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[cinnamonswamp]

Dear Me, 2020

Hey girl.

I'll just start with your questions.

Yeah. The weight. It got worse, but we didn't breach 200 lbs. I figured out what to do about it just in time for the holidays. We'll hopefully work it out better in the next year. But I will say- it is shocking how much it doesn't hurt. How loved and worshipped our body is, by ourselves and our partner. It's shocking how beautiful you are with your egg yolk belly.

I can tell you, with pride, that we are currently in the middle of our Marriage & Family Therapy masters program. We start our clinical practicum next August. This is your doing as much as it is mine, and I'm so pleased and grateful to give you this gift.

Hahahahaha, what if anything I do for work. I love your optimism. I am still a behavior interventionist, darling. It's still the worst. But guess how many hours I work a week. 12. I'm giving you this gift as well.

The world is... the same. No, it's not over. It seems to only be just getting into its groove. We've been vaccinated three times over.

However, your birthday was the TITS. Best birthday of all time. Your partner bought you a custom made SWORD. You both watched A Little Princess and you got good and drunk.

Oh, and we used the roller skates. Did we ever.

We made a friend. I hope we keep her.

We play dungeons and dragons every Sunday with the best group and fall al little in love with one of the girls who plays but we suffer in silence. Birch is such a good DM.

Birch. Oh. I may have buried the lede here.

***

I've been drunk for days. Almost two weeks. I ate bacon and sour cream, touched my pale belly with affection, stared at myself in the mirror, cut my hair, painted trees for hours and got gold paint on my leggings. Made love to my girlfriend, played hours of video games with a lap warmed by a cat, cleaned surfaces and threw things away that I used to love years ago. I put purple in my hair, slept in till 10 and only ate when I was hungry.

There's a story I've been telling myself since I was a child. It's a story of a girl, cursed with fire, or so she was told. She would raze the world one day, they told her, unless she was diligent. She must work, suffer, atone and hold herself inside herself like breath for a hundred years, to keep the fire at the bay. She never saw the fire, smelt it, but it was there, they said, even if you could not see it. And after a while, in the quiet of herself she felt something warm and feared it. In order to protect her family, she held the portended flame at bay and kept herself away from others.

Sometimes, when the world got its darkest and coldest, the heat inside her was her only comfort and she warmed herself by it. Sometimes, in a secret place, she wanted to raze the world. Knowing she could, but never would, was her only power. A forbidden power, but power none the less. When she became an adult, she started telling this story herself, carrying the curse of her childhood into new worlds and making it real with her rage and her loneliness.

You know what happens next. Cold people, homeless like her, drew to her despite her warnings and warmed themselves with the heat inside her. They told her that her fire was not a curse, it kept their blood running, their hearts beating. She had a gift, she was a gift.

She blanched. She reiterated how dangerous she was. They asked what towns she burned, who did she light on fire. She had no answer. She had to contend with the fact that she'd never caused danger to anyone on purpose, she just burned.

So, she burned. People came to her for warmth. She never forgot her prophecy, but stopped telling the story. She learned to burn brighter, hotter, more brilliantly without hurting herself in the process. She became not just flame, but light. People claimed her as their light.

But the people who claimed her were without home, they were outsiders to their towns, whores and deviants and thieves. How could she go back to her home claiming to be valuable when who she was valuable to were so despised? The whores turned to powerful women, the deviants turned to joyful creatives, the thieves turned to renegades and chain breakers and she found herself in them. She was always one of them.

Her home beckoned. She returned and hid. Returned and hid. Returned and lied. She lied. She lied and lied and lied. Because if she told the truth, the foretold flame would finally come out and burn them all. So she hid and she lied.

One day, she looked in the mirror and saw the mark of the deviants on her brow. Realizing she could never return home without revealing herself, she was presented with a choice. If her home knew who she was allied with, their men would come for them all. If she revealed herself, she'd burn her home down. Forced to choose between two families, she did nothing. She burned.

One day, members of her family from home found her soot-covered and branded and said "We're stronger than you think. We can handle a little fire. We have plenty of water and wood for new houses. Reveal yourself, and burn it down. We'll rebuild."

So she did. She burned it all down.

Except she didn't. She came home and didn't set fire to anything. She became light, and the only things that burned were the ones that couldn't stand the light and threw their flames against their own homes in rage and fear. The razing was never hers. All along, they weren't afraid of what she would do, but of what they would do. So she left them to burn their own homes and returned to her own, safe, illuminated and warm. She never saw them again.

She lived happily ever after.

[cinnamonswamp]

November 21

Let's make this quick.

Fuck this month.

I woke up. I stumbled into the weeks-left aftermath of my partner's birthday, our linens hung from clothesline at geometric angles to create a steepled tent. I ate left over Taco Bell and drank left over coffee. I trimmed my hair in the bathroom, naked and leaning over the sink to collect the shafts of hair. I showered, deep cleaning my hair, shaving weeks growth off my legs and thighs. I pasted my face with charcoal and Elmer's glue, peeling fuzz and rage off my face in long, even strokes, leaving pink sensitive skin behind.

We played Dungeons and Dragons while I took down the tent, vacuumed our couch, our rug, laundered all the blankets, rushing down a step ladder to my computer every few minutes to add my character's contribution to a scene. I opened all the windows. When I finished, a cleansed and aired living room behind me, I put a beer in my hand.

It felt good to clean.

I won't talk about the work, the panic attacks, the medical trauma of a rushed and harried IUD insertion and the endless blood. I'm tired. Fuck all that.

Fuck this month.

[cinnamonswamp]

October 21

It felt good to clean.

