California Tree Poppies from over at the track yesterday morning. They are thriving this year. On my way home from the gym where I ran into Charity coming out as I was headed into the locker room. The original friend ghost from 4 years ago that still hurts when I see her because she never explained why and actively ignores me when she sees me. It is so weird.
It still stings after all this time as I see her usually a couple of times a week. We are neighbors and go to the same gym. A few weeks back she was changing channels on the big tv over my head on the elliptical with the remote control like less than a foot away from me studiously pretending I wasn’t there. After 4 years!
People give me things. This has been going on since I was a teenager. It may have something to do with the fact that I live simply and am not so much into consumer culture and so what furniture I have is either cheap or used and it is fine with me and I wear practical clothes.
I think it was the second time Mr. B. was over here he took something out of his backpack and said he had something for me. It was a dark blue t-shirt. 1X. Huge.
The shirt the guys wear in prison, at least the most recent one he had been in. I held it up and asked if they made people that big and he said, oh yeah. And I said this would be like a dress on me, (and it was, almost to my knees) and he said you can work out in it or wear it to sleep in.
Thanking him I folded it up and put in the closet with my sweaty workout clothes and forgot about it. I did wonder. Do the guys think women they know want to wear their prison clothes? Is this a thing?
This was way before it occurred to me that we might, you know, become intimate.
A few weeks back I found it. Put it on, and yeah, it was kind of like a sleep dress, heavy cotton, at some point I had washed it along with my other sweaty workout clothes. Last week when things were getting odd, he told me he would be here Tuesday but, in the end, didn’t come until the next day.
I had pulled it out and slept in it. Then when I knew he was indeed coming over I took it off as I felt disconcerted about the whole thing and put it in the wash again.
I pay for a biweekly recycling service that takes wearable clothes every other week among other things.
The t-shirt is now in that bin. It will get picked up tomorrow. I wish it a happy new home somewhere far, very far away. Mauritania? Mauritania would be good.
What was left of the sourdough loaf he brought has been thrown away. The remnants of the soda he likes poured down the drain.
The work he did on my patio well and in the garden, I can’t do anything about. They are going to remind me of him no matter what, but in time I will forget to make the association.
In time. That’s the key. I know this.
I had a good day yesterday, lots of energy and the emotional pain felt more removed, but today, as grief is so unpredictable, I woke feeling sad and tired.
I seem to, with the birthday, and the stark realization that even if I don’t want it to, my age is making a difference in how I live my life, and how I experienced the mostly unprocessed grief because I was so busy with the League stuff and the circumstances in his life, of the death of my ex-husband a few months back, who I loved very much.
And Mr. Finch.
Everything about the poetry reminds me of him.
And right now, the poetry is the most important thing. I feel like I need to get the book done so that I can extricate myself from Walt’s world.
Things just feel so strange right now. Like I am stumbling around having just woken up from a dream.
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