Caterwauling

“When I breathe, and breathe into you
And I feel right to the bone
And I give what you give
And we go even higher than we are strong
And the cracks in the walls covered up by the sheets
We live underneath
All the sex, all the nights, we stay up, yeah we stuck
But we’re more than free.”

— Tove Lo, “Got Love”

It’s just too bad that a girl can’t get good help around these parts. The ability to take a day or an hour off is an impossibility with what I’m working with.

This is preventing me from getting some. I am a much happier, more productive employee when I am getting some. And I need to get A LOT to make up for lost time.

If my next orgasm is dependent on one person’s ability to find their ass with both hands AND with instructions, the business is doomed.

My mind was already wandering a bit when I got a text from one of my boys from the wilds of the Midwest.

I’ve never mentioned him but we’ve been friends for the past year. Actually I often called him one of my “kids” because he’s young and I ended up being a bit of a mom figure to him. (Gah.)

Which he needed and I’ll admit I wasn’t too bad at.

Anyway, now, he’s become my hero in a big way.

He identified where things were going wrong, we talked about the one and only solution, and I kicked his butt a bit to take a baby step forward. I was cheering him on all the way and willing to walk with him if he wanted.

He surprised me and took a flying leap instead. All by himself.

And today, he just sent me a photo of himself looking like a completely different person. He looks at peace. Happy. The guy I remember meeting not so long ago.

My heart swelled with this weird motherly pride he’s always inspired in me.

Today he doesn’t know it but he graduates from one of my “kids” to one of “my boys.” Which is a pretty special designation.

You wonder if people can look at you and tell what you’ve been thinking and/or what you’re thinking of instead.

You also wonder whether bringing along a spare pair of underwear might not be a half-bad idea …

Gotta love being in the midst of exchanging seductive texts and your night-owl colleague hits you up with five texts right over what’s supposed to give you a sweet dream.

Funny how when you know people are on the precipice of making what, for all intents and purposes, looks like the easier choice, you have to remember that for them they are often making the harder choice.

After all, you’ve got to wonder how many people are looking at you and thinking WTF when it comes to your choices and you wish you could explain, hey, yeah, you walk in these hooker heels and see what YOU come up with.

Of course, I wouldn’t mind letting someone else figure everything out for me sometimes …

This week I:

• Went to lunch with a wallet from which I’d forgotten that I had removed my credit cards.
• Broke the rearview mirror.
• Lost my shoe in the rain and couldn’t recover it from the quicksand.
• Cried a whole lot.

This weekend I:

• Fixed the reariew mirror.
• Returned to look for the lost shoe. I did not find it but I did leave with a shoe on each foot.
• Bought two cute leather jackets for fall. And a dress to save for a special occasion.
• Said a lot of things I needed to say. Without fear, judgment or repercussion.

The good thing about me is I get emotional exactly 12 times a year. Kind of like my 12 days of Christmas, only mine happen every 28 days. (And best present ever, by the way. The joy of knowing one is not knocked up, yes, but also the excuse to be oneself.)

I feel like I aged a year in the last seven days, and I certainly look it. But I earned every damn gray hair on my head and I will wear it like a badge of honor.

If you ever need one.

“The end of the affair
The weight of the world
The kindness gone to bed
It’s free of your laughter
Alive in the halls
Did he hear, did he hear
The fumbled words you said

Living without her
Living at all
Seems to slow me down
Living forever
Hell, I don’t know
Do I care, do I care
The thunder’s rumbled sound

This is it
This is just it
Go to him
What the hell, love?
What the hell?”

Ben Howard, “End Of The Affair”

I don’t think I can quite articulate the profound sadness in my bones right now.

But I figured I could take my sad bones to the bar and make them less hollow.

So it was pouring, as it is still the rainy season here … and why wouldn’t it rain when I’m leaving work late?

I was wearing my favorite flip flops, which have that designation for the company I was with and the location we were in.

It was A Day, one filled with lies and disappointment and the beginnings of emotion I will attribute to the (welcome) arrival of my period and not because Things were starting to occur to me on a very subconscious level that don’t belong in my brain.

My destination was my favorite bar I haven’t been to in years. Hoping for a little distraction I could usually find there. And pizza. That too.

The water was near six inches deep at some intersections as I walked carefully along the bricks. But in a blinded moment as I dashed across Federal, I landed in a wet pond of deep sand where I’d seen a crane digging earlier in the day.

Goddamn it.

I lifted my foot and my shoe was instantly gone in the wet quicksand. My beloved souvenir.

I am sure this is a metaphor I’m not supposed to miss the significance of.

A wonderful gentleman saw me and opened his newspaper over his head and helped me dig. I held my umbrella over him but the shoe was long gone at the corner of Fifth and Atlantic.

RIP, shoe.

We gave up as the rains intensified. My long red nails were now jagged and half-bare, and my matching red toenails — painted two days ago — were scrubbed raw by the sand too.

Of course, at the point you’re barefoot on you knees in quicksand in the middle of town, dignity is the last thing on your mind. The tears that come — and boy do they — are for other reasons.

I turned back, barefoot at this point. But no one notices the shoeless on the streets of Delray Beach. If you’re not barefoot, you’re not a local.

But my feet are not calloused like the beach bums’ and I slid on the slippery bricks. I thought of my friend with whom I bought the shoes and how I would never have those shoes or those moments again.

And I wanted to curl up in a ball and die a little.

I got to the railroad tracks not too far away and had an overwhelming urge to reach out and share my story. To not be alone in the loneliest moment of them all.

But it was too wet and I was drenched and my phone got soaked through my clothes. My hands were cold and shaking, and I couldn’t manage to text …

Not that I could see the screen through the raindrops on my eyelashes.

So I called and left a message. And as I later learned, we will never know what I said … because the train came and the call cut out.

Well, I’ll know.

I watched that train from not 10 feet away, wisps of my drenched hair drying from its breeze.

I’ll never forget that moment. I told myself I’d remember it forever, whether it was the moment I died inside once and for all or whether it inspired me to run away from it all.

I don’t know that outcome just yet. I feel numb. Which for me is as familiar and as comforting as anything.

He texted a little later to say I sounded sad and to ask if I was ok. I said I was ok. I had nothing else to say. I’d left it in the message that will never be heard.

I put my phone away. The moment passed.

A couple blocks later, I broke back into the office, cleaned myself up and grabbed my favorite heels that I’d abandoned Wednesday in favor of those beloved flip flops after another particularly trying day.

Self-rescuing princess, every time.

At the loneliest moment of your life and saddest day of at least the last year, all you want is someone to be there.

And that person is always, always you.

I think what I realized on the railroad tracks is that some of us are simply meant to walk this earth alone.

Oddly, that made me slightly less sad.

I cried part of the way home, though. But I stopped for gas and my tears dried with the rain as I made my way further north.

And now, dripping-wet underwear (and not for good reasons), jacked-up nails and no booze in my belly aside, it’s like today never happened.

That’s the good thing about being alone. If no one witnessed it, you can deny to the death that it ever happened.

Late-night shoe change and still-sandy jeans …

I can tell my frustration level by the number of draft posts I’ve written during the week that I couldn’t publish. (Seven, by the way.)

All I can say is this:

1. I am clearly the last smart person left on earth.

2. I will never get a reprieve.

3. I have to repress other emotions that may or may not threaten to bubble to the surface in other life areas. Which is nothing new because, heartless bitch. But you know, maybe just maybe one day I might want to let myself feel something. Other than rage. Which I am feeling PLENTY OF thanks to 1 & 2.