Investment labor never made any intuitive sense to her body, it didn't give the kind of feedback cleaning, painting, shopping or fucking did. The instant recognition of an effort well placed. Investment labor, like school work or professional occupation felt misty and aimless inside her. The final click clack of a set of key strokes on a term paper. The walk up two flights of stairs at the end of the work day, and the heat stroke of fatigue and overstimulation that would sizzle sharply in contrast to the silent comfort of her home. Why. Eventually she'd get a pay off. A degree. A paycheck. But like a dog, who having pissed on the carpet at 10am and is not getting clocked by a rolled up newspaper at 5pm, scared and confused, she could never tie the two together, the work and the reward.

You have to burn through it.

But it felt good to clean. The act took nothing from her, it only gave.

She sat in her desk chair in her living room. Her phone was dirty. When was the last time she cleaned it? Not since she bought it earlier that year. She plucked a couple single serve packs of cleansing wipes from one of the pockets of a hanging organizer off the side of a nearby bookshelf. Neighboring pockets housed a ruler, checkbook, a soft measuring tape, a hook with headphones dangling, inert. She peeled the case off her phone, systematically cleaned the debris from the inside, outside.

How many times would she be made to learn this lesson, she wondered.

It's just fog. You have to burn through it.

As many times as it takes, she responded to herself. She got better each time. Each time she invested less and less of herself, stuck around for less and less time. Before this it had been only a few months. This time barely six weeks. She was learning to trust her intuition now, to catch the red flags as they passed over her head and lay them out for analysis. She used to stay for whole years. She's improving.

She collapsed into her partner's arms immediately after. "Thank you for loving me, thank you for being safe," she muttered into their shoulder. Their hand was against the back of her neck. "I'm so sorry," they said. Generous to the bitter end, they are. They didn't even like him very much. Or, more appropriately, they were saddled with polyamorous jealousy for the first time in their and her relationship and was probably feeling just the tiniest amount of relief at the news of the... "break up". But they were still sorry. Sincerely. The wonders of non-monogamy. You'd genuinely rather hurt a little bit if it meant the one you love got their joy. She knew that fact vividly and saw it reflected in her partner's tight hug.

She went back to her paper, surprisingly cool to the heart now that it was over. It took three hours. Five straight days of procrastination for three hours of moderate effort. Pathetic. She immediately went to her bathroom and deep cleaned from floor the ceiling as soon as she was done. It felt good to clean.

He didn't scare her. Maybe he would have at one point, she didn't know. She was learning to bail before that proof got into any of her pudding. Pride was suckling dully at the roots of her consciousness. She was proud of herself. Pfft. Scare her. She'd once had a dude attempt to strangle her after he attempted to rape her. It took a lot to scare her now. Both attempts were utter failures, by the way. But not really for the sake of her gumption. Had that guy been stronger in both mind and body- who knows. She wouldn't have had the wherewithal or self-preservation instincts to do anything about it, not at 19. Fortunately, it took just a short scream to crumple the boy who was already in the middle of a debilitating mental break. She'd only known him a few weeks too.

It's just fog.

Pride. What a weird reaction. But she was, she was proud of herself. Just like the last time. "You can't treat me this way,". What a concept. Pride is such a better replacement for rage. The last time this happened was three years ago and she only just discovered a dusty pearl of rage for that a few weeks ago. It felt good to clean it out, dust it off and take in its curve and sheen. But it was ultimately useless. Just decoration. Pride was much better.

To peel herself away from something that gave immediate feedback to her body, but was ultimately unhealthy, mired in confusion. That was a task and a half.

Burn through it.

She deleted the text message thread, now filled with pages of his texts and no response from her. It felt good to clean.

[cinnamonswamp]

September

I've had varying reports, not many of them encouraging. Most people don't remember, my mom swears I was "sweet, loving, beautiful". "A very creative child". My dad said I had a strong will, and that's why people bullied me. Not that that does me much good. My brother, though, came through. "You were a pretty rad story teller," he said. Now that's consistent with my memories. Not the rad part, the story teller part. I told stories. Sometimes I forgot to tell people I was telling a story and I got accused of being a liar. I was a liar. I was a story teller.

In September I was reminded that my body, as always, is not a temple. It's a haunted house. And one of the spectral residents has decided it's their time to to cause a fit. Insomnia. That beast is back. I never know how much I'll be able to accomplish day by day, how tired I'll be, when I'll get up in the morning. I don't know which of my body's betrayals has been more visceral- the rapid weight gain or the chronic fatigue. But despite this, I've been resilient. And kissed by light fortune.

I have such a skill for pining. I now have the privilege of bestowing this ability on three people now, as opposed to one. I hope they cherish it. It is Grade A gourmet longing, finely aged and decadent.

I have a few skills, to be honest. I'm too old not to. At this point, everyone is good at what they've practiced. Without being too self-aggrandizing, I am relatively good at understanding people's insecurities and identifying places where they may need to grow. This developed as a survival skill, to love people when they were behaving badly. Now it's what will probably make me a fair asset as a future therapist. I'm proud of it. I hope to serve with it.

But christ, woe betide anyone caught in the unfiltered glare of its spotlight. My subconscious, I mean. She's me, after all, but unrestrained, and an absolute terror. She read me for filth.

I haven't decided whether I have the energy to retell the dream here. The Dream. Part 2 to the quest to find the ego. When the ego found me.

It was a nightmare. I couldn't use my legs and was calling for my partner, who was supposed to take me home. He never came. I could barely hear his voice in other rooms, but when I dragged myself across the floor to get closer it'd dissolve. It didn't matter why he wasn't there, that wasn't the point. This wasn't an abandonment dream. This was about me realizing I was on my own, that he wasn't coming to get me, and I was vulnerable. Then I was in my old childhood bedroom, and I knew I was in danger. I couldn't use my legs and I couldn't let my parents knew I was there or I wouldn't be safe. That was around the time I realized I was dreaming, so I came up with a plan. I pulled myself up against the wall, the same wall I sat against when my dad was in the doorway and I was rendered paralyzed with hysterics and fear and could only scoot along the wall away from him as my behavior frayed at his brain and he spoke in an even, soothing tone that he had never hit me and I was making it up and to stop crying.

