seven a.m.

     Freaking keyboard is going clack, clack, clack, clack... Leah poured soy-milk into my old one, and Ron gave me the one out of his black-hole of a bedroom. The keys were coated in a layer of dust so heavy, that it perplexed me as to how to remove it without rendering it useless as well. I questioned Ron about it, and he seemed insulted that I should imply that they were dirty at all. He finally helped me clean it after I started to have an allergy attack. I miss my old key-board. This one is old, and it is loud. No more quiet mornings spent writing until I find a newer, stealthier version.

Warning: This is a Personal Attack

10 December 2010

Chelsie: big mouth; expletives; ghetto white girl; the kind that will steal from you if she gets a chance. Ghetto white girl’s phony, drawling slang; “my man” and “my man” and “my man, bitch!” Ghetto girls riding city busses; purchasing BOGO at Payless shoe stores--swiping EBT cards as if they were credit cards; pushing strollers; whining toddlers--mommy busy texting on her pay as you go phone. Ghetto Girls clad in pajama bottoms and house slippers, shopping at Wal-Mart and Winco on the first of each month; participating in “programs;”  entitled to day passes, day-care; medical; dental; food; living in apartment complexes on month to month leases; five years until the next eviction is off her record. 

How to Disappear Completely (Title Stolen from Radiohead)

There is not a drug (I have been brave enough to try) that would erase how I feel about losing you in that fucking asshole of an accident. I hover just above the clouds and the asphalt, and the cynical moods, when I do not feel like doing a damn thing, other than sitting inside my own twacked-out little mind, starkly wondering at the fact that I possess neither enough hands nor sense, or whatever the fuck it would take to straighten out this mess I now call my life. And oh yeah God, while were at it, widows are supposed to have (count them) eight legs. Yep. You shorted me six. Don’t think I didn’t notice.

I don’t even know what it would take to blot it all out. Heroin and the needle? I don’t know a lot about it, but I’m guessin’ it’s sweet and blurry, and far enough away to hide indefinitely from ravages and riddles, and stupid breaking hearts. Catapult me right outta sorrow and grieving into “Pardon me for a moment. I’m gonna spend some time masquerading as a greasy, unkempt, hole punchin’ junkie. Hope I don’t die like you did. Whoops.”

***

For the six months that you lived after our accident, I marched back and forth like a strange, sad, militant ant, between intensive care units, emergency rooms and rehabilitative care facilities. I’d never had to shoulder so much pressure and responsibility on my own. It was as if someone shouted “Tag. You’re it.” and then just disappeared. In the beginning our battered, black, cordless rang constantly. Every caller wanted to know the same thing; what exactly had happened, which required me to then recap the whole nightmare in nauseating short form. “We were in a horrible accident on I-5. Our brakes grabbed and pulled us into the north side of the Marquam Bridge. Ron broke his back twice, his neck, all the bones in his face and hands, and they had to remove both bone flaps in order for his brain to swell. Me? No, I’m okay. Can you believe I only bent a finger nail? ” I can still hear myself numbly repeating that ridiculous mantra to whomever I was talking to; seated on the back porch of our Tigard apartment in that ugly, red leather chair, you once insisted we not throw away with the phone pressed sorely against my ear.

I was told by a social worker at Pacific Specialties that when she thought of family members who were there for their loved ones that winter, she thought of me. The statement surprised me. In all the months you were hospitalized I never  thought I was doing enough for you, even though part of me must have realized I was doing all that I could.  You were so broken. I wanted to be there with you. I would have never dreamt of leaving you there alone. The eye of God was upon me and I felt its heaviness. God knew the truth about everything leading up to our accident. He knew I had been unfaithful. He’d heard me tell my mother the day prior to us climbing in to that truck that I just wanted to be alone. He had witnessed me refusing to tell you that I loved you for the very first time in ten years and watched as you told me that you would be in love with me until the day you died, knowing good and well that it would be the next day. He knew that I had pushed you into driving to Vancouver when you were tired. He was holding me accountable.

