Tending the Ghosts

 I am sleepy and old. My room is messy and I need some coffee and some cartoons and some colored pencils and my dog. Color makes me feel better. So does sugar. Most people probably don't believe that your mental illness, the one you take pills for, is real. Oh well. The Pharmaceutical companies can have my soul. Sell it to jesus.
Saturday I tried to clean my room. It is coated in clothes and shoes and drawings and cheap makeup and stuff. I went through the box of clothes that Donna gave me before she died. I try them on and take them off and put them back in the box and sort them out and then mix them all together and stare at the mirror. I stare closer at my pores and eyelashes and beginning wrinkles and lines and acne and scars and hair and I sort of dissolve into a reflected mass of tiny pieces.

I take clothes off and put her clothes on and apply lipstick carefully. My hair is dirty. Her clothes fit and yet they don't. They are her clothes formed to her shape. I laugh bc her shirts are too short and my belly shows. She was sooo tiny and shorter than me.

I don't know if it is healthy or normal to keep re arranging her stuff but I suppose there is not really a "normal" for grief. In another era it was normal to make lockets of the deceased's hair and take their photos. In a study across cultures, I suppose, the death and grieving rituals could fill  libraries. So I wear her shoes. They are too big but I wear them anyway. Walk a mile in your shoes, lovely lady.

People like me rearrange pain, also. Maybe you do it, too. I fasted the week after she left. It was part of  - grieving, i guess but another part of me relished the hollow shield of protection. the dizzy numbness...this is not real, this is not real....
Tied my hair up too tightly, needles and pins and little blades...

I go home. I stare at this huge house that IS my parents...flesh bone cedar and soul....with lots of windows. Am I suppose to MANAGE this one day? Im lost in a no-where generation between a butter churn and instant messenger. Someone has to feed the cows. I don't know how to make money. I wonder what New York is like. I pull the laces tighter. A thousand memories are my sweetest friends and I rearrange them carefully in my mind, I tend the ghosts.