It was that again. How the fuck did I get back here. I've chosen to starve, be pummeled by new fathers manifested as boyfriends, work three jobs and sell my dignity piece by piece just to make sure I would never be here again. Now here I am, legs won't work, partner's gone and I have to wake up before they know I'm here and I'm weak. So I concentrated, much in the same way as when I'm drunk and have the hiccups, I focus on my body. Wake up. Time to wake up.

But there are children on the balcony. The balcony? My childhood home is one story. Doesn't matter. There are children on the balcony. They know me. Who the fuck- I drag my paraplegic ass out there in the night and holler at them damn kids to leave me alone, they're distracting me. I can't wake myself up when they keep hanging upside down by their knees and calling to me. They know me. Who are these kids.

My kids. Every one, every kid I've ever worked with. They're my kids. What the hell do they want, the laughing and the calling. But somewhere in the harmony, I understand. I know she's coming. She appears to me, not as a full body but a swatch of a face, an eye, half a nose, freckles, a chipped corner of a chapped mouth. Testing me, waiting for an invitation. Nothing to do but admit her in completely.

She doesn't appear as a child then either. She's a fucking cartoon, an animation of a classic Alice Liddell, nothing specific, just the blonde hair and the headband and the dress. We sit across from each other, me in the doorway, suddenly in my own Alice in Wonderland costume, her just outside the railing of the balcony, floating ghostly in the evening.

I asked her. "Do you carry us with you?"

She doesn't look at me. "Sometimes."

I know that's not what I'm supposed to say.

"You look nice in your costume," I say. Crying.

"You do too." She says. Crying.

We both cry. It's enough. I wake up.

"I had to compliment her before I could wake up," I tell my partner later, recounting this dream. I'm half-drunk in the dim light from the lit fireplace. That's when my famous monologue kicks in. I tell him about her. That girl. Slime, I say. Inert. Useless, though, that's the word that gets used with the most frequency. She's useless. I call this girl every awful thing I can think of. I say she never should have lived. I say she's different from me, because I'm valuable. I work hard, I deserve to be here, but I had to earn it. I tell him that that vile man had to beat the shit out of that useless slime to make her something worthy of breathing air and that's why I'm here. I say the worst thing ever hidden in my heart. I say it all, and lose myself in the overt horror of it.

I come to hunched in a doorway with my partner pulling his blanket up to his chin on the couch, terrified.

"Except in drama class, though," I say. At this point I'm as cool and calm as glass. The tears have dried. A heady feeling of serenity has glazed my entire body in the light of the awful truth. "I was useful in drama class. I was good, everyone said. My teacher used to call me up to demonstrate a new technique. The other kids used to ask me for help and I helped them." I talk about the first butch girl I ever met telling me I had nice eyebrows in that class. How she put her head in my lap. How I wanted to kiss her, and I didn't want to kiss then boy with the red hair and green eyes who I inevitably ended up kissing any way. My first, and I didn't like it. She was the one I wanted to kiss.

"I played Alice when I was 12." I said. "My teacher loved me, she gave me the leading role even though I wanted to be the mad hatter. I asked her for that part but she said I was the only one she trusted with Alice."

I gaze into the void, struck. "That's why she came to me in her Alice costume," I whisper.

The next morning, around 3 am when I wake up and can't fall back to sleep, I make a Pinterest board of Alice themed tattoos. I wake up again at 9, with a voice coming from nowhere telling me it's going to take much more than a tattoo to make it up to her. I pull a scant amount of childhood pictures off my mom's Facebook, I make one of them the lock screen on my phone. And I start texting people.

"What was I like when I was a kid? Can you remember anything?"

Because I don't remember. Nothing good, any way. Only the bad things. The beating, the names, the "uselessness". But a decade of children came to shame me for treating them with compassion, but not the one child who needs it most from me. And she's here now, she clearly refuses to be treated this way by me any more. So now, I start a new trek. I have to remember her how she was. I don't have much right now. A "sweet girl". Creative. Puke.

But apparently, she was a rad story teller. That I remember. She was Alice, belligerent in the face of things bigger than her that refused to make sense. She was a liar, a story teller. She never brushed her hair.

I'll get there, my girl. I'll pull everything I can from the ground and remember you. One day, I'll have more to say to you than "You look nice in your costume".

[cinnamonswamp]

August

I brought two of me into the bedroom as I roused this morning, aged 30 and 23 respectively. They took turns marveling and clucking at each other over the bed, the cats with their bodies curled into mine, the dog at the foot, the patio and the tree outside, the partner next to me. They held each other as he woke, pulled an arm around my body as I petted the cats. Both of these women are so uncertain, so scared to engage with hope. I wanted to give them something, to caress a promise back through the accordion of our timeline.

I hoped they didn't notice my round belly, the red stretch marks. I didn't tell them about the pain in my back, my financial dependence, the Ativan on the counter in the kitchen, the name on the calendar that's been scratched out. I'm not ashamed of these things, but they wouldn't understand. I only wanted to promise security and love, not remind them of the impossibility of perfect joy.

When they get here, they'll see that it's not so bad. The stretch marks are beautiful in their way, the belly pokes just a bit farther out than I'd like but it's not entirely outside my control, the Ativan is a mercy, the financial dependence given by grace and entirely temporary.

August was a stable month. Not outrageously wonderful or terrifying. Just a month. I worked through it with paint and wax, with words, with reading and research, stories, people, songs, rages and reliefs. My birthday, falling sleepily at the end of the month, my personal true beginning of Autumn, was one of the loveliest I've ever had. I drank for days, ate bacon every morning. I'm preparing for a bit of a restrictive detox period starting tomorrow, so I wanted to go out with a bang.

