Wherein Miss Maybelle gets a big girl bed and quits her job.

      Listen, if you are going to go crazy and lose yourself and your shit to drugs and alcohol and have to flee an abusive relationship in the middle of the night, it is best if first you were a good person so you have people to call to come circle the wagons. Drug friends are no good for this, trying to get drug friends to circle the wagons is like herding cats. No, you have to reach back for your good people, and whether or not I deserved it when I did, I reached back and I had those good people and it is because of those good people that I am here today. That is not an exaggeration, they saved my life.

        I stayed for a hot minute in my friends' house, where they didn't make me pay rent and they didn't ask me for anything and they watched me with nervous eyes until I insisted on my own place and then they helped me move again. 

       That was a bad time, even with all the help I was getting it was a bad time and I'm not real proud of it. I was not yet in recovery, I'd fallen down a deep hole and had yet to even try to dig myself out but kept insisting that I was. That's the thing about crazy, when you have truly gone crazy you can't even see sane, you have no idea what sane looks like anymore. 

      I didn't have a bed. I don't think I had a bed since I moved out of my parent's house to go to school when I was eighteen. I slept in a dorm twin at New College, then a futon matrice that fit in my truck bed, then my new husband's bed, then another futon, then a boyfriend's bed... Well, you know, in your twenties it's pretty easy to sleep for years in beds that you don't really own. So when my world fell apart this last time I moved into an apartment and the only furniture I had held my clothes. And goddamn no money, I had to borrow money from my parents to pay my rent and get my utilities turned on, there sure wasn't money for luxuries like beds or shower curtains or say, food. (Stay away from drugs, kids.)

        Another old friend of mine just happened to have a twin bed that her daughter (a girl I used to take care of) had grown out of, and they gave it to me. I didn't even think about what a miracle that was at the time- not just a bed but clean sheets as well! The whole shebang, ready to ride! Mama and I set it up and joked that it was a nun's bed. "Nun shall pass" I said, "You aint gettin' nun" says Mama.

         I didn't even realize how uncomfortable the damn thing was until I got sober a little over a year ago. Even then, with my broken body and learning how to sleep through the night, well, it worked. It was a bed. 

         But then, oh glory, a couple of weeks ago, just for sweetness, my dad bought me a New Bed. It is new, it is big, it is wonderful. Honey, it is a Queen. It came wrapped in plastic and everything.

      I felt a little funny about accepting such a large gift. I feel like I should, at age 30 and 2/3 be able to buy myself a bed, but the thing about buying yourself something is that there is always something coming up that takes precedent over it. There's Christmas and birthdays and car insurance and the economy's bad and tips aren't good right now and what have you. And I don't live like an addict anymore. I have a shower curtain. I have back-up everything- toilet paper, paper towels, q-tips, shampoo, lotion, toothpaste, bars of soap. When I mop my floor I use a real bucket, I don't have to empty the trash so that I can use the trashcan for that purpose. These may seem like small things but you know most drug addicts don't have a spare roll of paper towels if you come knocking, they just don't. So I swallowed my pride and said, "Thank you, Daddy" like a good girl should regardless of her age and I am so glad that I did.

       Did you know that it is possible to sleep all through the night? That when you wake up to pee at four in the morning you can go BACK TO SLEEP? I thought I had insomnia but really I just had a shit ass bed. 

       Now I'm not saying that the bed has changed everything in my life, but it wasn't but a few days after I got it that I went and quit my job. Look, the bed is paid for, they can't take it away from me. 

       After getting enough sleep I found that I was not more able to deal with the craziness that goes on at my job. Instead I had the energy to be angry. More and more my boss was reminding me of that crazy drug addicted man that I left a couple of years ago in the middle of the night. Same walking on eggshells, same irrational bursts of anger followed by remorse, same super hero complex. Same me, running around trying desperately to put band aids on everything just trying to get through the day without everything falling apart. Everyone else just sitting tight and trying not to make too much noise, scared she might flip out over the least little thing. No thank you. I will not let another person's insanity run my life, I've got enough of my own to deal with. 

       I've got a couple more weeks there and eventually, when it's up and running, I'm going to help work that bar that my stepfather is building. It's time I hitched my wagon to the ones that would circle up if I came calling. And I'm going to go back to school. It may seem like utter foolishness to quit a job before another is ready, especially with the economy being as it is, but my hard won sanity is far more important than the one dollar raise that I've been offered to deal with the shit that I've been dealing with. Sugar-Babies, I'm making my bed and I'm sure as hell gonna lie in it.

