indulging in loss

today started as a potentially grand day. things are movin' and shakin'. my house is selling, my sister is taking me skiing.

maybe i shouldnt be so... friggin' happy about the sale of my house, but i was. i want to have it done, and that is my only satisfaction for the entire ordeal, the finishing of it. finishing it so we can stop hurting so much and start healing. as hard as it is to fathom the distance from which we came to where we are now (it is a mind-boggling and sour sour thing), and i certainly take no joy in the minutae of the separation... the steps which have become necessary are always heart-wrenching and gnashing to the soul. finish it, i say. finish it and be done.

with grace if possible.

and so it came to pass, and not without a certain amount of yet more gnashing and at some point, feeling as if i had lost control of everything inside me.

and some minor graces.

i drove to my sister's house after signing the papers and mindlessly took the long way up sandy boulevard. i began to recognize all the old buildings again. the sandy jug had been repainted and renamed the pirate's cove, completely and utterly improper to my mind. then i began to recognize this path, this route. i used to drive this a lot, and i wondered why. i mean, i never lived over here, i had no jobs in this area of town.

then it turned over in my mind, and with it, took my stomach and heart and rolled them like a pair of levis in a large commercial laundrymat drier.

i came this way to see her.

way back when. way back then, at the very begining when we first started seeing each other and she worked at the airport. this is the way i came to find her at work. usually unannouced, i'd drive out to pdx and walk down the long concourse just to see her there. just to hope that she'd have time to hang out a bit... and smile at me, and laugh with me, and see the look on her face at having me there was all i ever wanted and never ever ever to lose... before i had to drive back to my shithole studio in northwest.

those kids... in love and falling for it all. all of it.

damn.

...anyway, as the weight of the memories of my past caught up to my now upsidedown heart, i passed 82nd which is where i would have had to turn left all those years ago to see her.

i can't turn left anymore.

i mean... i could, but there's no point to it, is there?


so i cried instead.


i arrived at my sister's and just lost control over everything. i blubbered like a child for a few minutes and reeled in the knowlege that this morning had been perhaps the last time i might see her on purpose, for a reason.

getting myself together, we loaded the truck and headed to the mountain.

hit the slopes just after 1pm. it was a decent day, fresh fresh powder from the prior evening's snow. the wind was not too harsh and the sun would peek through the terminal overcast sky occasionally.

though i was thouroghly happy to be there, i found myself distracted by the morning's events and daydreaming on the lifts, alternately staring at the back of my gloves or gazing through the mountain at portland eighty miles away. on my runs, i would find myself muttering or singing some song from my early adulthood and cracking up and going stiff on the berms when the downbeat in my mind wasn't jiving with the moguls in the snow.

all in all, i never did really loosen up. i felt sloppy and stiff all over the mountain, never finding my groove.

we did make good time on the slopes getting in eight or so runs by 2:40 when i just lost control over everything yet again. my skis crossed. the outside edge of my left ski bit the ground and took my ski boot with my foot in it to the right and behind me in a clockwise motion. meanwhile, my torso in a fit of unapologetic reverence to newton, decided to do a pirouette to the left in a counter-clockwise motion.

to which my left knee, sensing that the jig was indeed finally up, said "pop" and walked off the job.

before i even hit the ground, my frontal lobes were already saying "this is not good", followed by "this is gonna hurt" followed by, "oh, that's not so bad" in an attempt to rally the knee back to his duties, followed by "ouch, you idiot, that fucking hurts a lot."

um.. yeah.


a longer ride down in the back of a sled and a couple of hours in the medical hut and we're back in town and i am renting crutches which could have been frisbee's on account of the store where i picked 'em up.



really though, it was the best birthday card i've ever gotten. two 9 x 11" glossy b+w photos of the inside of my knee and a script for vicodan.



time to stop losing control.

its a kind of indulgence.