My partner has worked their way back to feeling ok in their body. We've managed to work a bit on our relationship lately, which is always a good sign. My back hurts, I still hate my job. But I'm making friends, getting good grades. Just asked for a new therapist. Again.

I don't know. It's just pretty ok right now. See you in September.

[cinnamonswamp]

July

This was a very Julyish type July. My partner and I took an unsatisfying road trip we were both relatively unhappy with. His parents came to visit which was equal parts lovely and agony. Work was inconsistent, my grad program was varying degrees of strenuous. I didn't paint for a couple weeks. I drank too much. I got a tattoo. I kept trying to make friends. Uncertain results so far.

I'm plagued by bad dreams. Shapes from my twenties form and unform. They've been here since we moved in, but I'm starting to feel the pressure of them now. I thought they'd have gone away by now.

The nightmare scenarios I'm trapped in are simply old relationship dynamics where I feel small, ugly, inferior. I've turned back to magic, cleansing the bedroom, putting star anise with lavender and black tourmaline under my pillow, walking barefoot, lighting candles.

My partner is crumbling. I don't know how to help him, it feels like he's falling backwards off a cliff and I can barely grip scraps of his clothes to keep him upright.

I don't really have much else to say. I'll see you in August.

[cinnamonswamp]

June

My apartment complex is covered in a thick green scent now. When I’m walking up the stairs from the parking garage after work it’s the first thing that puts me back in my body, reminding me that I’m home. I am in love with this scent being home to me. I was going to say that the varieties of plants that grow up and down the complex are competing, but they aren’t. They’re singing.

If May was the month that barely happened, June was a storied epic. I started the month holding despair back with my teeth, directionless. I’m ending it in a grad program and 20k more in debt. I’m starting my journey towards becoming a therapist. I finally pulled the trigger. I got my DSM-5 this week. I got my meds adjusted and bought three new dresses that make me feel at home in my body. One of them is red. 

I’m still painting multiple days a week. People are starting to receive them. I did some lemons the other day that look beautiful. Today I wrote out and submitted the last of the homework I had for the week, got re-certified in CPR, cleaned the apartment, did three loads of laundry, went to the grocery store and made white wine sangria. My sister is coming this weekend, both to enjoy our company and also to watch our pets as my partner and I go off on a road trip next week. We’re doing Route 66. 

Half the people I saw at the store today weren’t wearing masks. I’m vaccinated, but I don’t know if I’m ready for that yet. 

I guess June was ok. The panic attacks are coming slower and fewer now. Holding onto my heart for July. 

[cinnamonswamp]

May

This month hardly happened. My partner baked bread, I worked on paintings for my dad and a friend for their birthdays. I cleaned, organized our pantry. We took the cats to the vet, cooked hot dogs on the barbecue and drank homemade lemonade by the pool, soaked in lavender and rosemary. I had ups and downs, got a new therapist who I do not like. Drank too much. 

Jenni’s coming this weekend for a visit. I requested my entire birthday week off. June is going to be full of people. My dad’s having a retirement party. My partner’s parents are coming in... July I think? 

I’ve been concerned with how insecure I’ve been lately. My trust in my own convictions is becoming loose and translucent. It’s hard to not see Dark Omens in my spit. I’m dreaming of past partners nearly every night now. It’s irritating more than anything. I don’t know what my subconscious wants from me. 

The work is chaotic, but it seems to be settling down now and I’m learning where my feet are. 

I drove myself to the hospital for routine blood work by myself on Sunday morning at 8am and when shopping after. They tell you that there is never a moment where you sit back and thing “I’m an adult now. I’ve arrived”. But that’s as close as I think I’ll ever come. 

In any case, May was the month that barely happened. See you in June. 

[cinnamonswamp]

April 21

The freeways here are intuitive. I often feel as though I know precisely where I’m going. It’s been a pleasant surprise to find such confidence in my car in a new city. 

I don’t want to write this. I’m emotionally exhausted. But I know I don’t want to write it later either. I was drunk by 2 yesterday. I sleep 12 hours every night. I gained five pounds. My weeks are peppered by varying degrees of panic attacks. I could only order more medication yesterday and I took my last dose last week. Holding my breath for the next week. 

I don’t know what to say. I’m a wreck. I feel like an absolute waste. I feel pitiful and delicate. I feel like a whining freak. I work three hours a day. I am destroyed by it. Every land mine under my skin goes off, I pull the pressure down into my socks until I get home and stumble into the counter half-blind. I keep myself from throwing up. I dissociate in the kitchen when I can’t find the blender and scare my partner. I can’t tell if this is my body trying to tell me to stop or if this is a delusional traumatized baby I have to coo to sleep so I can be an adult. I don’t know what voices to trust. I don’t know anything.

I wish I could curl back up into my home and be left alone by everyone. I pray this is temporary. Sometimes I feel normal. Sometimes I. do. not. 

I’ll start seeing my therapist again soon. God, I need help. I need so much help. I’m so scared. 

See you in May. Pray for me.

[cinnamonswamp]

March 21

It’s Spring. My cat and I both saw the white butterfly out the window today. People are already clamoring for Summer. It feels like it’s been full year of Winter. Even I’m looking forward to Summer, safe in the knowledge that my partner and I are sheltered in an oceanside town where it nearly never gets above 85 degrees, I imagine I’ll thrive in the warmth for once. It’s also hard when everything you want to do is outside and typically wet in some way. I was belligerent about the pool a couple weeks ago, determined to get my whole body in the water one freezing inch at a time, waiting until the pain receded and going further in. I lasted about twenty minutes before giving up and going straight for the Jacuzzi. 

I can’t remember if I talked about the jacuzzi in my post about February. It is my new favorite place, or one of my new favorite places. Bordered by a rod iron fence and a host of obscuring shrubs and trees beyond, it is a shady warm lagoon framed in flora straight out of a dream and it is wonderful when you’re hung over. You get lost in the swirling mist and foam. I never thought I’d be one for jacuzzis. That’s what a sudden boost in class status will do for you. 

