ANGRY, SECOND ANNIVERSARY EDITION

This week, I am still angry.

“Angry”, say people who want to impart wisdom and peace and such,  doesn’t harm anyone but the anger-bearer, so I’m Doing Things with its fuel.  I gathered Things to discard at the alleyside for Big Trash Day, which might happen this Monday.  Anything  in the yard, or among my untouched belongings in the house, or in the Storage Unit of Grief, that carried with it the bad juju of two years ago went to the curb.  I’ve always been a gleaner of junk with possibility, but if the stuff was carried for me from the Cottage to the Charming Wreck and the stuff is still just pieces of Maybe Someday leaning against the unseen side of the house, I’m going to just throw it out on the strong possibility that Someday has crept too close to Never.

Four boxes of actual trash came from storage.  I’d thrown myself headfirst into that storage unit before eye surgery–regranulating corneas do not approve of dust and mold and I do not approve of not seeing clearly enough to identify that spider–and I found a whole lot that I am happy to kiss goodbye.  And a black widow, my first real-life sighting.  I did not kiss her goodbye, I set her free in the grass, with my small person’s compassion ringing in my ears.  She saves spiders, so I saved the spider, but the trash had to go: the wrappings of things I chose to carry home, and rain-stained things, and broken things resulting from a box-avalanche of last spring.

The culling of broken and bad from boxes made me feel less angry. Anger started a process that actually did some good. Fewer boxes are better.

Two years ago, I was blessed with many hands to fill those boxes.  I tried to decipher the writing on the boxes, to remember whose hands.  Every different kind of china was carefully wrapped and labeled.  Every different room’s books and treasures were kept together, so when I peered into the hand-holes of those boxes, whole cabinets came back to my memory.  I think I know whose hands, but some script is still a mystery.  There were more than I knew, because I didn’t know much of anything, two years ago.

The writing on the boxes reminded me that I am dear to many, which made me feel less angry, but I am angry at not knowing exactly whom to thank and where to send my apologies for the state of my bedroom and bathroom upon moving out.

No, excuse me, but FUCK THAT.  Someone else needs to write the apologies for the state of my bedroom and bathroom.  I didn’t make that particular version of horrific mess. I wish I still knew were he lives, because he owes my friends and family and my small person some apology letters.  Handwritten.  Maybe also a press release and a youtube video.

See, this is what I’m talking about.

The Professor of My Dreams has noticed my anger. I’ve been flashing indirect “death stares” all over the house.  My face betrays my attempts to forget what happened two years ago.  The shorter days and the cooler weather have flipped a memory switch that usually stays in the off position.  I fall asleep thinking of the ways a person with ill intent might come in, uninvited.  I dream of different ways that night, two years ago, might have gone if I had closed all of the windows and deadbolted the door, or if my own uninvited person with ill intent had forgotten to remember where I lived on his middle of the night stumble home from the bar, or of seeing him again and not restraining my urge to run him over with my car. I wake up with my heart in my throat expecting hands around my throat and I don’t know why, because I was fine and I am fine and nothing bad is happening and nothing is trying to eat me now. But he, my darling parter for life, sees the stress and the lack of joy.

I love the life that has evolved in the last two years, but I  hate the reason I moved in.

Today, I can’t end with some witty, “Never mind, I’m too busy counting my blessings to be angry about…”.  Some part of my brain is too busy trying to keep my body safe when similar has triggered an assumption of same.  Anger, I suppose, is a way to keep myself upright and moving when I edge too close to curling up with the sorrow and getting comfortable with it.  We, my small person and I, are in a safe place, and I don’t mind riding along with anger for a little while longer until I wear it out.

It can’t last forever.  I was fine last week.