And then she was all like…

I am not going to blog-lie. I have never felt this horrible in my life. I cry all the time. I agonize about forgotten conversations I couldn’t write down before forgetting them. I lay in bed awake for a half hour before I can even bring myself to move. Every morning, I break the news to myself that, omygosh, I can’t believe this is my life. And that it always will be. How the hell am I supposed to know I’m going to just, like, LIVE through this? Can’t I die yet? Every night, I go to bed congratulating myself that I’m one day closer to it. My little spirit is so tired, and it just wants to go home. I’m sorry. I told you I wasn’t going to lie. Don’t get all up in my comments, and tell me to get help. I’m not going to off myself. I am just content with what I’ve done, and it wouldn't be such a shame if I got to duck out while my boobs were still semi perky. People tell me I seem like I’m doing better. Are you effing KIDDING ME? This is a month and a half after the worst day of my life. NOW is when it is SINKING IN.

I talk to reboyfriend out loud every night around this time. Up until the last night we spent together, we had a little two-part ritual any time we conked out. Now, I do my half of it alone in my bed every night. My imaginary friend, Jed, does his part back in my sad little pretend mental world. **WhoaWhoaWhoa WHOA...I just re-read this today...and realize it sounds totally dirty. Holy embarrassing. OK. What I meant was, every night we had a little back and forth VOCAL ritual, where he would sigh really big and let out this vulnerable, needy little hum, and wait quietly with his eyes closed, for me to copy him. If I didn't, he would do it again until I caught on. And when I did, he took it through about three more rounds. Duh, that's really all. But it was cute. He used to do it when we dated in college, and I had forgotten about it until one night this past spring he did it again out of the blue. It was our tradition of affirmation and endearment. Wow. Anyway...** I wonder if he ever sees me pick my nose, and I need to remind him that it was just an itch, not “picking.” I tell him about my day – my minor successes and the times he would be proud. I ask him if he misses me. I cry, because I don’t think he does, and then I get nervous about crying because I have this paranoid belief that he won’t come near me if I’m ever upset.

I can remember a time, four summers before this last one, when I was going through THE shittiest time. I lost 15 pounds, gave up on God, and I might have even developed a twitch. It was one of those things I Got Myself Into, so I made a point of learning like hell from it. I moved home from SLC, to live with my mom and four little sisters in Highland for the summer. All of them were going through their own loads of total crap. It was a crazy summer. Not the kind of “crazy” that involves jEePiN’ and lots of cuh-ray-zay nights out. I mean crazy as in mentally ill. Or pretty close to it.

Some of our favorite memories as sisters and daughters come from that time. We didn’t have a whole lot to be excited about in life. At all. We were all broke or knocked up or in rehab or getting restraining orders against people something equally rad. It wasn’t like we had a cruise coming up, or a wedding that we knew of, or some form of graduation from something. One sister had some childbirth penciled in, but she had to come home empty-handed from that one (and to this day, she is still my hero for choosing the harder route then for the better life now). Life just didn’t have a whole lot of sparkle on the horizon for us. So we made stuff up. There is just a human need, in some people, to have something, anything, to be excited about. And you need it even more when your heart is in a million little pieces.

We sprawled around on the floor of the living room and talked about this amazing song we heard performed on Leno, or the lame people in the online dating scene, or made fun of the girl that stole a boy from my sister because she drove a car called a “Lazer” that looked like a really old Eclipse, and we enjoyed repeating the word Lazerrrrrr as obnoxiously as possible. I looked forward to coming home from work and watching Mean Girls two times in a row, back to back. Or Little Women.

So, we’d burn that cool new song on to a CD and get in my car and open the sunroof all the way, even though the AC was running. We took late night drives down to Walmart or Del Taco, or the gas station for a fountain Pepsi we didn’t need. We drove down this really long “lane” (what a great word) that connects Highland to Lehi. It feels like a secret, because it’s really quiet and narrow and shady, and it doesn’t have lines painted on it, and hardly ever any other cars. The “lane” also meanders past some water reservoir/watershed thing, but they had to be all pretentious about the zoning, so it is surrounded by granite boulders and wrought iron fences, with pebbles spilling around the base of it as if to create the feeling of a quaint little pond. (Yeah, a pond that is a perfect rectangle and has this ugly metal power shed thing in the corner). We promptly mocked this, asking each other how in love with yourself you would have to be to take your neighborhood ditch and try to make it all classy. We named the road “classy ditch road.”

But it’s a beautiful drive. It cuts through field after field, before ending at the mouth of the world’s biggest jackpot of chain atrocities known to man. I love this, all of this. One minute, you’re in a scene from a Hallmark movie and next thing you know, BAM, you’re in The Meadows, the united states of generica, the glory hole of all strip malls, which has taken over Lehi, Utah. Anybody want Sonic? Somehow, that little road stayed surprisingly quiet and serene. I think legislature and resident CC&R vitriol may have had a hand in it. But also, you know, the fate that makes everything revolve around ME right now.