I painted today at my nook by an open window. I’ve done that many times in the recent past. My partner and I share the office now. I’ve set up quite a little art spot for myself in there, with a fold out desk and lots of little shelves and twine to hang water colors, spools of wire, glass jars of q-tips and plastic skeleton bones. It was the closest I imagine I’ll ever come to nesting. 

I’ve decided that I cannot be mentally healthy unless I get a serviceable number of hours to my own devices and I’m fortunately attached to a wealthy enough man to freely make that decision. My joy is constantly etched in guilt. I get to have what I believe to be, finally, all my basic needs met for wellness. A roomy, comfortable home of my own making, a couple of balconies, cats and dog, a jacooz, a fireplace, a lover who nurtures and challenges me at the same time, more art supplies than I know what to do with and the leisure to demand only part time hours at my job. Everyone deserves this. I get to have it, simply because I’m lucky. 

I got a job offer last week from a clinic nearby. I negotiated the pay to $3 over their initial offer, which I’m a little proud of myself for. It was my first time. It was a too good to turn down offer, a fancy sounding place with multiple disciplines of treatment all on site with lots of teamwork and overlap. It sounds like an absolute nesting ground for me to figure out where to go next in my career. Red drapes. 

I start in a week and half or so. I’m already starting to operate in my free time with a scarcity mindset. I’ll miss being truly free. But it’s not the prison sentence it used to feel like. At least not now. Hopefully my spirits stay up. Hopefully I feel good, and still paint and create and do my whacky shit that keeps me grounded and whole while still actually earning a meager income. Pray for me. I’m scared it’ll get bad again. It’s hard to be perfectly happy and then have to change. 

See you in April. 

[cinnamonswamp]

February 21

And the duvet cover, let me tell you what a calamity that has been. My partner decided that he wanted blue and not being especially fond of blue in bed linens, I did my ample best to compromise which resulted in us getting something more for the design than the efficiency and it was just truly terrible. Plasticky, not a comfort to the skin, hardly warm, totally didn’t fit the insert and slid all around. Dreadful. Almost from the day we put it on the bed I declared that we’d need a different one, but certainly not right away as what we’d gotten had been marginally, borderline criminally, expensive. I lasted barely two months before I woke at, like, 6am and crazed coffee fiended my way through various online outlets, filter after filter, by price and color and material. 

Three hours later this man finally got out of bed and stumbled bleary eyed into the kitchen, totally ignoring my ambient chaotic task aura. I had to flag him down and beg for green, to no avail. 

It turned into a bit of a spat, and by spat of course I mean me finally and explosively telling him that something about our lifestyle is a compromise to the point of stress and him being entirely unaware because my fledgling communication skills are still being fine-tuned. And then of course he is immediately flexible and doting and tells me to get whatever I want but of course I can’t because it’s important to me that we’re both happy so I walk away from the computer for the day, come back in the evening and pull the trigger on something that is so bland as to be universally boring to all. 

Oh and when it got here, I of course gave it a quick wash, following the laundry instructions on the tag to the very letter and OF course it looked splotchy and bleeding when I put it into the dryer and I was just about to set the whole building on fire. 

But then I put it on the bed, along with my new exceedingly fluffy pillows and their dark green pillow cases (compromise) and it... it’s a vision. A gorgeous blue/grey linen vision of comfort. What a remarkable phoenix from the ashes.

Any way, I have begun the tedious and agonizing business of trying to make new friends. I have also started writing a little story that is fun and sweet to live inside of. I’m also painting! 

And we continue our weekends of going to the beach or swimming in the pool. Rebuilding my relationship with water. He's drafting up a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign, fielding in some players little by little. We’re going to roll my character tonight and I am very excited.

My sister came to visit last week and it was lovely. I drove four and a half hours of what should be a three hour drive to visit my parents and look for a long lost jewelry box containing the jewelry of my adolescence, but found nothing. I got drunk and told my mom that I’d marry my partner if we were marrying people but we’re not. I guess it’s my secret hope that my family takes our partnership as seriously as they do my sister’s marriage but honestly that was never in question. They love him. I guess I do mourn that people like us don’t have a... oh I don't know. A mile marker, a signifier of commitment that married people do. But I do know that I certainly do not want to be married. It’s a conundrum. 

Any way that’s about it. February was its own blend of lovely and frustrating. See you in March. 

[cinnamonswamp]

January 21

There are two shiny metal cylinders, a short one and a tall one. I fill the taller one part way with ice from the dispenser on the double door fridge. I pour four parts gin into a plastic hour glass shaped measuring utensil made foggy white by repetitive usage and dump it into the smaller cylinder. I repeat again with elderflower and lime juice, three and one parts respectively. I’m following directions. This is the first one I’ve made for myself.

Our fridge is pimpled with the adolescent stages of magnets and accumulated pride and obligations. A Christmas card from my sister and her husband. The first power bill. Our first vaccination cards. I stand in the bedroom, leaning against my partner’s dresser and stare through the glass sliding door out into our balcony at the new hummingbird feeder I just set up, making sure it’s working properly. It’s raining. The balcony is bare entirely, having just spent the previous morning sweeping a trash bag’s worth of branches and casual debris off the tile. The chairs I bought won't come until next week. 

The feeder is the first installation of what is going to be my personal labor of love. I called the side of the bed closest to the sliding doors so I can wake up and see the trees outside and in the morning I imagine it. Plants, hanging lights, the typical Pinterest wonderland. I have wanted a balcony all my life. Ever since I was a child. Now we have two, and one of them is just for me. My own particular use, you might say.

