One week til I can get on a plane and touch him for real.

Not sure who was more ashamed this morning. Lochlan for having the gall to invite Caleb up to function as the huge space usually taken up by Ben, knowing full well I don't need to complicate my autumn any further, or me, who drank a whole bottle of malbec, said fuck it, and took every opportunity they gave me to turn myself inside out while they touched me, headphones in place so I don't have to hear the things they say, body numb by the time the sunrise hit, mercifully so until the broiling steam from the shower hit my skin and woke everything up again. I fled the room for the relative safety of the gazebo as the sun climbed the long ladder into the clouds and I refused to even meet Lochlan's eyes once daylight rounded out my view. 

It's okay, pretty sure his hypocritic gaze was fixed on the floor too. Not like he doesn't know it makes things worse. It's a short-sighted solution to a longterm problem and it would be better for everyone involved if we didn't pull this shit every time we miss Ben. Not like Caleb doesn't lurk around us late into the night just hoping we'll let our guard down. Just pouring more wine, hoping Bridget will turn the corner from mean, spiteful insult-thrower to positively pathetic, helpless drunk and the minute that switch is flipped Lochlan just wants to fix it and he doesn't care who he has to sell his soul to to do it, whether it's August, Sam, Schuyler or the Devil himself.

Caleb and Ben are the same size. Same colouring. Same intensity. And that's where it stops. Caleb has his own vulnerabilities but they're nothing like Ben's. Caleb holds his fork wrong. He shoots his cuffs too much. He wears an exceedingly expensive Breitling watch that hurts when it scrapes against me. His eyes are blue instead of brown. His hands are smooth and manicured, no callouses from the constant guitar playing, no hesitation, just smooth all the time. Calculating instead of earnest, manipulative instead of predictable, serious instead of goofy. 

But that blurs in the dark and we let him in. And we gave him a show for free and then he made us pay the price and the proximity burned us against the moon until we keened and hawed in the night for everything to stop, painfully aware as the night ground to a dull finish that the only things we're eroding here are our credibilities and our strength. Bridget's mental health. Lochlan's steadfast morality. 

But who needs either of those things when the Devil will give you everything you really want. 

I called for Ben and gave my family code and it wasn't even ten minutes when he called me back. Facetime. I am so hungover and so sensitive I can hardly meet his face. 

Caleb came over last night. 

Loch there? 

Yes. 

You both okay? 

Yes, I lie.

It's fine, Bridge. Sorry I missed it. He smiles his absolutely smarmiest grin and I start laughing and crying all at once. 

You think it is? I don't think it is. 

It's better than if you go see him alone. 

I know. 

Then don't worry about it. 

When can you come home?

I see Asher coming across the lawn and I roll onto my back so I don't have to look at him, holding the phone up in front of my face so I can look at Ben for one more minute. My time is up. My ghost-balloons bob around in the cap of the gazebo, Jacob coming into frame every few seconds to frown down upon me, Cole laughing at my pain and Ben begins blur until I can't see him anymore. Asher takes the phone from me as I choke out an I love you and Ben's gone again. 

Asher puts my phone in his pocket and turns and heads inside. I cover my hands with my face and sob because out here no one can hear me and there's nowhere else I can go.

Fixty-six (floating on a wine-dark open sea).

The ship has flung me off a thousand times in the night and still I crawl back onboard only to be tossed into the darkened sea on the next invisible wave. This time he plucks me out of the salt and ash and pulls me back, keeping me in his arms tightly even though we are both soaked to the bone, ice-cold but growing warmer by the minute. 

Lochlan holds up his hand and lights his fingers aflame one by one, a birthday cake we only celebrate in this one place where he is a pirate and I am a mermaid and he melts my ice with his fire but it never seems to be enough.

Oh, it's enough, Circus Peanut. 

I laugh shakily, my teeth chattering against the cold slicked down flannel covering his heart. Is it? What if it kills us?

Then we'll go out knowing this was the greatest love and the best birthday of all time. 

Now I know you're lying. 

I never ever lie, though. 

Yes, you do. You told me everything was going to be okay. 

And it is because you're here with me. It's the happiest birthday I have ever had, Bridget, and you're never ever going to top it. 

I'll top it next year. I'm going to buy us lifejackets so this stops happening all the damn time. 

If you don't want to go out on the boat we don't have to.

Maybe we'll just wear the lifejackets on land too. Then we'll be extra-safe. 

That's a very good plan. 

