Santa's real but his beard is red.

Christmas starts at lunch time today! 

UNGHHHHHHH YES! 

Also happy Solstice or warm tidings on the longest night and shortest day. We got through it. We survived. Now Santa is coming, just in time to celebrate the days getting longer and we're not even going to talk about the decided lack of spirit this year or the fact that my primroses and strawberries are still blooming. I tossed them in the vegetable garden pile and covered them with maple leaves in case we got snow but instead we got warmth and tons of rain. I should have left them all out. I did make an executive decision and take the olive and pepper trees back outside. I don't care if they don't make it, truth be told. We all have to fend for ourselves and I have tiny gnats in the window by the doors. Every day I kill four of them and they just keep coming. 

Like an army. 

Kind of wonder where they're holed up but also I don't want to know. I'm a very fussy cleaner but are the boys? Some of them. None of them will be there at six-fifteen in the morning with a butter knife wrapped around a cloth scraping dust out of the grooves on my big American southwest desk though. You'd think I use no dishes for all the crap that winds up in this groove. 

The last load of laundry is in. We might try and hit the Christmas market downtown before it's gone but that's a maybe. I have three different knitting projects on the go and a bottomless list on Netflix so I've cured my shack-whackiness. I bought no good snacks this year and am subsisting on prescriptions, multivitamins, pistachios and homemade wine. 

Caleb says I'm an abomination. 

Ben says I'm a saint. 

Lochlan says I'm a fever dream. 

Duncan said I was a bitch. 

I was so thrilled at that one I laughed. Better a bitch than a doormat, I told him. We've been spatting all December because he can't cure his shack-whackiness. It's a more primal version. I told him he needs a trip somewhere, maybe but he said he'd rather be home. 

Gosh, we're all getting old. 

There's a bottle of tylenol by the kitchen sink. No point putting it away because someone always needs it and takes it out. I used to replace it a couple times a year. Now I buy a new one every two weeks. I wake up stiff and sore, limbs aching and never in a good way. I have resumed doing yoga with Ben because if I don't I just hurt all day. I spend all my downtime in the hot tub, sauna or pool. Same with most of the others. 

I am back to saying less and meaning more. 

I am trying so desperately to find some spirit. 

What would help? Lochlan asks and I want to give him my list of complaints but he's always been one to say Now tell me what might help make that better? A variation on the question between us right now. 

A smoky jazz club, decorated for Christmas, and an old-fashioned, followed by an Irish coffee. Maybe a pastry or some tapas for lunch.

Go change.

Extra pills, fewer words.

Today's t-shirt makes me laugh. PJ brought it back from LA for me. It's got a cartoon drawing of a UFO on the front and a speech bubble that says GET IN, LOSER. 

I feel like it's meant for me. 

Today's breakfast was a handful of pills and oatmeal, black coffee, a badly bruised banana (fuck you, Superstore for your shitty produce) and a multivitamin. Today's lunch was uh, crackers and dinner was a fried egg sandwich with farm bacon from a place in the valley that cuts their bacon so thick I stopped calling it bacon and started calling it steakon. They know what I mean! 

(GET IN, LOSER.)

It's cheap considering it's practically the whole hind leg of a pig in one package. Like fourteen dollars and it feeds eight people, easily. We also bought pepperoni and some aged cheddar but that won't last long. 

I am sober, if you're wondering. 

People say I sound gagged. Like legally or threatened-of-bodily-harm but honestly since Caleb behaves and I am now boring there isn't much to write about save for Lochlan's blissful contentment. His dreams are coming true. Caleb's not evil, I'm not stubborn. Ben isn't scary anymore and Cole and Jake are dead, 

It's perfect. 

I mean it is. We took the money and ran as far away as we could from the circus and the side show too, the midway is a distant sticky, sweaty memory and the music still winds around and between us but we're still here. I'm still here. He still puts up with me. The ghosts haven't gotten me yet but neither have the aliens. 

I'd rather be a loser than a memory. I said that to Loch from my side of the hot tub earlier and he laughed out loud and said Same.

 

Black Tuesday.

 I did all of my shopping early. I stuck with practical gifts instead of fanciful, instead of homemade and I ordered damn near all of it this week and every single day a blue van pulls up early in the afternoon and a pile is left in the parcel box by the gate. I had to have Lochlan go and remove the lock and we added a camera out there because there are so many couriers and if one locks the box then the others have no safe spot to put the rest but I turned on my camera notifications and once the frost burns off the driveway I can go up and fetch things as they trickle in. I bought tape and cards and paper last year. I will make labels and reuse boxes to ship things in and I already remembered to buy an extra roll of packing tape so while I am not nearly as prepared as I usually am, I am getting there, and that's a good thing, as I feel mired perpetually in the quicksand of pills and sleep and routine and pain and I'm okay though, so that's something. 

