Wacken.

I wasn't actually necessary at the meetings and apparently they had 'limited space' in their huge expanse of offices (or maybe I was distracting?) so they sent me back to the hotel where I watched strange American television for a few hours and ordered room service.

Then we went to Coney, as promised.

Except that most of it was closed.

Memorial Day weekend. That's right. Schuyler said.

I can't believe I'm standing in one of my favorite places in the world and it's the week before they flip the switch and turn it all on?

I Facetime Lochlan.

Peanut. What's up?

It opens...soon. 

No, offence, but good. It feels stupid that you're there without me. 

I've been here without you before. 

And that's stupid too (damn his revisionist history. Damn them all).

I can't change that. 

Going forward, you bet we can. 

So what do I do in the meantime? 

Fly home. 

Okay? Okay (not okay).

Wednesdays have morphed into incredibly busy days. I didn't get to see my garden, didn't get to enjoy any down time and worked all day, hustled for three hours straight when I got home to finish my chores and get dinner on the table and now I have to drive to the other side of town to pick up Ruth from her job. I could farm some of it out but then I would feel bad.

Talk tomorrow?

Sure, he says, pretending not to be disappointed. Ceart go leor, Neamhchiontach.

I quit coffee, take II.

I did. I had a weak, horrible little cup of it yesterday and this morning I joined Lochlan for his very good Irish tea. Or English or Indian or whatever, it's tea. I have favorites but I'm not that fussy overall. 

I was a little crabby but not too much.

I survived and I don't have a headache and I don't even miss it, and I wanted to be one of those people that drank tea instead and now here I am. 

I just found out about a thing called Friday Night Lights in Deep Cove where they do a two-hour guided tour of Indian Arm (a place I kayak) and you get to see the bioluminescent seas and enjoy dark, quiet kayaking. 

Can we go? I ask Lochlan after reading the whole damn article to him out loud. 

Or we could just..go take the kayaks out at night. Except that you never liked being right on the water at night and you're going to scream the whole time. 

Maybe I won't. 

Care to wager on it?

Sure! 

Let's go. It's dark. Get your life jacket.

Wait. What?

We're going night kayaking. 

But there are things-

What things? 

Sea monsters, I whisper and he laughs.

Lilac season.

If you funnel yourself down through the layers of mountain, highway and concrete you reach me at the end, a quiet, small presence just around the corner from a windswept park, just along the edge of a cliff that drops to the ocean below. Not my ocean, again, as I've reassured myself a million times, maybe more, but good enough for now.

It is there that the lilacs opened for the first time this morning, and I stuck my whole face into a bloom and was surprised by a bee just minding his own business. He kissed my lashes, bounced off my face a couple of times and moved along.

Cole is the bee. There's always one drifting around the edges of my journeys around the yard.

I planted some stray ferns that escaped the woods, some mint and some leftover sunflower seeds by the (broken) gate. The old one that separates the side yards around the front of the house and past the porch. It is decorative and hardly functional and yet with wildflowers coming up all around it it looks incredible. Some of the larkspur grows there too, and daisies and a foxglove or two.

Caleb frowns at it. We'll have it replaced this weekend. Or maybe just removed. It dates the property just a little bit. 

Leave it. 

It's rotten, Bridget. The wood is so weathered-

I love it. 

He watches me, a study in walking cognitive dissonance and I refused to meet his gaze. Instead I watch the bee and I wonder why it doesn't bother him.

You always did love those little pockets of unexpected beauty. What did you call them when you were little?

Things To Paint. 

Ah, yes. Things to paint. Are you going to get your supplies and come out to paint this?

Maybe I will. We'll see.

Therapy.

If you could find me would you even know me?

How about a garden?

Really?

Sure. We could do a raised bed with room for some tomatoes and strawberries.

It was a surprise comment from Cole at the castle on a blustery spring day that stirred a long-dormant need to put down roots. Moving addresses every four or five years. Not having time to settle in, to grow. I'm still prone to beginning to write an address I had four addresses ago because I forget.

Okay, lets!

And the garden thrived. It thrived. We were giving produce away. It was a ten by six foot rectangle hemmed in with two by sixes and a few bags of topsoil and it freaking thrived. The kids would run past it and stop for handfuls of cherry tomatoes and pull out baby carrots that weren't even close to ready and eat them without washing them first.

That was then.

This is now.

Now my garden is the size of a olympic swimming pool and I call it 'the patch'. Last night I filled it with pumpkins, tomatoes and cucumber seedlings, mint, sage and radishes. Today I will finish with seeds kept from last year and sunflowers too. I want lettuce and peas and squash and cauliflower. Potatoes! It makes me so happy. I can't work in it when the sun is doing her worst but early in the day or after dinner that's where you'll find me.

I loaded my jeep with manure and came home with a surprise chore for the boys. I drove the jeep around through the big fence gates and across the backyard and I parked her on the bluff and we (by we I mean they) shovelled out all of the manure. Then I hosed it out and put her back in the driveway.

My life is basically perfect now.

Still too hot to talk about birthdays but I like to try and give you something, if I can.

Lochlan's hair is already rose gold. Thank you, summer, for making him glow. The chlorine just hastens the reaction and yet somehow he is as pale as ever because he doesn't suffer the first half of the summer sunburns in exchange for a tan that would last until Halloween these days.

We've grown old. Or maybe we've grown smart. We've grown. Gone is the living on candy, running til dark, filled up on doubtful fierce love and in its' place a better diet, marginally more sleep and a comfortable, secure love that I don't think I'd trade for anything.

We still fight over what kind of ketchup to buy at the store. Don't get me wrong. And he insists a hot dog is best wrapped in a piece of staleish bread, burnt on a charcoal grill while I've moved on to only liking them if they're seared bratwurst in a fresh sesame-parmesan bun with raw onions, sauerkraut and a second-tier mustard.

That level of elitism means no goodnight kiss for you. 

The pompousness of it?

Naw, the onions.