Silver-lined.

You know what I secretly love about Caleb? He can be ridiculously, childishly impulsive. Like me. And I never see it coming. So he waited for Lochlan too and we went off for brunch. Only we were late and so brunch became midnight dinner.

In Montauk.

A place I have come to find sacred, safe and calming. Which is crazy because it's right next to a city that runs at a pace that leaves me breathless and then you drive for a few hours and boom. Silence. Surf. Sand.

And they were nice to each other. I started to get nervous and tired and kind of lost my shit at the end of what turned out to be a long day. I am famous for travelling much like a four-year-old in that I need breaks and distractions and I get overwhelmed and worn out so fast my composure dissolves just as I'm told to put on nice clothes because we're headed somewhere exclusive and difficult to get into.

And they stopped on a dime and turned and Caleb arranged take-out instead and we ate on the beach just down below the place he rented, which isn't all that far from the place Lochlan and I stay when we come here alone.

After dinner I put my head against Lochlan's shoulder and I was out like a light and I woke up this morning and it wasn't actually a dream. Especially since I woke up alone. I smell burnt toast and hear the low laughter and head downstairs in yesterday's dress and they're making breakfast, faces clearly disappointed as they were going to bring it upstairs for me but I beat them to the punch by showing up before it was ready.

Fucking 1979 is playing on the stereo and becomes the song of the summer, just like that. Only it's still The Contortionist's version, thank heavens.

There are bags on the table. Clothes. Caleb kisses my forehead as I peek inside but then breakfast is ready so I resolve to eat quickly and get ready so I can have as much beach as possible before we have to go. He and Lochlan are already ready, dressed almost alike in black t-shirts and black shorts. Damn. I'm so lucky.

Why here? I asked last night over candlelit sand, my voice slowed by the heavy red wine. Lochlan had excused himself for a moment and we were alone.

Because you needed an adventure and I didn't think another shot at Nevada was a good plan. 

New York is so far though. Could have gone to Oregon.

He shrugged. And we could have gone to Bali. Pick a beach anywhere in the world. It's not the same. Besides, we can go to the fair today.

Why did you bring Lochlan? 

He's your comfort object. Imagine the meltdown if I hadn't. 

True. I stick my face in the glass and hope to drown. Who wants to imagine that?

Sleeping holes.

And I know it feels like you’re drowning these days
And I know you question if it’s too late
And my only hope is that you choose to stay

Don’t be too proud to say
That you are alone, lost and afraid
Think about your pride
Just know your doubt’s misplaced

I know it feels like you’re drowning these days
I know you feel like you can’t be saved
And my only hope is that you choose to stay

Church this morning was coffee and ballpoint pen-stained fingers clutching my own and a whispered, quickened prayer against my forehead before a crush of a hug and a send-off into my day so fast I blinked and I was alone.

Sam came to us last night, late. He has a hard time shifting routines and an even tougher time living alone. As much as it has helped us to have Caleb close enough now to touch at any moment, it's been more difficult to have Sam so far away and so I might, as things shift, suggest that Gage take the boathouse, as Gage is the most private and independent one of all, and then Sam can resume life in the main house, surrounded by people and not feeling like an outsider. Plus both Gage and August are good friends, night owls and outliers, and so giving them closer proximity to each other might foster a closer relationship and that's never a bad thing. The Collective is always shifting and adjusting our dynamics based on need and so this wouldn't even be strange. I have already suggested it to several and they are positive about it so perhaps this week will involve a shuffle and Sam will return to the fold.

He seems buoyed by the thought, at least, sleeping easily when we did sleep. I had nightmares and was so cold. He and Lochlan had all the covers and I froze, pressing myself against Lochlan, hoping for a full-body snuggle but he was hot and too tired to be interested and so turned away. I didn't have the heart to wake Sam for more and so I tried and failed to will myself to sleep.

I won't make that mistake again.

The warmest bed on the point is Duncan's. Duncan has what has to be a four-hundred pound feather duvet that is so thick his bed seems up to my waist if I stand beside it and once you're in you feel like there's a heavy dense cloud wrapped around you. It's glorious. He adds flannel sheets in the winter and I couldn't ask for more. I tried to replicate that upstairs but we almost fainted from the heat. I think I just need to shift gears, maybe put the duvet back on the bed and close the windows at night but it's also supposed to swing back to forty degrees in the shade this week so maybe not quite yet. I'll make sure I have an extra blanket close, though. Just in case.