I went with Ruth today to finally collect her car, fresh with snow tires and it's one less thing to worry about. Henry is secure in his job. Lochlan has so many irons in the fire it's drowning for a lack of air and I discovered I really freaking love knitting. I have knit off and on since I was a little girl but lately it's all I seem to do in the evenings while we are watching movies. Lochlan smiled so dryly the first few times. He asked me if he should bring the rocker in from the front porch. I smiled and said no. I'm a couch knitter, bracing my needles or my loop against my ribcage and I can't seem to break such a bad habit but I'm also knitting top-down socks today and so maybe once I'm better at them. I'm struggling to be a proficient fine knitter. If I can't be a fast one, that is. 

Ben asked for socks. He asked for a hat and a sweater and fingerless gloves too. I'm going to be so busy. We are actually minding the deep-freeze this week. It seems stupidly cold but it's not. 

I made an executive decision this year though that is a big change from previous seasons. No Christmas decorations up and no lights until December first, giving us time to embrace fall. I'm loving the early dark and the yellow leaves and the change. Rather than rushing headlong from Labour Day through Thanksgiving into Halloween then two months straight of Christmas we're enjoying the post-Halloween extended fall season. It feels less rushed somehow and richer, more meaningful. And hopefully instead of being sick and tired of the trees and lights by boxing day I'm hoping it will help extend the spirit into the first weeks of January. If something isn't working it's always good to try something different, I think.

Many years have gone by now and I still dread today like the rain that never stops, and you wonder if you will get swept to your demise or wind up in a new place altogether. I did anyway, as nothing is ever familiar about the way this feels and I have used this anniversary as my own personal monkey bars, and I climb all over it and run around it and sometimes I duck between the bars and sit inside and hope no one can see me, and sometimes, more rarely and ever wonderful, I can stand at the very top, arms outstretched toward the sun and I can reach for heaven and wave, hoping he sees me. 

Some days I can't even make it to the park, but I am not keeping score. I no longer care what year anniversary this is or exactly how many days he has been gone. I don't weep for the man he would have been on his birthday, the day that follows this day nor do I recognize myself in the mirror. 

Things I want to tell him are always on the tip of my tongue. 

I made potato bread today. I bet you'd love it. 

Do you think the world is actually imploding? 

What do you think of this perfume? 

Your son got his contract extended for a year. He's doing so good. 

Ruth is overwhelmed in her amazing career and is finally going to buy snow tires. 

PJ still calls you a coward in his darkest moments. 

Caleb still wishes he had been there to push you. 

I wish you never left. 

I wish I looked the same for you. 

I can't tell him that Amazon now gives me a running countdown to tell me how many stops away they are, or that butter now costs nine dollars for a cups worth, salted or not. I can't tell him I finally stopped drinking, just when our homemade wine was starting to get good. I can't tell him I gained a little weight or that it's because my heart falls out constantly, rolling around on the floor picking up dust. I could show him the new kittens but I don't think they would be enough to bring him back. I could show him what finally forced Ben into the sweet gentle giant role he should have been all along but I could also show him how long it takes Ben to type a text message, or get a joke now. 

Maybe he does see all of it, and more. Maybe he sees how I struggle to conquer this jungle gym and I fall off it so often, knocking the wind from my lungs on the hard grass, leaving streaks of dirt on the back of my shirt. 

Maybe last year was easier. Maybe next year will be too. Maybe the rain will stop but I doubt that just like I doubt everything. It's the new normal. I live with it, around it and in it. And yet I am never comfortable here. And I never ever stop missing him. 

 

I want to write but my brain is mashed potatoes. For my own safety, probably (gestures helplessly at the calendar) because next week is the bad one and while I've been nicely distracted lately (mostly without internet by design), it's not as if they can just turn off time. 

Well, Maybe Lochlan can and this is how we picked up where we left off? I don't know, exactly. I just know that his aubergine waffleknit shirt is too big on me but also it looks better with my colouring and these jeans are at least twenty years old if not older and the clocks go back this weekend. 

Bringing more darkness, earlier. The rain is set to start this evening and not stop until Advent, or maybe later. The world gets so small it fits in the light thrown by a single candle and when that happens I can't breathe. It's such a quiet panic, however. No drama, just slack-jawed, glassy-eyed, sleep-breath, staring-at-the-wall panic. 