***

For Lochlan's birthday I got him a sailboat so my waking-dream was themed perfectly. It's not large, it's just a fifteen-footer, basic Marlowe with an open hull but he's always wanted to learn to sail and I get to be the one to teach him. It might hold three of us if one of us greases up but it's small and safe and gleaming and he absolutely loves it.

Let her eat cake (there is so much of it anyway).

Still here. Still having french fry wars and singing in the rain, getting used to new eyeglasses and drinking rosemary gin. Still in too much pain to type a lot which is being looked at on Tuesday, and in the meantime, the man burns tonight.

In an hour, actually. You can watch it on Burningman.org. 

Also I asked Lochlan to saw off my hand. Never heard a nervous laugh like that before. I'll be locked in the main house for the rest of the year now, probably. Happy birthday, honey. Your wife is fucking CRACKED.

Hand still hurts but the emails. Holy cow.

I'm alive, contrary to the breathlessly bitter and excited emails asking me if I'm dead (yet). Sorry to disappoint you. I'm a little bit coked out (it's a JOKE. It's codeine, not cocaine), pain-riddled and busy. Ruth and Lochlan's birthdays are this weekend, Friday and Sunday respectively. We have no shortage of ridiculously traditional festivities planned, and the boys have been so incredibly proactive in helping to cook/wrap/fetch/bake/decorate it's been unreal. 

All the while we are missing Ben with a fierceness I don't remember from before, as he's always been on tour or in rehab this time of year anyway. I never said fall was a good time for everyone, but in this house spring, summer and winter can cause problems too, you know. 

(All of this planning and preparing will keep her busy, they said.)

And maybe they were right, because the words and directions come slowly but I direct them in a dance that sees us ready to roll almost a day and a half early, and we are finding the joy in simple things like working together and putting new twists on old favourite traditions. If you don't you die, I guess. Maybe this is the point. You just ride the rollercoaster of feelings into oblivion and then on the sea of glass you look back and it will be profound and stunning how beautiful everything truly was, even the hard parts. The ones that made you sad or afraid. All of it by design.

Guess who got her cast off this afternoon?

My hand and wrist hurt like the dickens and are useless and my skin is molting. Apparently this is normal but it looks and feels almost worse. The doctor was so very proud that I didn't saw it off over the summer or charm someone else to. 

I must be losing my powers, along with my mind.

Jesus paint swatch.

Ended up buying a huge teak bench yesterday after finding a forty percent off sale and out-talking a fast-talking owner of a little import furniture shop who was anxious to make money but also aware that if he prices things too high his inventory is going to sit. 

We both came out really happy with the transaction and the house looks more West Coast and less cobbled-together prairie farmhouse every day. I'm going for a fusion of the two. I don't really actually care but am going into fall looking at shit I hate and changing it. This was for the front hallway, which has somehow had a radical makeover without actually making many changes at all. Works for me. Not like I spend any time in that room, it's just a place where I drop my keys in the wooden bowl and then kick my shoes off and leave my bag on a hook with my favourite scarf or wrap. That's it. Sometimes I need to go put shoes away or mop the floor or collect half a dozen hoodies left on hooks. But it's the first thing I see when I come inside if I use the main doors (which I never do, I come in the side door and up three steps into the back side of the kitchen, from a long hallway with a bathroom and the butler's pantry. So I want it to be homey. Case in point, the back hallway is painted a beautiful shade of burnt orange because it just needed to be warmer. I don't know but it works and it works very well. The whole area down there is natural wood trim with lots of light from very tall windows and yet it's shaded by the huge trees around the edges of the driveway. 

I don't know, I like the bench, is all. And fall makes me think of reinvention in a way spring never has. Maybe if I put up new curtains this fall will be different. Maybe if this room is a different colour shit will hurt so much less. Maybe I'm coming down from these pills and feeling too much again and decorating is just a strawman topic for today.

Sun but cool. Perfect.

 My phone doesn't want to charge overnight anymore and I keep waking up to it on 43%. Huh. Two nights in a row. I've done some things and changed some things (and some cords) and we'll see what happens tonight.

In any case, it's a sunny Saturday and they let up a little to see what happens with me too, as I am only charging to around fifty percent and my software, well, it's fucked. I am by the pool writing, since I can't watch videos on my phone. I'm shopping on Shein, which is somewhat hilarious but it's addictive to scroll through seven hundred thousand dresses, even if they're not Valentino, which is all Caleb wants me to look at if I'm shopping. I've never chosen one proper. He picks them. He'd be horrified to know I have an account on this website but I already got a dog travel basket for the truck and a pair of gingham shorts that were a little big but very cute and breathable for the heat so a win on both counts. I think I spent twenty-five bucks. 