Sam's warm fingers around my hand are replaced with Caleb's. Equally warm but larger and more well-manicured. My mind is a quick read for this man this morning.

You wouldn't have been cold with me either, he frowns.

That I know. The fires of hell burn bright. I smile at him. It's fine. It was just cold last night and I didn't close enough windows. 

I would have fixed that for you. 

It's fine. I repeat and he changes the subject. Church?

Next week we're back to routine. Today's the last day. 

Ah right. Brunch then? 

God. He knows the way to my heart is a path lined with bacon and eggs. It's slippery but it's stick-straight and too amazing to ever deviate from, I swear.

My only hope is that you choose to stay.

(Should have listened to the cover of 1979, which is far better than the original but that year was a different sort of minefield. It would be the final year of Just Bridget before she met the boys and everything changed.)

The leaves are starting to fall, suddenly it's cool and dark early in the evening, and everything everywhere touts 'Back to School'. The pumpkins in the garden are so large I'm soon to need help to lift them when they need to be moved. Currently they are hanging, wrapped in cheesecloth hammocks tied to the iron fence along the eastern edge of the vegetable patch but soon we'll have to take them down.

The carrots and beans and peas are finished. The oregano remains a living buzzing organism of honeybees and the tomatoes press forward with a determination I've never seen from them before this year.

Our cucumbers were poison. Bitter and terrible from the cold nights. At least only three of them grew.

I am amused by the garden this year, not at all invested in achieving anything other than happiness from it and I think that's the best way to go.

I dug myself a massive dark hole this morning, listening to Early Grave, the best song on the new Contortionist EP. I could have driven my jeep and the porsche into that hole and probably a few of the trucks too. I could have thrown in three houses and the stable too and still you wouldn't have been able to see the bottom. Lochlan took one look over the edge and called Sam, who came and filled it all in while Lochlan held me far back from it, showing me pumpkins and coffee and notes on his guitar from when he tried to learn it and realized I was listening to the words and put the instrument down on the couch and went into emergency mode before I even realized I was digging that fucking hole because here we go into a steep slide straight to Halloween.

Life is a minefield and every second step I land directly on an IED. Life is a day as a sheet of paper with precious instructions, floating in the wind and it's raining so you must fly between the drops. Life is harder than I imagined.

Hey, check out your sunflowers. They actually grew! 

They're so late. They should have been open weeks ago but here they are, only as tall as me and tangled up in the grapevines so perfectly I didn't even know they were there.

I choke back a sob and will my eyes to stop flooding over. Be right there, I say in a strangled voice and I take a deep breath and head to where Lochlan waits for me.

Regressive tendencies.

Sigh.

A whole post about owls and woods and metal and you're all..."a single nother peep"???!?

Bridget, I thought you were a published author. It's 'another single peep'.

God. I could feel the condescension all but dripping off the emails but I had a laugh, wrung myself out, by now floating up to my ears in it, and pulled the plug on the room, washing it all down the drain. I rarely check my emails these days but I was waiting for something and so I read them, against my own best judgment, as I get tired of being told I'm a whore, that I'm going to hell, that I'm greedy and using people and dumb and soon to get 'what's coming to me', etc. etc.

Then the grammar police showed up. Thank heavens, because the others cut so deep but I tend to stay out of reach as it is. And my assistant blocks the worst and reports the very worst to the internet police or whomever needs to know. The Russians? Whatever.

(My assistant is Daniel.)

But yeah. It's a single nother peep. Because for me that's how it's ordered in my brain and I don't care if it's awkward, it's the way my mind does it and going back to edit my words later is sometimes something I can't get to. Sometimes it doesn't get fixed at all and I should try harder but sometimes...

Sometimes I just have to spill the words on the page and leave them there to pile up underneath the dead leaves and the moss and the pumpkin spice lattes and whatever's coming next. I've decided it's going to be good because I need it to be, regression and all.

She's a space cadet. Leave it. Important missions and all that. Lochlan isn't being unkind. In fact, he's the kindest of all, absolving me of my grammar tics and strangeness in one massive sweep. He is forgiving and gracious about it. He called me a space cadet once when I had my thoughts in the sky instead of in the present as required and instead of bursting into tears like he feared I would, instantly wishing he could take back the words he put down in anger, I took it as the single highest compliment he had ever given me. It's better than sweet, heavier than pretty, and more phenomenal than perfect to me.