I take this peaceful, scenic little nature drive most mornings on my way to Starbucks or Walgreens.

Because here I am living in Highland again, once more to heal from something traumatic, this time something I didn’t get myself into, a life I never chose.

Tonight, I took the “lane” all the way back up into Highland with my Walmart and Panda Express bags tumbling around in the backseat. I opened my sunroof all the way, blasted my music and thought about the weird ways we stuck together and kept each other laughing that summer. It’s September 29^th. It’s still really Summer. And in Summer, you should always have your sunroof open when you drive at night, and your music should always be loud. I wondered, secretly at first, if maybe some of the sweetest things in life are things we look back and remember sprouting from the bitterest times. I honestly think some of the sweetest times in my life were those empty-hearted, broke-down moments next to Coot and mom that summer. I cut the stems off the Walmart roses I got for the counter today, eating my crap Chinese food, and wondering about that.

I know it probably weirded you out to read my first part of this entry. Where I talk about being one day closer to death (that always depresses people. Hell, it used to depress me). But don’t start thinking I’m some goth emo pu**y who just wants to lay around and listen to Radiohead and Tori Amos until people get sick of me. I put on a game face every damn day. I congratulate myself for things besides being a day nearer to God. I congratulate myself on crossing off 50% of my to-do list today at work. I congratulate myself for taking a shower AND using face wash in the process. I reward myself for going to work, almost once every single day. And here are some of the ways.

- Go to Smart Cookie. Buy a cream-cheese-frosted sugar cookie in every color. Bring home to host family.

- Stop at Cheesecake Factory on the way home from work. Pick up Wild Blueberry White Chocolate Truffle cheesecake. Bring home to host family.

- Buy myself a celebrity smut magazine (the first I’ve read in about a year, excluding hair salon days). Then eat cheesecake while reading about how Scroungelina is jealous of Brad’s relationship with The Walking Perfection That Is Rachel McAdams. I got to the blueberry graham cracker crust right about the part where it talked about Angie making Brad UNINVITE Rachel and her husband to the Jolie-Pitt Chateau. Tacktastic, Angie!

- Get a carwash. The best one they offer, with RainX and rainbow soap and free vacuums at the end.

- Stop at Starbucks and buy myself one of their really pretty mugs with my pumpkin latte. When they start to wrap it up in tissue paper and a gift box, stand there and don't stop them. Because it’s a present. To myself. Open it once I get to my desk at work.

- Get a cute pair of socks at Target when I really went there for contact solution.

- Get a cute notebook to scribble in and carry in my purse.

- Draw a bitchin bath, as cliché as I can – meaning candles and bubbles and Enya. Soak in my cliché. Bask in the triteness. It’s overdone for a very good reason. Shave! Past the knees even!

- Get Ghirardelli raspberry squares for smores that you will make in the chimnea on the back deck with the host family. (I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since the cabin trip with Zeke and Anaga…a blog you will read soon).

I do something like this for myself, every day. All this while, I am feeling incredibly sorry for myself, which is also healing. It makes you feel so deserving of the treat, and also makes you feel so loyal to yourself, and so in control of your healing. I get so tired of saying "what is taking so long" and not even know whose mercy I'm at.

Last weekend when I was out hunt for some gifts, I bought one for myself. I was at my favorite store of all time (Tabula Rasa), browsing all the cool books they have on display. One stood out at me – it is a little post-card sized hardcover called Take Time. It is full of inspirational quotes about how to LOVE all the time you have, how to make the most of it. Relish in the potential contained in the seemingly ENDLESS SPRAWL of your untouched future. It was on a day that I was feeling particularly overwhelmed by the amount of life I have left to live without the Jedster. And this made a celebration of that, focusing on how much of this life is terrifically just mine, for now. And that I’d better soak it up before I’m dead and back with him, so I can appreciate doing our nightly rituals and teasing each other about voting wrong.

Reboyfriend always made me make my bed – or made it for me, every morning. I NEVER made my bed in the morning before that. Now, I make a thing of it. And I put my dumb little Take Time book on the edge of it like a present, and it greets me when I get home from a long day at work.

I urge you to get something for yourself next time you buy something for someone else. I think you should congratulate yourself for something every day.

Oh, and there was no real point to this post. Hence the title. Sorry if you were waiting for it to make any sense, ever.

Whatever. Here's that book.

And, you know, that other book.

And Reboyfriend's copious notes taken while reading this blog, still stuck inside the pages of the book.

We love books.