i remember you

i woke up this morning feeling sad, bad, and a little like suicide. but i wasn't going to do it. i'm stronger than that. it felt very much like just a reminder from something darker that whether or not i have strength and courage to endure, whether or not i have the will to survive, i am not ever fully out of danger, i must always be vigilant because i can get stupid in a second and there will be no taking it back.

so i did some of my packing today, but otherwise i sat and played cards online, figuring that my one job for the day was simply to survive. i even won a couple games; i had a granny hand in the tenth and went alone, and in the other game a guy who otherwise had the game sewed up went on a bad pick and got taken for everything.

if you are from wisconsin you already know that i was playing sheepshead.

anyway, i got suited up and went to my race, only i couldn't remember how to get there. except i actually got there, but i didn't see evidence of the race happening; maybe the storm came through there and they cancelled? but i didn't know i was there while i was there (looked it up when i got home) so i drove around a while looking.

but then i figured i'd have time to go to staples and get the thing i was supposed to get today but didn't, and as long as i was up there i took my bike down and i rode from the strip mall into downtown swanton and back, just to have gotten a ride.

i love my road bike.

so then i went back into staples to use their rest room and change into clean-ish clothes and i got on the interstate to go home thereby avoiding traffic in st. albans, which has the third stupidest traffic pattern in the world and i was going to just stay on the interstate all the way down to exit 11, but i know full well that the trip is much shorter if you get off at exit 19 and go by route 104 through fairfax.

i work in fairfax. and i have not been in fairfax since 21 december, so that was a little hard. but i am insisting lately on taking my life back. i have a limited amount of time in which to regain my strength and be fit to work again. and parenthetically, i want to lose about sixty pounds.

anyway, st. lukes's cemetery is on the way out of fairfax. sometimes i go to visit the graves of people i know who are buried there and tonight i needed to go, really bad. it wasn't even like a choice.

a long time ago i was on my way to work in the morning and traffic was all tied up with emergency vehicles; a man i knew had thrown himself off of the dam at the falls. i didn't know him very well, but i knew his wife and children. i am fond of the wife and i love the children. i was standing just behind the boy when they came to tell him. i will never forget it.

the man had what i have; he did what i was going to do. he died of of it, and i wanted to go and kneel at his grave and pray. and i wanted to ask him to talk to me; to tell me in retrospect what a terrible mistake it had been. i wanted him to come and tell me something important, something i can take and use to make myself strong, to help me survive.

near where he's buried are graves of other people i knew: a boy who died young; he had the cynicism of a child who knows he is dying and has no time for the silly pretenses we go through with children.

and i don't know if you remember that plane that went down in an iowa cornfield in july 1989, but i lost two children i cared about and their parents in that crash. that was a hard, hard funeral to be at. four matching coffins are wheeled in and a visible wave of visceral pain washes across the room.

but i was kneeling at that one grave, hoping for something to hold on to.

tell me it was a mistake. tell me to keep going.

and then i was crying and i couldn't stop. i called rumblestrip, but i had to get on the road. and you know, i'm not such a good driver when i'm crying. and every fifteen minutes or so i had to pull over and call rumblestrip to tell her i was all right.

and somewhere on the road, i found myself shouting: "you cannot have me. i do not belong to you. i belong with the living. i am going to live."

and i made it home. put my bike away. i didn't really feel like talking to rumblestrip, but i had to call and tell her i was in. i didn't call her right away, but instead came right upstairs to light a candle and beg:

bob, please make me yours and yours alone. if i did not belong wholly to you before, take me up now. let me be yours and yours only. please.