When I went visit you, all I could do was sit holding one hand or the other, watching for fluctuations in your heart rhythm, blood pressure or other vital signs.  The monitor above your bed always registered the same steady beep, beep, beep and flashing image of a pale, green heart on a dark, grey screen. There were times I am sure I was hypnotized by it. Hours would pass without my realizing they had gone by. When I left at the end of each day, I always took with me the sterile scent of the hospital linens and the sound of your heart beat, as I traveled the three city busses it took for me to get home.  Neither of our girls went to the hospital often. Violet, at three years old, was far too young of a child to see her father in the condition that you were in. Aimee was fourteen, but understandably did not handle it well either.

On the evening of the accident I was told that if you were a sixty-five year old man, they would have let you die. It was only because you were twenty-nine that the neurosurgeons were so aggressive. When they brought you in from the initial surgery I was shocked and overwhelmed by state of your appearance. Horrific, shiny, black stitching ran the width of both sides of your enlarged head. Your eyes were swollen as well, and resembled black and blue grape-fruits. You bore a tracheostomy and an awkward, complicated looking brace meant to immobilize your neck and back should you suddenly awaken from the coma you were in and start moving around. It seemed as if nearly every part of you was damaged. When asked what the chances were that you would ever regain consciousness the answer was only “grim.

Initially, I saved your life. After the truck quit rolling and came to a stop on all fours, I realized that I had somehow miraculously survived. I looked over to you, assuming that you, like me, were uninjured. To my horror, the driver’s side door had come open and although you were still belted in at the waist, your head was upside down, outside the truck resting on the black-top. There was blood pouring from your nose in to your mouth and my first thought was that you were going to drown.  I can still hear the sound of my own seat-belt as I fought to get it undone; my fingers frantic and shaking. I got up on my hands and knees on the seat between us and for the first time in my life, I screamed “Help!” I don’t know what possessed me, but I did not try to get my own door open. Instead, I hopped over your lifeless body, aware that your back was more than likely broken and tried desperately to position your head so that the blood was running out instead of in.  I did not know how bad it really was until I saw that you were also oozing thick, black blood from your ears as well. You were not breathing. A man whose face I still cannot remember came running over to help me hold you up. I was begging you to breathe; please just breathe, when you took a single, strangled breath. That stranger and I held you up for the entire fifteen minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive. He kept telling me that he didn’t know how much longer he could support your weight. A female RN got out of a nearby car and assisted us. After the paramedics took charge, I stood at the edge of the scene with your blood all over my shoes and pants, like a pale ghost watching you disappear in to the vanishing point.

  I was the last to understand that I needed to stop the feeding tube. I realized later that your family and extensive medical team had more than likely been counting it as a real possibility for months. It was unimaginable to me that at the end of such a hard, cold, soul stretching tragedy nothing would be won. Your doctor was a young, Chinese man, not much older than you. I sat emotionless with while he cried and pointed to the neurologist’s notes, which read “Chance of regaining any normal cognitive function - 0.” I signed the papers later that afternoon much to your family’s relief. They told me that you would feel nothing. That you “would go out on a cloud of morphine” and that it would take approximately a week. That was March 1, 2004. You died on March 8^th. I was on the phone that morning trying to price a set of tires at Les Schwab, when the other line clicked through. “Hello?” “Hi Susan, this is David over at Pacific Specialties. I just called to let you that Ron passed about a half an hour ago.” Silence, then “What do I do now?” The answer was nothing. I’d prepared everything in advance. You were gone. There was nothing left to do but go to work. 
       In the months after you died I fell apart. I had done such a convincing job of being bullet proof during the time you were ill, that I guess it should have been no surprise to me or anyone else that I would eventually start to crumble. I kept the circumstances surrounding the wreck mostly to myself and it began to eat me alive. I stayed drunk at night and just stared into the blank, white glow of our McIntosh, wishing I could write something; anything that would help me to make sense out of what had just happened to us. I socialized, dated men prematurely and rationalized it all by telling myself that our marriage had been over any way. Aimee, of course, hated my guts for this and went to live with my mother as soon as she saw a clear opportunity. Violet just never came home at all from your mother’s where she'd been for several months before you died. I absolutely did not want to hear that the grieving process would take three to five years, which is what every one was telling me. I would have done anything to avoid facing what we had just been through; anything to take it all back; anything to disappear completely.