Look at me, drinking gin. Roller skating in an empty parking lot. Pulling my dress full off my head at a public beach and running into the ocean in my sports bra and yoga pants. Sitting in a Jacuzzi and being discreetly inappropriate with my partner. Swimming in a pool and putting my head underwater, slowly learning to trust my breath again, that it’ll be there when I come up to the surface. Look at me, telling my partner that I’m in the middle of something and to leave me alone. In a nice way. And feeling awful about it for an hour afterwards. I’m working on it. Look at me go. Making art. Moving my body. I wish I never had to go back to work. The unemployed version of me is so free and full of things. 

It’s been one year since I started this blog. I was a fifth hoping that it would blow up and we’d have a Julie and Julia situation, where mapping my months was worth something to more people than just me, it’s hard to do things that are for just me. But I also have enjoyed the privacy. The freedom to switch prose styles and presentations back and forth, to be whatever me I was that day. And it’s been helpful. 

In the mornings, I get up whenever I want and make the fancy ground coffee I get special once a week from the shop across the street. It’s called Gratitude. I sip it begrudgingly. It’s as close as I’ll come. It’s only because it’s delicious. Don’t read too much into it. I sit at my computer and research art project ideas and decorating ideas. I did the mantle piece, organized my jewelry, my make up and hair station, my little office nook tucked away at the far end of the living room. In the evenings, we watch TV by an actual fire in our fireplace, and our animals come to sleep on our bodies. We slowly build our bar set up in a variety of bottles and colors, opaque and translucent. 

When we wake up on the weekends, we curl into each other on our absolutely ENORMOUS bed and ask each other what we want to do that day. We spend days together now, swimming in the pool, creating a gallery wall with our conjoined art, rollerskating down the street, hopping gingerly through our neighborhood ugly-beautiful beach large rock by large rock, picking over tide pools, looking for starfish but only finding hermit crabs, pointing out cool rocks to each other. I’ve lost five pounds since we moved here. I’m falling back and so in love with the way I look. 

And one night, telling my therapist about how I talk to my sister who is currently going through a psychological crisis, she stops me and tells me how impressed she is with how I handle and reflect the situation and for the third time tells me she really hopes I choose to become a therapist. I’ve probably said this before, but every therapist I’ve ever had has told me I should be a therapist. It means more coming from this one. 

Then again, every teacher I’ve worked for has told me I should be a teacher. Every behaviorist has told me I should be a behaviorist. Every school psychologist, speech and language pathologist, social worker and school principal. They should bid for me, like a professional football player. 

So, you get it. I’m Good With People™. In DnD, I’d have a naturally ridiculous charisma score. Maybe wisdom too. But before you accuse me of being vain, check my dexterity and intelligence modifiers. They are absolutely doomed. Wow I’m really giving myself away here. Any way, back to me being amazing and not an absurdly dense and clumsy nerd.

I don’t know. It feels right in a way teaching didn’t. Even before I got there, the dread in the deep place where We Know Things was extremely clear. I followed that path because I was scared and desperate. I am no longer either of those two things today. What I choose I can choose from a place of safety and that singular fact is slowly breathing trust back into my body and my judgement. My incredible, loving, often oblivious, farting, door slamming, fearless, teasing, doting, horny punk fairy dusted scientist partner has offered me a literal on this good green earth miracle. I get to choose my future now. Truly choose it. 

Man, I don’t suck that dude’s dick enough. 

[cinnamonswamp]

December

December was truly decadent. My partner moved to temporary housing in San Diego for two weeks and I spread myself out in the vastness of the quiet. Then he came back for the move and the world heated up with noise and work again. There was both everything and nothing to do. Men came and took all our delicate little fixtures and wrapped each in layers of paper while we hid in a bedroom, the wear of idleness drawing long on our bodies. I ate a burger on a bare mattress on a floor and overheard the men meowing at and hassling each other, cooing over our nerdy things and desperately wanted to take them all out for a beer. One of them liked rocks. He wrapped all mine up with care and tenderness, and I could not hug him. 

My cats nearly worked themselves into heart attacks on the way home but bounced back so quickly I cried. My partner and I roused at dawn two days in a row to put together our new home before we brought the pets in. Those days of constant and exhausting work was probably some of the most romantic days we’ve had in months, pausing every now and then to marvel at our fireplace, our balconies, our enormous kitchen, punctuating our movements with awe and disbelief and joy in each other. We made love brazen on our couch in front of a roaring fire with our blinds wide open, nothing but the trees that fill our balconies to see. We spent Christmas on the couch, hung over and running through every holiday movie we could find, fiddling with the presents my parents sent us and eating pastrami sandwiches. 

I invited all my family members to visit us one by one, I took a million pictures. Our new apartment is a dream. Very quickly it started to feel cold and the reality of change and loneliness of being so far from my friends and family and familiarity hit and I swayed a bit from the weight of it. We held each other, watched our normal TV shows and tried to breathe routine and familiarity into the place. We’re getting there. And I feel a little better every day. Now I’m going to stop here and get about the business of fixing up the playlists I made for my family. See you in January.

[cinnamonswamp]

November

This is the last week my partner will be here for the rest of the month. I’m giving notice to my job this week. Over Christmas, he and I will be moving ourselves, our earthly possessions and our animals to a new city. Meanwhile, my job, largely involving direct work with children, just moved exclusively to teletherapy. It still remains to be seen how many of my hours just got nuked in the process, but I’m more anxious about resuming work than not. Transitioning to a new service platform in the last few weeks of my stint at this gig feels pointlessly exhausting. They don’t even know yet. That was the hardest part, giving the news of suspending in-person sessions to all my families knowing I was going to deliver another blow in the following week. For most of my clients this will hardly matter more than a few weeks inconvenience but a few will probably struggle with it, and that... super sucks. 

