Two things I've written lately:
on the fray
I gave him my bed when I moved away from Iowa.
I went to Seattle. Spent some time on a little mattress that my parents gave me. Bought a bigger bed, a hard-mattressed bed, a bed that I could take up all by myself if I wanted. A bed that I was the first to own.
Then I came back to Iowa, and visited him and my old bed. It wasn't my bed any more, really--he'd shifted the groove in the mattress, and it didn't smell like me any more.
But I lay in it anyway. When we had a fight and he walked out of the room, i lay in bed and, rather than think of the harsh words he'd just said to me, thought about the bed. How I'd gotten it from a couple who sold it to make room for a bigger bed they could share with their girlfriend. The people who i'd shared it with--my best friend, a couple of ex-boyfriends, the guy I'd dated for almost a year, my first girlfriend. The fights I'd had in that bed, and the passionate making up after the fights.
And the bed still didn't feel like me. It was as if, by giving it to him, i'd erased all that history, all the good and the bad and the passionate things that happened in it.
It was as if I'd become someone new, someone who had never been in that bed.
I understood then, for the first time, that sometimes history isn't enough. I knew with an aching certainty that I would never be enough to fill the spaces in this bed, the spaces in my past.
I should have listened to myself, then. i should have gotten up from that bed and walked out, disappeared without a trace, left those spaces behind.
But I didn't.
And a year later, I'm paying the price.
idat
and on Depths
There is a strange camaraderie between bus riders.
This morning, waiting for the 70 to whisk me to work, a group of people came by
the stop. Bus riders like us, they explained that a Metro employee had come by
their stop and told them that the power in the overhead trolley lines had
failed, and that we would all have to walk down to the bus stop which the 66
(which is an express and therefore gasoline-powered) would stop to pick us up.
So all the people at our stop joined the group in walking down the street, a
motley group of teenagers and adults, some going to school, some going to work,
some without an apparent destination. We ambled in a clump the three blocks to
the 66 stop, joining the 30 or so people gathered there already.
It reminded me of the time that I walked to work from where my bus had been
stranded in a snowdrift near Lake City. I followed the path of the bus,
letting people know as I walked that the 72 was stuck, that the snow was much
heavier a half mile north, and it would be a while before a bus would come by.
Bus riders are strung together by a common dependence on a system that is as
likely as not to be late or malfunctioning; we are common in our attitude that
we'll get there...eventually.
Cars foster the illusion that it's everyone for themselves; bus riding breaks
that down. All of us face the same drunks and crazies, all of us leave earlier
than we would ordinarily in order to leave time for bus strangeness.
We're all in it together.
I'm feeling...overwhelmed.
too much work, deadlines too tight, not enough time or resources. not enough me to go around.
I just want to curl up under my desk for a while, and maybe take a nap.
and maybe the worst thing of all is that Kallisti has gone missing. he slipped out the door last night, and I didn't see him, and I didn't think to look for him till hours later....
I am such a dumb human! I want my cat to come back.