right now it's 11:19pm, wed, 6/6/2012. anniversary of d-day, for another 40 minutes.
i'm in the house. mike is asleep in the bedroom. every so often i hear him snore, and it makes my insides feel warm.
mike is hard to explain. i guess he's my boyfriend, but we have complicated issues with commitment. honestly, i don't feel like going into it more deeply. he's here, i'm here, he's snoring happily, and that's as complex as that needs to get at this moment.
tonight i still need to go upstairs into the barn and move some more of my stuff around. it's intimidating. i keep putting it off.
the apartment over the barn was going to be my home. i had visions of sitting up there with the woodstove going, doing my writing at my rolltop desk, maybe getting up every so often to make a snack or get some coffee. i imagined peace, i imagined the thoughts and dreams flowing... like every other home, it's gone now. i don't even want it back, because the price i'd have had to pay for it would have been unlivable. any peace i might have had would have fled.
as it is, going up there to do anything is hard. it hurts. i don't want it, but i can't quite give up the might-have-beens, standing there looking around. it's a lot like losing love, i guess. you know you can't go back to him, he lied, he was a shit, but the might-have-beens take a long time to fade, and you can't stop remembering how good it was, when it was good...
i guess i've been looking for home for a very long time. every time i think i've got it, it turns out to be fake, unreliable. i thought my ex was home, and where we were, was home. i thought that for fifteen years, up until the moment i realized i couldn't stand to lose one more thing to him. we owned a real house. we lost it. well, i did what i could, but he wouldn't get a job to save his life, or mine, for that matter. we lost the house because i couldn't do it on my own, and my own was all i had.
so the mobile home in north san jose that came next, that should have been home. i found that by complete luck and nerve, and i made it work with the money we had, and my ex still couldn't be bothered to get a job or contribute more than a few hundred a month that didn't barely cover food, let alone rent and utilities.
that was my house, and there's my truck. the front had all my plants. i liked the neighbors, and my daughter had her best friend in the house behind us. the plan was, when i got it, that we'd save up and buy some land, and move the mobile home on the land, to live in while we built a house. that didn't work either. when i was finally used up and couldn't give any more and said so, we lost that house too.
so now i'm sitting at the corner of an old school desk, in the house of a man i care greatly for, but he's not my home either. i sleep in my travel trailer. all i have is my truck and my trailer, which i guess is more than some people have, but they aren't home any more than any of the other places i've been since i left my parents' house. if home is uniquely mine, than i've never actually had one, not that lasted. not that i could hold on to.
i don't know who i am and i don't know where my home is. sometime i can handle those thoughts. other times, especially late at night when i'm tired, i can't ignore them. they turn into the ghost of a house, with empty windows and ivy crawling all over the falling down walls. they whisper around like skittery rat claws and wind sighing through broken places.
wow. it really is time to go face the shit i have to face up in the barn, and then go to bed and forget all this for a while.
'night, y'all...
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