I’m knocked a bit unbalanced by the swamp of uncertainty coming up, but I’m doing better with it now than I was a couple weeks ago when we first learned what was about to happen. He got The Job, and in an instant our lives would have to completely change in such a short period of time. It was weird for me to have such a mixed reaction, we’d been hoping for this for a while, me especially. This was the one I hoped he’d get, this was the city I was most looking forward to moving to. And the circumstances really work out in my favor, I get to be a bit of a princess for a while. Rent, bills, financial desperation are no longer a problem for me. Poof. Just like that. And I get space and flexibility to pursue my next big adventure, whatever it ends up being. I may go back to school, get my masters. I will likely be actually able to afford it, due to the good graces of my patron and lover. But when we first got the news I immediately sunk into a miserable depression for a few days. 

I’m not used to being not good with change. Every time I’ve left a town, a job, a boyfriend, or any other major lifestyle situation I’ve been fleeing something. I’m not fleeing anything now, I actually quite like my job and my city and my friends and my therapist and I’m actually sad to leave. Being sad to leave was new and it scared me. But buried under it was a true excitement to start the next something. I’ve been ready for a while, and I’m very excited. 

This month has been marked by the cue of long-term changes with no immediately observable differences in the day to day and a subtle cynicism left in the air where there should be joyful anticipation. But I guess this year, our world, has kind of robbed us all of that for a little while. I hope it will be lovely where we’re going. I’m relatively sure it will be. I hope the world doesn’t turn around and fuck us, fuck me. That has tended to be its M.O. in the past but not always, and not recently. You know, save for the obvious. 

And so, coming up soon, I will again go through the process. The cleansing, the shrinking, the boxing, and the unboxing, the ordering, the peach-tinged melancholy of loving something new. This is a rhythm I know by heart, it’s honestly my most sacred happy place, to feel like the most constant thing in the room. I am the one that will stay the same, while everything around me blurs. Each time revealing a puffy pink layer of a truer me as I take opportunities to leave behind whatever isn’t serving me. 

See you for Christmas. 

[cinnamonswamp]

October

My partner and I have been having trouble this month.

With all the other attended bobbles and glories of October, that was the first sentence out of my mouth today. Probably because I wanted to get it over with. I’m so legitimately spooked by how quickly our romance entirely deflated after I moved in. What I want is for us both to peel ourselves off of our computers and our video games. But we’re both hiding from the world and each other, because we are the world. He had a six hour job interview yesterday. I didn’t know how to comfort and celebrate him after. I bought him a dumb candy toy I found in the checkout when I was buying beer, and I forgot to give it to him. 

I had a really hard period of Uber Depression earlier in the month, which turned into rage and frustration that he caught the teeth end of. I couldn’t stand having him around, trying to talk to me and touch me while I was using all the energy I had to keep the tiger in the cage. All he’s getting from me is criticism. Give me more space, spend more time with me, touch me, don’t touch me. Even I’m frustrated. I broke down a few weeks ago and spent the day in bed because I don’t know what my body wants. I try to listen and give feedback appropriately but then she rebels. I slammed my forehead with the heel of my hand “make the fucking happy chemical,”. 

So now I’m on lexapro. Just started last night. So I’ve got this little yellow ticklish bird of an idea that if I cheer up, we’ll start fucking again, and dating, and celebrating and laughing. Maybe it’s all me, maybe I can fix this all by myself. That would be nice. Something fully in my control. But it's your store brand cyclical wash and repeat of I’ll Try Harder! and then nothing and then I’ll Try Nothing and then nothing. And he... I don’t know what his plan is. 

We need some zero stakes free space. Everything is tense now, all our choices and interactions are in Save The Relationship zone. I hate it. I’m just kind of taking my pills and checking things off lists and drinking coffee and waiting to see if this is a tunnel or a grave. 

Something worse- I’m getting little rumbles from one of the far off islands of my brain that I don’t want to move. WHAT even is THAT. Of course I want to move. I’ve wanted to move for years. I’m rambler, man. I hate being in one place for more than two years. I guess it’s because I like my job? And my therapist? I wish decent shit wasn’t so fucking rare that I’m scared to let go of it. It took five years to find even two things to stay here for. A big massive freak out breakdown is coming. There will be tears. My therapist will be exhausted. And then I’ll make a choice, just like I always do.  

[cinnamonswamp]

September

I woke up at 5:30 this morning, showered by 7. By 8 I was on the sleepy Sunday street, getting groceries. As soon as I stepped back in the apartment’s door my partner handed me a breakfast sandwich on a croissant that made my fingers wet with translucent slick and hot sauce. I opened all the windows, started the laundry, poured an iced coffee from a mason jar into one of my delicate Tiffany’s glasses that were a wedding present from my dead grandmother who mercifully never got to hear of my divorce. 

I want to write the sentence “gratitude is coming easy to me this morning”, but nah, I still turn gratitude away at the door like a stray dog. Pride, maybe. I’ll own to pride, pride’s a safe place for me. I’m thinking about bubbles lately. I’ve been learning a lot about bubbles, they’re stronger when the surfaces are colorful and shifting like an oil slick, they pop easier when they go clear. 

“I know a guy who did his whole dissertation on bubbles.” My partner said when I told him. 

“You need to give me his number immediately. There’s a poem here, but I can’t find it.”

“It’s probably about tension. The colorful ones are thick, but uneven and probably under less pressure because of the amount of water. The clear ones are more strained.”

“Yeah, see, if that’s not a poem I don’t know what is.”

I’m building a playlist of sea shanties. I’m taking inspiration from Tik Tok. Pirates are big over there right now. I was trying to figure it out in the shower this morning. What is going on with the sudden fad of sea shanties combined with tongue in cheek depression memes. Then I got it. There’s a bit in one of the songs that's like “You may boast of your wisdom and brag of your blood/ We'll both be forgotten in the wake of the flood/ I'll eat when I'm hungry, I'll drink when I'm dry/ If things don't get better, I'll lay down and die.” And another song that’s almost an epic metal ballad about a poor man digging a hole. I’ve been listening to the latter on repeat for the like the last 20 minutes. I think like a lot of people on Tik Tok, I’m coming out of the time where I was content to be sort of like Sophia Coppola-colored sad in my well decor’d apartment, languid and crying. 