       Yesterday my very best friend that I don't talk to turned thirty. Today, if he had lived, my best sleep on the couch drink all my beer pee on my toilet seat make me laugh till I puke friend would have turned 28. Tomorrow my Aunt Lynn died a year ago. It's three days that make me feel lost, lost in time, little girl lost.

       Nyna, I called her Nyna in high school, she was my high school wife. The girl I'll never get over. When we met she was so shy she had her childhood friend call me to invite me to her birthday party. I'd never known a girl like her. I remember her hair, it was a universe of curls, a tangled wood, she let me plunge my hands into it until my hands disappeared and I would stay clutched there, wanting to make her mine. She had purple hands and toes, so different from my own, and her skin smelled like amber, and sometimes like sesame.

      We were in the same classes. Somehow, in freshman English, our teacher decided that she and I already knew everything (no lie, this is true) and so we didn't have to do the assignments or read the required texts. We were allowed to read whatever we wanted to read and then report on it. We read My Papa's Waltz by Theodore Rothko and interpreted it a metaphor for child abuse. We read that strange book about rabbits, that made me feel as though I had a hole in my head. She taught me all the lyrics to Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen and we would sing it in the courtyard of the school. I made her sing. She didn't want to. Her singing voice was not strong, but it was perfect.

      I broke her heart, and then she broke mine. It was like our love was too strong and strange and we were kids, still figuring out love. We were hurtling full throttle into life, not backing down, not looking where we leaped, not being careful we wanted life and freedom and fuck all and no regrets but I was not careful and she was too sweet and too beautiful and we both got damaged. At some point I leaped and looked back and she was not by my side. She had better things to do. 

     A few years ago I went to her wedding and wept the entire time. It was too beautiful, just like her. What is it about friends, these girlhood child friends we have when we are young that make pale the relationships of older age? I cannot love another like I loved her, it hurts too much, it is too dangerous. We must contain ourselves. And now she is thirty and has a baby and I still dream about her. 

      One time, before she was married but after my divorce, I had a potluck at my College Ave apartment and it just happened to fall on her birthday. She called and said she was in town and I made a chocolate pudding cake and cut her name out of pink postcards and glued them on toothpicks and stuck them in it. Then Joe came by and it was his birthday too, but at midnight, and so the cake then said Joe as well. 

       I'll call him Joe because his name is Joe and he is dead and he cannot be embarrassed by what I write. When I moved into the apartment on College Ave, freshly separated from my husband, Joe and a boy who became my boyfriend were the first new people I met. I chose the other boy because he was taller and had better shoes. 

     At first Joe hated me. I remember one time at the Warehouse him telling me, "Shut up May, no one cares what you think".  He was not afraid to be an asshole. But as time went on and I became the den mother to a wrestle and tug of sweet sweaty boys, we were thrown together more through proximity and at some point found that we were on the same team.

     Oh I loved that time. It seemed like I was always cooking and we were always drinking and there were games and movies and midnight runs to the grocery store to make sandwiches. Joe often slept on the couch, or sometimes in his cab in the front yard, one time dressed like a pirate. Once we made sock puppets. They tried to teach me to play chess. One time Joe and another boy were trying to teach me the proper way to shoot pool and it involved them standing close behind me, their arms over my arms, hands over my hands, and my boyfriend got mad and we had to go home. We were often getting mad at Joe.

      One time we got kicked out of the house Joe and I, by my boyfriend, and we went down to the Leon Pub to drink beers and shoot pool on the midget pool tables. My boyfriend and I had been having problems and I was upset. Joe stood at the end of the pool table, cue in hand, dark hair and dark eyes and pale face haloed by cigarette smoke and stinking of beer. He said "You know May, I will always be your friend."

         And then too soon he was gone. He played banjo. He wore red swim trunks. He drove his car into a tree at four in the morning on my birthday. Today is his birthday.

        I don't talk with the mutual friends we had back then very much anymore. Partially because when you break up with someone you break up with a whole group of people. Partially because when you get sober you have to change people, places, and things. That's okay most of the time, but it's this feeling lost, this wanting to say his name out loud and have someone else see his face. I miss him. I miss him so much.

       My Aunt Lynn deserves a whole blog unto herself, any words for her are short shrift. Can I just say that there was no one like her? That she more than anyone else in my life inspired the beautiful and the absurd? That she faced the world with the most beautiful devil gap smile, that the wind blew only to push her hair back from her face. She was there when I was born, taking care of my brother while my parents welcomed me to Earth in a trailer in Lloyd. She taught us to throw the hair from our hairbrushes outside so the birds could make nests with them.

