today my mother and i both grew faint and sad and light-headed from the inevitable paint fumes. we painted and sanded and threw things away. my mom hurt herself even more by insisting on doing her part. she says it is necessary. perhaps it is, as tomorrow (today) is my week anniversary. tomorrow night i will have been here a week. but at least it feels like we are finally starting to work on things here. we are finally starting to figure out what we really need to do. we talked to a lovely lady way too early this morning, who is helping us out, in a way. things are moving.
so why the hell do i feel so heavy? so weighed down and sad? why do i continue to be the engineer behind most of what ails me? what the fuck do i think i'm doing, anyway?
valid questions, all of them. i hope i can figure out the answers before my head implodes.
my new profile picture was taken this morning, as i was waiting in the car outside of cooley dickinson hospital, while my mother ran into the x-ray division and retrieved her film, so we can run it to her hip specialist in boston next week. cooley dick, as we locals seem to inevitably call it, is expanding, ridiculously. still, the emergency room appears to be the same place that i was rushed to 15 years ago, when i accidentally sliced off part of my finger in the lettuce slicer in the course of my duties at la cazuela "tex-mex" restaurant. it also appears to be the same place that i was brought, by expensive ambulance, 17 or 18 years ago, when i hit a car on my bike, flipped over the hood, and landed on my face. i remember, then, being so completely terrified by the blood pouring into my eyes that i convinced myself my face must be broken, and readily agreed to the ambulance. my mother was away from our house, a mere block from the site of the accident. so, yeah, i panicked. later i was glad just to learn that i hadn't gotten that much blood on my bauhaus t-shirt after all. a small scar amid my right eyebrow, and random nerve damage in my middle finger, right hand, are all i have to show from either adventure.
both of those times were miserable, i remember. the doctors were rude, insisted it was all my fault, hurt me more than they possibly needed to. in the case of my workplace accident, they cauterized the wound in a fashion akin to dousing it with gasoline and setting it on fire. well, that's what it felt like, anyway. i hadn't felt any pain until they had gotten their fingers on it.
i'm not sure what the point is. i'm drunk and awake. it's three hours later than all my posts seem to tell me it is, the computer unaware that i am here instead of there. my heart hurts. and i guess there are just a lot of ghosts here that i haven't dealt with, yet.
i just feel so disconnected, so far away, from all that feels normal to me. i have history here, spanning most of a lifetime, but i feel so distant from it. part of why i am here is that i need to deal with that history. but it hurts, still. the distance.
the closeness hurts, too.