I want joy. It feels like something I have to come by defiantly. It’s October next week, it feels like the world wants to take the savor from my mouth. Like, am I changing anything at all, no. But something inside me feels like its changing color, like the trees. 

Oh I get it. I’ve spent the whole blog talking about Tik Tok and my Tiffany’s glasses, my beautiful apartment, the partner who cooks for me and my penchant for poetry, so it may be going misunderstood: I’m poor. I had a wealthy grandmother who’s dead now and died with nothing, I have a partner who is going to be unemployed in two days. I had to walk the earth with a rat bastard’s name for five years because I couldn't afford a divorce lawyer. I’ve accumulated comforting kitsch for ten years by lifting fraying and overflowing cardboard boxes by myself from one rented room to another (until this last move, which was assisted by a lovely man who cooks for me, I’ll concede that point). I used to live much more desperate than I do now, but the smell of the scorched earth is still on my clothes and I spend every day and every decision in fear. 

So joy is hard. And shanties see me, because they turn the dread and desperation immortal and angry, what the world did to small people, names forgotten in the flood.  

I don’t know. September was mostly awful. Like every other month, but also partially lovely. I like it when I get to read books and open my windows. For a while, the sky turned green and orange and we could barely open the door for longer than a second before the whole apartment smelled like smoke and the air was toxic, on top of everything else and I fell apart. That was one thing too many for me. But I got to open my windows this morning and as soon as I’m done here, I’m gonna hang up some dresses, vacuum a bit and spend the rest of the day reading. And gratitude doesn’t get to preside over any of this. I’m grateful for nothing, I’m a dragon in a cave guarding a tattered cardboard box of comforting kitsch, snarling and smoking, fat and angry and ultimately in love with herself that way. 

[cinnamonswamp]

August

I like thinking of summer as a wheel. I think it’s easy to consider summer this way, especially where I live. You know well enough when you’re at the top of it because you are the absolute most miserable and simultaneously you’re comforted by the certainty that the wheel must inevitably go down again and that the misery will eventually abate. The sweat will cool on your skin and hide itself back inside you, your clothes will thicken and layer, various spots of shame will disappear once again and the every day hell of being in perpetual suffocating discomfort will fade to barely even a memory. Pumpkin spice will come back to Starbucks. You know, the works. 

All this to say that every year when I’m at the top of the wheel, it also feels like the harder circumstances of my life are somehow tied to the temperature and will also just inevitably drift off to other parts of the planet and leave me to pull musty scarves out of my storage box in peace. I don’t even enjoy pumpkin spice any more. I feel like I used to, it’s entirely possible that they changed the recipe of the syrup. That’s likely, they do that once something becomes popular, they just pump whatever it is with more sugar. I used to work there, you know. I don’t like to talk about it. I’m embarrassed by how traumatizing it was. Some trauma is almost nearly prideful to talk about, almost like a brag. Like being harmed as a child by an adult, that’s a medal of honor, a bronze survivor badge, look what I survived, can you even imagine? But being traumatized by a working class job, by an 8 hour shift in customer service and beverage creation feels like a sign of weakness. 

I think I should talk to my therapist about how I view discussing my trauma as humiliation vs. self-aggrandizement. You know what else was a trauma? Student teaching. You know what else? Parking tickets. This is feeling dumber the more I go on, but some things sit like black bullfrogs in my brain and disembowel my ability to problem solve the moment they're woken up. And one of those things is parking tickets. 

None of this has anything to do with my month. August was... fine? No. It was ridiculous. It was ridiculous but also fine? I’m not in the best headspace right now, if I’m honest. It’s hard to have perspective today. August felt like a chained event of crises that had virtually nothing to do with actual choices I made, just fires being started by other people that I either tried to sidestep or use what little resources I had to help put out before throwing up my hands and leaving it to the people responsible. Here’s a tip, don’t start a fire if you don't own a hose, people like me are every day deciding they no longer want to throw themselves onto other people’s pyres in the hopes of dousing the flames with our bodies. 

I had a thought the other day that I just don't want to help people any more. Not, like, as a general rule, but I mean professionally. I don’t think it’s as misanthropic as it sounds, more than I don’t think I can find a way to help people that doesn't hurt me. I think I’m losing the belief that some avenue of service exists that doesn’t systematically exploit and harm the people providing the service. I used to believe it would be selfish of me to not put myself in service if I had a gift that could help people. I’m either losing my faith in my gift or in my martyr-complex. I hope it’s the latter, but maybe they’re inextricably tied and to lose belief in one is to lose belief in the other. It feels good to not be a martyr any more. On my birthday, a friend called and expressed regret that I’d been turned away by teaching. I explained that even though the impetus was a bad experience, I’m grateful that I was given an excuse to walk away. I’ve spent too long relating to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the difference between me and her is she doesn’t get to simply change careers. I do. And what’s often missed in that whole show is that if she could take it off her shoulders and walk naked into the sunset she’d do it in a heartbeat. We are talking about a woman whose greatest personal achievement was fucking dying. 

I don’t want to spend my life excited to die. 

Maybe I feel hard done by this month and I’m working overtime to be aloof because I don’t want the responsibility of being angry at people. That’s kind of what I’m seeing in this Rorschach of a blog. Any way August wasn’t as bad as July but look, nothing is great right now. For any of us. It’s starting to feel more stupid every month talking about my personal pain when Chadwick Boseman just fucking died and an innocent black man is handcuffed to a hospital bed right now... I just. Fuck. This isn’t for you. This is for me. And later, I’ll be grateful I did this.