        She cannot be gone. She is not gone. This is what I mean by being lost in time, that she is not gone, and Joe will show up with his banjo and his crooked smile, and Nyna is singing Suzanne and is still my friend and we are all old and we are all young and we are babies. This day is so cold and blue and the air is so thin it could fit a million souls inside and still have room for angels dancing on the head of a pin. It is not too much to feel this sad. It is not too hard to cry and miss and feel this pain. It is exactly right, this bigness of love, and gratitude to have met the people who are here for not long enough. 

       Sometimes I think I feel too much, that my body is not big enough for the feelings that I have. I am grateful today for my over emotion. To feel the world spin and time go back and forth and all eternity inside my heart, it is what it is. Today my tears and the blood in my ears are my poem to the people who will never be goodbye. 

My Tonight Quiet Thoughts

I've gotten out of the habit of writing things here. Everyday, I write in my journal, I wake up and I write and I drink coffee and I look out the window and my head is full, but my voice is silent. Sometimes you need to just quiet that mouth, quiet that mouth about the important things and just let them happen until they trickle on in and make a home inside.

     Last month I celebrated my one year of sobriety. And it was Thanksgiving. It was Thanksgiving and sobriety and thankfulness and fullness and help me God and Thankyou. I got to stand up at the AA birthday meeting in front of all those people who have seen me cry and who have seen me laugh and my sweet mother and strong step-father and tell my story and receive my coin. I feel quiet about this because I cannot say how it was. I cried so I wet my Mama's hair when I sat down next to her. 

     Sobriety is not just not drinking. What a lonely, empty life that would leave, just a life of not drinking. Sobriety is a spiritual journey, one in which we remind ourselves to pursue progress and not perfection. 

      I was not born with a steady hand. This mind I live in, this heart and body, so sensitive. I have a hard time disappointing people, even in the smallest way. My heart breaks when I make mistakes, I have to walk very carefully and tall so that I don't knock things down. I don't want to see people sad, and I try to make them laugh, but when they don't I want to take their pain inside me, take it from them and wrap it in my own body so it is a dull thing and not sharp enough to cut. But I can't. And it is unbearable. I don't have many close friends. Always, a game is only fun until it seems someone will definitely win, and then someone will lose and the game is not fun anymore. 

     I had a husband once who did not like for me to be praised. If I made something pretty, he grew sour and silent. He did not think I was pretty, and I did not know that until after I married him. He married me in part, because I was just good enough, but not better than him. 

      I divorced him and he moved far away without ever really knowing me at all.

      Drinking made me feel numb and I liked that. It made me feel free, and I liked that very much. Drinking allowed me to be a super bitch, and I liked that best of all. Oddly enough, I had lots of friends. They all liked to drink, too. I don't think they knew me very well. I lost myself in those years.

      Dancing, sewing, painting, writing, thinking. All those things dwindled down to tiny memories of my magic life I might have had and I was busy trying to forget.

     My mother did not let me forget. 

       Now those lost years, they feel like some one else's story. I am still so sensitive. I am learning how to deal with that. People feel pain, I feel pain, pain is good. Pain is better than numb. I have all the alive feelings now, because I am alive now.

      That is what sobriety is, it is the fullness of being, the alive feelings, the grace of the muscles being moved by the soul. My mother wears salt in her hair very well.

      All of that, the getting lost, the waking up, the finding my way and how I am today, that is what I feel quiet about. 

      Here it is December and it is cold tonight. I gave a homeless man three dollars in the parking lot outside Bill's Minimart. He said he would buy a blanket. I think that was a lie. I don't care if he bought a blanket or a beer, it's cold tonight and I have a warm home. When I walked home the moon was so full and big I said "Oh god, you are beautiful!" and there were two stars.

      I have a tree in my house and isn't that cool? To have a tree in your house? If there is a sentient Man/Woman/God person I bet they say "I have so many trees in my house! That is so cool!" My tree has lights but I haven't decorated it yet because I'm waiting for the right moment. Last night I helped my sister and her husband decorate the tree in their house and to see my sister's eyes on that tree, their first married tree together! Her eyes were more sparkly and beautiful by far, but as she is inside those eyes it's good she has a tree to look at. Her husband is the luckiest one, he has the tree and those eyes. How does he sleep at night with all that glitter and goodness around?

        Here I am, thinking about my Mama again. No matter how crazy I get all I have to do is call her up. She lets me walk around in her mind and therein find my stable ground. 

         This post is not good writing, but I am okay. It is how my mind is talking tonight. Maybe I'm just breaking the ice again, getting back into poking these keys instead of thinking pen in hand. If you want good writing go to Bless Our Hearts or TallyHassle, I do. Everyday.