What? He says, shocked. It's a name called. It's an insult, Bridgie. 

No, it's a goal, Locket. If I start out as a cadet, eventually I'll be the Space General! And then everyone will HAVE to listen to me.

Owls + new Starset.

Gravity
I pull on you
Close enough to rendezvous
You come to me and then you slip right through
I'm in the solitude
Why's it always touch and go?
Now we'll never even know what it's like
Left me in the afterglow
'Til I'm falling through space and time

Okay well, yeah. Toss the rest of the week off with one solid kick and haul in a new day. The owls sung me to sleep last night and when Lochlan came up I was all SHHHHHHHHHH CAN YOU HEAR THEM? And they didn't make a single nother peep for the rest of the night. Maybe that means I've manifested them only for myself, as Ben pointed out this morning. As if I could do that. Like, what?

Speaking of Manifest.

Jesus CHRIST.

I was scared Starset wouldn't sound like themselves. I didn't like MNQN, truth be told. I was really annoyed that there was another project taking up the time that should be used to push out the third Starset album and now that it's almost here I'm thrilled. I listened to Manifest about a thousand times this morning. It has all the elements that stroke my brain just perfectly. Heaviness, melodic emotion, and outer space.

Probably owls too, because owls are cool. 

When I say this afterthought Lochlan's coffee all but spits out in a huge spontaneous laugh.

God this song is SO GOOD.

Eagles, bats, IKEA pour-overs.

Drinking coffee in the gazebo, listening to The Contortionist's new EP Our Bones, reading my own words as I do a little subcontracted fiction writing for a guy who sometimes needs my touch but you'll never hear him thank me out loud. Sometimes gigs are crushing but still lucrative and I never had a soul to sell for so long it seemed easy to give away chunks of the carnival in my mind for a song or a fat cheque or a pat on the head, doesn't matter which.

I am usually the most impressed with the things I come up with anyway, overall.

Lochlan watches me from the patio steps, right by the door in the shade. My very own carnival in human form.  I take another dutiful bite of the apple-jelly toast he brought out for me, washing it down with a gulp of ice-cold gritty coffee from a cup I've been keeping close for several hours now. It's absolutely terrible and yet I'm proving a point. He doesn't need to hover.

I write a few more paragraphs and now I'm faking drinking coffee as it's empty, grinds travelling up the inside of the cup like a waterfall of dirt that eventually dried up in the sun. No one is going to hike back to see this marvel of nature, that's for sure. No one's going to invest kilometres of energy to stand in awe of the raw power of grinds sweeping over a ceramic vessel with a perfect blue-red lipstick print at the top. It's not Instagrammable. It's not wondrous. It's as pedestrian as one can get and you'll never see it but it still exists and that's somehow the important part today.

It's quiet and easy and not beautiful. The opposite of everything we reach for, everything we want, as always.

Oh, here he comes. Old eagle-eyes (blind as a bat these days) knows I'm faking and so I suppose my time here is up.

Upside: I didn't get eaten by a bear.

Yesterday's adventure wound up consisting of a long waterfall-laden hike yesterday. I ran ten kilometres to pull this off, as everyone walks a brisk pace when we hike to keep an even distance from other groups of hikers, even faster when we need to overtake, and since the average stride of the long legs of anyone in the group span several meters easy (might not be hyperbole), I therefore must run. When I begged them to slow down in the humidity they did but only enough so that I had to walk so fucking fast I ran out of breath eventually and got teased endlessly for being out of shape. Ben offered a piggyback. Lochlan offered to take me back to the truck to wait for the others. I swore at both and continued my medium jog as walking fast wasn't keeping up and the flat out running is really hard in the close air of the woods. I also needed enough stopping power to avoid horse poop and huge banana slugs making their way home, something I don't actually have the reflexes for when I run.

My reward was a giant beer and a monte cristo with a mountain of fries and two dill pickles. WORTH.

It also gave Lochlan a chance to regroup and rally back around instead of starting off offended at my allegiances of the morning, wanderlust speaking for me without permission or information, obviously as it is selfish and singular and I am generally not. He isn't mad, and has vowed to make the next week exactly perfect and beyond, as we can manage it via these uphill battles. We're attempting a full-fledged effort to throw history into the sea. Or the woods. I may miss the spectacle since I can't keep up.

Sight/seer.

