I’m back.
Tonight’s one of those sleepless nights, where your head is spinning, and you realize you are at a crossroad. One random thought spirals down into a pit of words, flying so hard inside of my head, I’m afraid my skull will fracture from the inside out.
I’ve done so much work this summer, that I’m feeling strong and wild and free. I see an opening to change things in my life, I mean really change them.
It means jumping off the perceived safety ledge. It means a lot of scary things. It also means staying alive, and finding my dream, dreams, dreamz….who knows what it is?
FREEDOM
I’ve worked so hard. I’ve staid the course. I’ve put my time in. I know what is the “safe” thing to do. I also know it will mean a bare subsistence level of living for the rest of my life. I’m not craving things, though the loss of my little house 18 months ago, in a very small town in Montana, nearly killed me. I’d love to have “my house” back.
“My house” really isn’t housed in a building. It was. Now it lives in the dark recesses of my brain, it was a place of excitement, a place where I thought I would find myself. Thinking about my house now, is so painful, it’s hard for me to do it.
My house was where I raised my boogers, kept my dogs and loved my woman. Then something happened. I got sick. I mean really sick. The kind of sick that negates anything, except crawling in bed when I got home from work. My woman, she took over parenting high needs kids that weren’t hers. Kids that didn’t really like her. Kids whose dad hated both she and I being together. Kids that have no idea still, what she sacrificed for them, but ultimately for me. In the end, we fell apart. I shut down. She shut down. I wasn’t listening. I’m not sure I had it in me TOO listen to her then. I was too tired. I was in too much pain. I was losing the battle of staying in life.
She couldn’t do it anymore. I don’t blame her, I blame myself for not noticing that she was dying inside. When our lives fell apart, we broke up. As most of us have done, more than once. I was trying to figure out how to move myself, my two very unhelpful kids, my two large dogs, out of my house before the bank took the keys. I couldn’t financially maintain my house anymore, without her, and I was barely maintaining it with her. She moved out, with friends. We barely texted. Still, she came home every weekend she was off work, to help me get us out of that house. Because I had been sick for so long, there were piles of crap, treasures, trash everywhere. I couldn’t stand longer than 5 minutes. I hired every person (including children) would would possibly help me to do so. I rented a house for three months while we weren’t living in it, because it took me that long to get out.
My love and I moved into that house, in the bright summer light in August. It was beautiful, with amazing energy, an even more amazing view of the Montana valley I was to call home for the next 8 years. Our last day, in my house, was a cold, snowy brutal day in March, some 8+ years later. It was an awful day, week, month, year. It was also a new beginning, of sorts. It was the beginning of a year even harder than the one that came before.
It was a year of not being able to breathe, from missing her. It was a year of trying to parent my very hard now teens alone. It was a year of making up with their dad because I was desperate for his help. It was a year of trying to figure out how to take care of my own elderly mother. It was the year, my pain threatened to force me to retire, at 55. Old, angry, in horrible pain and alone. Things were fuzzy. We lived on Domino’s pizza for months.
Slowly I started finding a little groove, when I heard there was a new doctor in town. I didn’t think, I’d be able to have the surgeries I needed to become whole again. Deep, in the feral places in my heart, I knew I needed to jump, and I needed to borrow, beg, plead or steal to make these surgeries happen.
my montana lair 