better never than late

I am sick. I've been sick for a long time and everyone, I imagine, is sick of hearing about it.  My stomach my stomach my stomach. I'm going to a specialist next month. They will do a scope, which means a tiny camera will go down my throat to my stomach and inspect it. WTF?  16 years. Really I've had stomach ache for sixteen years. This is not a romantic ailment. You know, how some people get those and become the tragedy girl for life. I'm not her. Maybe i envy her? To have these problems be something that people, you know, gather round and pet you and and make time for you and worry and care and cater..Those sick women that get a pass because they are mentally emotionally or physically ill and all tragic and lovely and then the martyred ghost of everyone's  past. No, no, nothing like that. I just have an incessant never ending stomach ache. I can't eat, I can't drink I am sick of being sick. I think this house is making me sick. It is a classic New Orleans house complete with 1910 floors no insulation, no ac, and 100 years of dust settled in so deep no Dyson sucking power vacuum machine can touch it. Oh and 100 years of roaches... and gaps and cracks that can never be sealed bc the house settles and shifts with the humidity and rain and heat. It's fine. It's tiring but its okay. Least i got a house...and The ceilings are high enough for hope to rise and the transom sheds light on my silvery existence. and pain. That is physical and not physical. If there is even a such thing as "not physical pain" bc i feel ever heartbreak and soul ache in my guts. Which, is possibly...part of the problem.
I was in rural North LA for a week and a half for work. I didn't miss the city not one bit, not one drop until the last 2 or 3 days. Then I come back and its just...reminders on every street of shit I thought was going to happen but didn't. I should move on, but god, i keep doing a GREAT JOB at this job I only like half the time. Really, I accidentally did such good work up in N. LA that i get to go back. And do more work. Its good, i suppose, and I am only slightly being sarcastic and I should be happy that my boss is happy but in reality i sort of don't want a boss, a job or a car or a body, even. Some very old sick part of me that rejected being alive is in there still. Kicking around. Kicking my in stomach, up the esophagus, caught in my throat. Words stuck.
I have a good life. In the sense of AMERICA and the world and history and humanity and the gadzillion pounds of human suffering that pervades us all ...I got a good deal.
I sort of roll my eyes at it though. Like, whatever, I just worked hard and got lucky.
Don't squander this...
My parents are going to die. I think that sometimes, like at a red light or at times when i am supposed to be paying attention and Then I am just like Well Fuck Everything then. Jesus. Humans have it sooooo great, we are all self aware and shit. When people tell me to be glad things happened, not sad they are over  and its better to love and lose then never love at all,  I want to spit. No, it ISN'T.

One time my little sister, (who is my hero and a very unlikely one seeing as how her mental issues have been misunderstood by everyone and she got slapped with the label BRAT before we even knew that she didn't have, like, ANY SEROTONIN) she said, people will tell you that time heals all wounds. They will tell you that, but don't believe them. Time doesn't heal anything you just get used to the pain. I wonder if its true. I guess it doesn't matter. I mean how do you even tell the difference?

One time, after this particularly tragic heartbreak (aren't they all sooooo tragic?) I went back home for a couple weeks. I was stunned, I think, that a break up could leave me reeling like that. Confused and shocked and feeling so  like, like i didn't know who i even WAS. My dad told me that most wounds eventually heal themselves if you leave them be. That is quite different that saying that time heals the wound. But i have a NEED to not leave it be. a physical sore, a mental one or whatever  - i peel it back off. I poke around, i get in. and under. I want to UNDERSTAND. I run my fingers over the ridges left by old scars and stars and i have rusty kit of old hurts with sharp points. I can open them back up. This is self defeating. This is selfish. This a pain junkie.

Biologically there is a reason. Like loving your own bullshit, you can get addicted to your own chemicals. Serotonin or epinephrine or wtf ever. The pain feels good. The pain lets you back close to that one person that you can't have. or whatever else it was you lost. innocence or heroin or starvation. It's like, I can't do that THING but i can get back close to the pain that caused me to do that THING and that will suffice when you are a fiend for it.

 

Sometimes I feel like this abandoned farmhouse. Everyone left or died or forgot to stay. I am all full of their remnants, reminders, just slowly turning to dust.  No one is coming back.

sick little birds

and their nonstop chirping

Of everything good

I walked briskly down the street and the smell of jasmine and sweet olive is so thick in the humid air its suffocating. No lie, when they write about New Orleans they always say something like, the "flowery essence of the still air was intoxicating" and that is one thing they say about this city that is not a lie. or even an exaggeration. The bad thing is the smell of vomit, beer, and piss can be equally as strong on a Saturday morning near a bar. and you are always near a bar in this city. Always.

It's not just jasmine, either. There are other ones but I don't know them by name. Crepe myrtles shaking down little tuffs of flower ...like cotton candy sticking in your hair. Some other big droopy bell shaped flower that smells like a sugar blossom should. It is everywhere and it smell so fragrant and rich and good it almost makes me sick.

It stormed today. A big gully washer they call them. Just rolled in off the gulf, big hard sharp thunder, lighting, dumped a couple inches of water and broke up. Blue skies by the evening.

I went for a walk then. Everyone lives in a shotgun house. A shotgun house is a house without privacy, they say. No joke. I can't even hide from myself in this house. I can't go on hiatus from my own life, like other people can. People just take a hiatus from you and your invisible crisis. To tend their own crisis like a withered garden.

I thought i could handle it but i can't. I am getting healthy anyway but the farther I reach out the more some hard little interior just collapses within itself. A dense little marble made of lead instead of glass. getting heavier and heavier as the months flow.

I watch forensic shows while i draw. The true story ones with cheezey dramatization and factual science. I like it bc they always get the bad guy. Always. A piece of skin, a stray hair, a partial fingerprint, zoom in and pick the invisible apart...Make it mean something. those tiny things...

someone else's tragedy becomes not real. But it is real. we are all real, just stuck here for now, waiting to see what happens next. We are always entertained by someone else's tragedy because it is all we have got and then soon it becomes your own.