Watching Caleb sleep. I'm jammed in the corner between the wall and the window, knees up, weighing down the duvet so that if he turns, he's going to wake up, as he won't be able to take the duvet with him. He's my wanderlust cure, my adventurer oddly enough, always suggesting exactly what I need to fix the weird propensity to want to run when things get good. I think it's a holdover from the days when Lochlan would sneak us out of a gig or a town with a saying about always leaving on a high note, when things are good, before people start looking for you. Lochlan is a homebody at heart though. He always wanted to just stop moving, for chrissakes.

My brain has her bags packed, all the shades are drawn and the lights are on automatic timers so that no one will know that I'm gone.

You're like a little bear. The only thing missing is a honey pot. He laughs sleepily. I jump at the sound of his voice. I thought he was out like a light.

Did I wake you? 

Yes. You didn't think I would feel a hundred-pound weight on my blanket? I've been paralyzed like this for over an hour. He grabs me, pulling me in against him, throwing the duvet over top of both of us. His skin is so warm. He kisses the tip of my nose and then pushes his face up toward the light to fall back asleep.

I close my eyes but I don't sleep.

Where do you want to go? 

Day trips. 

Where though?

Exploring. 

Ah. Close enough to be safe but far enough to get away. This is the story of your life, Bridget.

Waiting for the wind to change.

Sam felt the urge this morning to wake us all up at the crack of the dawn and march us down to the beach for a private service by the water. He vacations just about as well as I do, which is to say he hardly does. I will proudly report that I sat outside for a whopping ninety minutes with a glass of wine and Kitchen Confidential, churning through almost a quarter of the book proper and I didn't hear a peep from the house or the sky or the neighborhood. I think they put an embargo on contacting me for that time period and it was nothing short of surprising and completely unexpected.

I did forget to water the lawn too, which was going to be part of my evening but the book was too good to put down and so it waited. I'll do it today.

I was having a good sleep but I am finding that it doesn't actually matter if I go to bed at ten or at one in the morning I will wake up exactly seven hours later ready to roll. Usually that's five but since last night was so late due to an attempt to cram two movies into the later part (Rezort and IO, respectively, on Netflix. IO was far better but Rezort had the best chase scene since Vanishing Point, not even kidding. I screamed out loud.) I went to bed at one-thirty and was up promptly at eight-thirty, or maybe that was Sam's soft knock urging us to follow him.

He had coffee in thermoses at least. Bless him. I sucked almost a whole one back and then decided I was ready to listen but he was almost done. It was cold, about seventeen degrees and I'm up to my ankles in the icy Pacific, short-shorts and a huge sweater and bedhead because that's fashion for me as of late. Underneath it the ever-present pink bikini.

I look around as the caffeine lights the fire in my veins and I think this is my life now and it's awesome.

Moonicorns.

My dark favorites of music and metal in particular are thick and heavy like cream pouring over glass, like the night settling in over the trees, layers of inky opaque purple punctuated by random tiny flashes of light, fireflies or stars to decorate the black. Just the way I like it. I tried to commandeer Ben's big headphones for the morning but he needed them and so I made due with my airpods (finally in again after three months less one week using corded phones due to the ring through my ear.) and it wasn't so bad, honestly.

Besides, Mark is here so I'm not listening to music right now. Right now I hear the hypnotic drone of his machine, the power supply humming away on the floor underneath his doc boot, the needle a higher pitched vibration as he deposits color into Lochlan's skin.

I'm always horribly jealous when someone else has work done and I can't be the one. There's something so cathartic and relaxing about focusing on the pain of the needles for a few hours. I have to watch very carefully. If I am distracted my brain forgets to stay still and I will be overwhelmed with the urge to rip myself away from that pain. If I watch I'm fine.

I'm not having any more work done. Think I'm full up. Mark has changed a few small things, touched up things and finished me off and the only parts remaining that are not tattooed are not places I would like to be tattooed so I'm done but I miss the process. And so I have my books and wine and I'm chilling out this weekend at home while they get things done. I will garden and cook and bake and maybe nap but probably not and I will Netflix and chill and Schuyler promised to take me for ice cream at a place they go since we can't get to Cows up the hill in Whistler this week and it's better if you buy it by the cone instead of by the tub.

(Whistler is overrun with mountain bikers this week for Crankworx. Not my all-time favorite season on the ninety-nine but better than ski season, oddly enough. And Cows is the best ice cream in the known and unknown universe, as ever.)