the next person who comments will be number one hundred—we dare you!
Tuesday 5 June 2007 | someone left a cookie
For behold, some kind of nifty prize I haven’t quite thought of yet will be yours.
Another sun, another moon. As the Brujo points out, even on days when I despair and think I haven’t accomplished anything, I usually somehow manage to get quite a bit of stuff done. Packing a dozen boxes, including ones to go to mes parents in Texas (soon-unwearable coats, wool sweaters, hats and mittens) and to the Physicist in London (beaded salwar kameez, silk scarves, jewelry that I feel should stay in his family, perhaps to be given to his new wife when he remarries); writing letters to the Slumlord concerning our move-in date, and to the State School consenting to their background check; researching moving-truck rentals (Budget beats out U-Haul at $373 for 4 days and a 16-foot truck versus a staggering $963 for 3 days and a 14-footer); and seeing the DBT for what will be one of our last visits.
The Dialectical Behavioral Therapist, recently turned 40, looks closer to 28 except for the grey streaking her long straight dark blonde hair. She’s near six feet tall, strong and solid and tan of limb and with a ring of blue forget-me-nots tattooed around her ankle in memory of a beloved sister, who died of complications related to (among many other severe illnesses) endometriosis. I know little about her past other than that she spent years coaching women’s basketball, visits family frequently in Jersey and Florida, and worked at the local battered women’s shelter. She also has dark brown eyes and an easy raucous laugh; and we laugh together a lot, at our own profane not-mean-if-true jokes, sharing an irreverence and sense of the absurd which has stood us in good stead for two-plus years of my being, at least at first, spectacularly unwell. The sessions are much less like therapy now and more like hanging out with a slightly older sister who teases me out of my furled anxiety and into my bigger, more amused-at-the-world self. She tends to remind me of who I also am.
This morning she stared at me in mock disbelief. “Of course you’re anxious, and needy, and freaked-out. That’s totally normal. You’re moving.”
I snarled and unsnarled the sash of my skirt, winding it around and through my fingers. “Well, yeah. But—but—but I—but—”
We had variations on this conversation another dozen or so times, for about an hour, interspersed with my observations concerning less-than-supportive Santa Fe friends and the eyepoppingly supportive, sexy, stand-up qualities of the Brujo. We laughed riotously at all our own jokes and she was unpretentiously validating as ever, jumping in when she saw exactly where I was headed, asking the empathetic questions begging to be asked, and making gratifyingly reflective faces when called for (as when I told her that my mom had bought my dad a $10,000 airplane off eBay, and a wide-screen TV—”Um, yeah, I’d say she can probably cough up $500 to help you move”).
As thoroughly internalized as the DBT is within my psyche (with me often asking myself WWTDBTD?), how will I ever get along without her.
Pyewacket and I sit outside on the brick edge of the raised bed, her chewing grass reflectively and us both staring out at the tiny white moths that flutter in the dusk. Sulphur-yellow juniper pollen washes in a bright, two-foot-wide streak down the driveway blacktop, smudged there by yesterday’s thunderstorm. It occurs to me that perhaps Pye doesn’t like my box-packing because similar activities preceded her being abandoned near my parents’ farm. And I think I have issues around moving.
Suddenly she leaps forward at nothing and does a funny little spiral dance in empty air, what the Brujo calls her “chasing the flying kitties.” Why are his loved ones so convinced he’s making the biggest mistake of his life—do I seem that messed-up? And do I really care what people who don’t love me think about me? Should I make the blog private, as two I regularly read have recently done? But wouldn’t that defeat my entire purpose in establishing the Un, as I intended it—to be transparent, to represent without editing?
If they don’t absolutely adore you, fuck ‘em, said a wise woman once.
Silky black-furred cats shouldn’t scamper around heedlessly on the blacktop in the gloaming. She’ll be safer in Tartarus, in our grassy fenced backyard. I scoop up Pye and carry her, protesting and big-eyed, inside for the night. I will have maple pecan granola with 1% milk for dinner; and afterward she gets to lick the bowl.
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You and the Brujo are going to rock Tempe. That slumlord will never know what hit him. And your students are very lucky people, indeed (though admittedly, some of them may not realize it for years).