The world has left me by myself this evening. My brain is stumbling, wanting to be placed in the hands of someone warm who would curl up with me, knot their hands with mine and drowse into grounding sleep. I feel so incredibly detached, as if I were to know the trick of it, I could lift up my body and float into the ice-cream cold sky. The wind would be unbelievable, the chill worse than a bad piano recital. I don’t want that tonight. I want to murmur, “where are you going?” on the edge of sleep and have someone reach over and comfort me. It’s becoming a stretch into years, that feeling. I’m so bad living in only half marriages. It’s like a sickness, this not having certainty. I enjoy the pauses, but I need something stable. It took so many years of clawing back into an emotional world that I feel as if I’m squandering when I’m trying to be satisfied with small print contracts.
I’ve been mentioning in conversation lately my traveling approximation of childhood. I’ve clarified there was trauma. I was a girl, they were an older boy. My mother was young, my father a violent man. I’ve almost shown the carried scars on my body, graveyards of happy memories I never got to have, but somehow, it just wasn’t the time. In a very strong way they don’t matter. To my mind, I didn’t properly begin until I was seventeen. Before that I was running around on automatic, a seed in a field that never got any water. There were no genuine feelings, only faked approximations because if I didn’t keep up with people, they began to let on that I was too much of a problem. What I want to explain somehow is that past all the months of living in the back of a truck, all those accumulated years in hotel rooms and blank transitory hallways, I can forgive myself for leaving the world alone when I was younger, but not any longer. What I’ve finally gathered is too precious. See? I hold out these hands in spite of everyone. It’s simple. Interaction is the way to stand in front of time and take the force of the blow.
I’m living close to the line right now. I’m got less than a hundred dollars to live off until I find myself employment, and I get back on the twenty-fourth. It was a matter of keeping my job or going to Montreal. To me there was no question. With the little I was making, there was no feasible way to Save Against A Good Time. Damn the basic idiocy of leaving with as little as I do. If I’m going to go, it’s going to be now. If nothing else, the cold will be a deterrent against staying.
I haven’t found anyone who’s willing to take my ferret and I only have one day left. It’s kind of Ryan to try and make it back here every day to top up his food and water, but I’m not sure I can rely on him to remember. Are there any volunteers in the audience? He’s very sweet and won’t hide anything in a place impossible to find. There’s an issue with him getting into dangerously exciting places like Beneath The Fridge and you’ll have to get used to checking under things before you sit on them, but overall, he’s really quite easy to take care of. Food, water, a twice a week sink bath with dishsoap or shampoo, and he’ll sleep with you at night if you let him, especially if there’s a draught.