Ben will bite his lip and point it it's probably better to say something. 

I let my eyes move so slowly, trying to balance the tears so they don't spill and I keep my head straight and level until I meet his gaze. 

Jesus, Bridge, you're so creepy. 

But his voice is full of admiration instead of horror and with that I am snapped back to the present. To the warm, well-lit kitchen, lights on, woodstove crackling, arms everywhere in case I need to hug someone or fall. 

It will never not feel so heavy, and I have never felt so weak.

October rust.

How do I fill the time, holed up in the shadows of the ones who have left, only to forget those shadows leaving these huge dark spaces where so much light used to be? 

Learn something new, I tell myself automatically, finding solace in working with my hands, keeping my brain so focused on perfecting the task at hand that it remains present, failing to wander away into the night, mistaking that ever-present darkness for a simple shadow, time after time. 

How do I not stay in the past, refusing to move past the dates seared into my mind? How do I not become hypnotized by the flames, so beautiful even as they burn everything to the ground, leaving nothing but a smoky darkness that looks like shadows but with more destruction, more decay. 

How do I put it down when I can't let go?

***

I wrote that a few days ago and didn't post it. It feels like me. Sounds like me, looks exactly like me, a spitting image carved in granite of Bridget's forever psyche, like a greek tragedy represented in stone. The leaves have turned red, the moon orange and the bats have returned to replace to chickadees now rare in the cold October winds. I wrap my sweater tighter around my bones, sip my coffee and listen carefully as the boys talk in their low voices. Sometimes I zone out. Sometimes I sleep sitting up. Sometimes I strain to hear and still can't and other times I want to break out of this stone and run down the grass, leaping into the saltwater, and healing the scratches and scrapes from the days keeping their hold on me. Sometimes I watch Netflix for days on end, another video up on a second screen, teaching myself continental knitting or so I hope in order to be faster at it, since the English way is slow. I'm pretty certain the Irish way of knitting is to say fuck it and pour whiskey over the whole thing, lighting it on fire, but I want to become a fine knitter as it's a brain-calming activity the likes of which I rarely find and it's an easy creative outlet when I don't want to write or paint. 

The pumpkins and leaves outside are soaked. The grass so green now it looks as if someone turned up the saturation on the world and the army has begun to draw close yet again as the calendar rolls around to the truly sad bad anniversaries we can't seem to forget if we tried.

Decade-old cravings and not being able to help them.

What wouldn't I give right now for a bowl of tumeric coconut curry with pineapple chutney and chunks of chicken with roasted roots? Don't ask me that when I'm hungry, but the only place to get the one I want is downtown and no one will drive there and get me some even though I am on day five of the first cold/flu of the season and somehow only Ruth and I have been struck down by it. Ruth goes like a bat out of hell as it is, working like a maniac and then doing extreme sports and escape rooms and day trips on her days off and sees a lot of people so it makes sense. I live in my ivory tower and am not allowed to go anywhere except the superstore and occasionally the yarn or potter supply shops in Surrey so I don't know how I get sick. 

Oh, yes, Ruth comes by to show me things and then I get sick. Or maybe I had the luck of someone breathing on me in the aisle where I let out a mighty expletive upon discovering that, while they took away all of the Stouffers and Lean Cuisine frozen dinners, cosmic brownies and Little Debbie products, they gave all that space to more Global foods and so I can buy pakoras and masala vada and stuffed naan whenever I want. 

When I swear in the grocery store people look so alarmed. It's nothing, I just get excited about new stuff. Grocery shopping is such a chore. Also we have on average only five varieties of pop-tarts in Canada now and I will never understand why. 

Yes, I do. Everything is disappearing from the shelves because supplies can't afford to parse out their wares across the entire huge vast land that is this country, especially ironic when we all live within a stone's throw or an hour's drive of the border. 

My new passport is here and I am sorely tempted to drive down to Bellingham and go to Trader Joes and Target but I also don't want to shop near people with automatic guns so I might stick with Superstore and uhhh wherever else I can get what I need. I don't want to leave the country anymore. Thanks to Amazon I barely want to leave the house and don't have to. They're driving down my street every day anyway, may as well put that to good use. 

They won't bring me the curry though.

Lift me up to the heavens (I can't hear what they're saying).