      Aren't we glad the world is such a big thing and we are such little things? Isn't that something to be thankful for?

But Can Bloody Mary Tell Me Who the President Will Be?

Insomnia is a serious inconvenience. I thought that I would clean my house with all the extra hours that I have to work with but everyone is asleep here at the old Park Ave Apts and how do you clean without rocking out? When we were kids, my brother and I would slow as we approached our house coming home from school, Bruce Springsteen evident from a block away. Oh dear, Mama's cleaning.....

      My neighbor sets his alarm for 5:AM every morning and I just heard it go off. Boy is he going to be pissed when he realizes it's daylight savings time again! Of course, it's also Sunday. The whole thing seems off, but it's comforting to me. Someone else is alive! Yes! He is hitting the snooze button! Ha-Ha! Maybe he is a spy. If he is he has a very good cover. He has a wonky eye and whenever I see him he's joyfully drunk, his steps as rolley and unpredictable as his vision, but his smile is sure.

      I went and voted on Halloween. Early voting on Halloween is super fun. Batman voted, and Darth Vadar. Do you suppose Vadar voted for McCain because he is aligned with the dark side, or did he vote Obama because he is black? 

      The lovely T-Bone was the one who suggested we go vote. We work together and had spent a fine morning at the restaurant wearing the fake mustaches that I brought for the staff. Each mustache was different and had a name. Mine was "The Rogue", our chef sported "The Scoundrel". Our fey and stylish gay waiter chose "The Party Boy". Neither T-Bone nor I can remember the title of hers, but it could have been called "The Paisano" because combined with her dark hair and red bandanna it made her resemble a disgruntled pizza cook. I wanted to make her perform for me. "Sharpen your knife and look mean!" God, it was so good.

     At first we thought we might wear the mustaches to vote, the upside being that it might enable us to commit voter fraud by voting again ("Hey! Didn't you just vote?" "Oh no, those girls had mustaches!") but we had already exhausted the adhesive and went sans disguise. (If you are planning to commit voter fraud I suggest you do not buy your disguise at a place called The Festivity Factory.)

      The line was long but we were motivated. First we had to stand in the line that led to the line that led to the courthouse. I thought there might be snacks and mimes, maybe for entertainment purposes, but T-Bone thought not so we came prepared with drinks, baby carrots, and cigarettes. 

        We spent the hour and fifteen minutes talking about the people we know, the people we used to know, who's in jail, who should be in jail, all the drugs we used to do, and who's doing the drugs now. The people around us were silent in that very pointed way that people have when they are listening very hard. Perhaps we were the entertainment. We should've worn the mustaches! We would've been so much more amusing, not to mention more anonymous. ("Hey, I heard you were gossiping about me in line to early vote at the courthouse." "Oh no, I heard those girls had mustaches.")

         We were a little worried that they would search our purses once we got in. T-Bone had a knife, and I had a little wad of something suspicious looking wrapped in plastic wrap (it was a mustache, I swear) but that fear turned out to be unfounded. What we did find at the end of the line was an especially tall handsome man in a floral button down shirt. His job was to stop us from madly rushing the polling booths before they could take our information. I told him that I liked his shirt, that it was very handsome, coyly cutting my eyes away. He said that when he put it on that morning he said to himself, "Yep, nobody's gonna miss Mr. Tim today". T-Bone pointed out that it was helpful that he was also so tall. When it was my turn at the booth, Mr. Tim thanked T-Bone for coming out to vote. She told him that we were excited to vote, that we were excited to be making history, and he smiled and thanked her again, and they had a moment.

      The voting? My heart did swell. I checked and double checked to make sure that I did, in fact, vote for Obama and against the We Hate Gays proposition. I knew I did, but there was a paranoid part of me that somehow I'd filled in the wrong circles. It's like that feeling that you might just spasmodically drive into a building some day, you know you won't, why would you? But you think somehow you might. By accident. Like maybe you lost your mind for a minute.

      When I walked out of the courthouse, into the dusk of Halloween, I felt strong and hopeful and exhilarated. Me! I voted! The trees glowed bright. Everyone was smiling. Children played.

     As we walked back to the car we talked about what we had done, how we felt, and what it meant. I said, "Mr. Tim, do you want my phone number? I vote YES!" and we decided that we needed to use that pick-up line before the end of the election.

      Last year on Halloween I wore a flower in my hair and sprayed myself with body glitter and went to a party and did jello shots. This year I wore a fake mustache and laughed more than I have in a long time and voted in a historical election with one of my best friends. Ah there is hope for us yet, ah there is hope and laughter and hope again.