I don't feel like swimming this morning and prefer to watch Lochlan and Dalton do backflips off the diving board, something they're not allowed to do technically but Henry-with-the-fresh-haircut (and beard trim!) is still sleeping upstairs in his room in the main house and Ruth moved out a while ago but comes over on her days off to swim and hang out and raid the pantry and see all of us, especially her little brother. They're so close, I worry for him but he seems happy and he goes with anyone and everyone who heads out to visit her. She and her fiance have a lovely huge bright apartment in town and they're so happy. It's weird but I'm getting used to it, save for a few stunning moments here or there where I feel like I can't catch my breath. I guess this is normal but it feels so strange.

It's been a pretty quiet week overall. I got sucked so hard into A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara that you might never see me again. I'm in love with the characters and it's brilliantly written so far, and I'm only fifty pages in. All of the boys read it and cried and grew closer than ever before and now I need to see this magic for myself. 

So off to read and laze around and hopefully someone's ordering a pizza for supper.

Short and toasted.

For day three of the burn we retracted the whole roof of the pool enclosure in order to swim in the rain, like the old days, temperature of the water jacked to almost-bathtub appeal and every time I stop treading I fall asleep so I only lasted fifteen minutes or so. That was very early this morning.

I want to take Henry for his haircut this afternoon. He can drive. I don't even technically have to go.

I'm eating my tomatoes as fast as they ripen. Once they're orangeish I bring them in to finish to a full red on a bright windowsill somewhere. And then I just eat them. That's how good they are. The apples from our apple tree were crisp and sweet, the grapes from the vineyard are perfect and taste like Welch grape jelly. The potatoes are buttery-fresh and delicious and the pumpkins and sunflowers are HUGE. The only thing lagging now are the cucumbers which are almost dill-pickle sized and so good enough for me. I was actually worried and considered not planting any due to the fear of having to make a huge batch of pickles again this year when we don't go through all that many and I gave away so much I can't expect people to take more. 

So yeah. This is manageable. 

Lunch is dumpling soup from the korean place I love. If I'm awake. If not mine will get eaten. They always say they will save it for me. Then conveniently there wasn't enough.

Burning, day two.

Apparently from across the room, with music playing Hold her for a while becomes Haloperidol. 

Who knew? I thought August was answering an earlier question, since I can't fucking stay awake to listen for a response anyway, he was trying to keep Lochlan in the room, as Lochlan HATES this and disappears, leaving everyone else to deal while he heads off somewhere to drink his fears away. Or maybe ponder where else he can run off to, where I might not follow, as I haven't failed to follow him yet and maybe he just wants to get away. 

This city's cold and empty No one's around to judge me-

Still wondering what The Weeknd did to cash all his chips in on one old flame. What was he so ashamed of save for coming back after leaving, probably. The music industry is built on broken hearts. I should know. Speaking of which, the theory goes that I literally threw myself off a psychological cliff after watching Ben go over the side. In support. In defense. Who knows? It's happening and eventually I guess it will stop but it's an extreme stress reaction to what he's going through. 

(As ever. I will side with Ben until the day I die. He's the best friend I ever had. Sorry to everyone else but you know this and you can drug me to hell and back but some things just happen.)

So I still don't have an answer from August but gosh the DREAMS. EPIC.

Burning (wo)man.

What are the side effects? 

They've given me Haloperidol or something. It's not Ativan. I keep falling asleep and falling off a cliff in my dreams, jerking awake. Like every fifteen minutes. If that's not a side effect then I think I need something better because this sucks. 

Erectile dysfunction.

Caleb's eyebrows go up and he stifles a laugh. Anything else?

Sudden death. 

This sounds like a poor choice. 

They do what they think is right. This is a team that Everett handpicked to try and work with my own doctor and the Russian doctors too. Since I won't leave. Asher is a hawk. When I sneezed he all but leapt out of his chair, colliding with Lochlan, who was up as I opened my eyes. He'll beat anyone at attentiveness but he's so tired he willingly gave me over to Caleb and Asher is all but a footnote in the day now as Caleb has been leaving messages for people in the know all over the world to try and see if there isn't something better/different/more expensive we can try. 

Best burn ever, I point out and he smiles, medium-blues concerned but full of warmth for me. He was afraid I would leave so I didn't. Any other moment I would have run for the hills to spite him. 

But not today, Satan. 

Literally.

Ha.