Your princess finally got to see Atreyu, seeing Drowning and more importantly, Watch Me Burn live were parts of my brain I didn't realize were puzzle pieces and now that section of this weird science experiment that lives inside my head is complete. Or mostly, anyway. You can still see right through it but I love live shows and I'm happy they opened, as when I originally got the tickets for Maiden it said Raven Age was coming back again and I rolled my eyes. Again? Nepo babies in music are a given but after one tour it's a problem. 

Maiden was nuts. Though Bruce looked older than his years at last, and he has grown his hair back out (I saw him last in 2016) and the bangs were my favourite part of his look and they are gone in favour of a white half-ponytail. He also had a bad cold and hid it amazingly well. I was pleased he didn't call it off but also he still hit all the notes and it was the final Canadian date on their Future/Past tour. 

Also the merch was so much better this time. No more disembowelled moose on t-shirts, instead the actual band designs/album covers on shirts. Cotton shirts, one hundred percent. Love it. 

They trotted out Eddie a couple of times. A big inflatable thing came up for all of five minutes before they stuffed it back in its crate. It looked like a red dragon but it's probably not. I don't know the lore. I didn't even know some of the songs this time, but they did play Fear of the Dark and Wasted Years so it was good. I had a sore throat and crowd-fear so it was a challenging night for sure. 

The beer was cheap and plentiful and the crowds were fun. I do have to give a shout out to the gorgeous girl with the black hair, black tank top and black shorts who I saw crowd-surfing not once but twice. From my ivory tower suite I wanted to be down in the pit beside her but also not, as those days are long over. It's not often you see girls surfing. It's not really a safe thing but she ended each round with a huge smile so watching that was as fun as the show itself. Thank you for the added magic of watching your profound joy.

Bruce swears they'll be back. I hope he's right. They range in age from 65 to 71 and it shows. Will I go in seven years again? I don't know. I felt old.

Pumpkinhead.

My, my, those eyes like fire
I'm a winged insect, you're a funeral pyre
Come now, bite through these wires
I'm a waking hell and the gods grow tired
Reset my patient violence along both lines of a pathway higher
Grow back your sharpest teeth, you know my desire

Is it obvious I show up every couple of weeks? I don't know, you tell me. I thought it seemed obvious. I would be here all day if not for the Rules. Rules that work, I guess. For who and why? 

I don't know. I'm not in charge.

I scrubbed bathrooms today and did some fall garden cleanup and caught up on laundry too to help Dalton and I talked to Ruth for a long time on the phone and also talked to the old man up the street that also walks his ancient dog each morning.

My reward was the dog sleeping blissfully for most of the afternoon and a date with Daniel and Ben for nails and hot chocolate. Daniel gave Ben matte black polish and I got a really nice french manicure that he did when I said it was his choice. Usually he puts on Chanel Vamp if he gets to pick but this is really nice. Chaotic neutral, as it were. Vamp makes me feel as though I should be putting on winged eyeliner and scowling at everyone and I don't scowl much these days. 

The hot chocolate was really good too. I got it at Wal-Mart. It's a big can and it's really cheap and for some reason it's just good and not sickly sweet like the take-out stuff. 

Lochlan says I am depressed and it's probably just the daylight lessening that is doing it. It's a well-documented problem that I have and very little helps. I have given away half my wardrobe. I don't want colour. I never actually sleep. I can watch movies and clean but I don't do a lot else. 

I don't know. Jacob's anniversary is coming. His birthday is coming. Thanksgiving is coming. The dark is coming. 

Oop, the Devil is coming. He's going to be pissed off. He loves the Vamp shade.

Oh Lantern.

So busy today and we went into downtown Vancouver for a change of scenery after lunch but the traffic. The people. The lineups. Crazy. We went and had Japanese food at our third-favourite place. Went for Tiramisu at another and then went to Starbs and had coffee (I didn't, it was four o'clock! I had a frozen mango-dragonfruit lemonade-thingie). We sat in traffic on Hornby for a stupid amount of time next to the ever-empty bike lane and Lochlan asked me if I wanted to bail on traffic and stay at the Fairmont tonight. 

No, I wanted to be home. I had my empty sticky plastic cup and my paper shopping bag from Saint Laurent and my patience flew out the window on the Iron Workers Bridge at some point just before sunset and it's time for this princess to turn back into a pumpkin. Time to fire up the Netflix and knit for a little while as the boys fire up games and books for the evening. 

It was nice though. Reminds me of old times and cements why I like it here so much, tucked out of the way, down the long driveway past the big black ornate iron gates. Back to having the Devil within reach and the army keeping watch, but not letting my guard down. 

My guard is Lochlan and I made a promise.