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The Valentine
Today is Valentines Day and I just finished having breakfast with Lorina followed by a bout of speechlessness and then I bid her adieu out into the icy cold and grey wet unknown of the Virginia countryside.
Some months ago we decided to break up on Feb. 13th and so for the special occasion last night I baked some Salmon and she baked this medley of vegetables cut into cubes and doused with olive oil and salt and pepper. The vegetables were beets, parsnips, potatoes, garlic, and carrots. She made a spinach salad with cranberry raisins and goat cheese and some of that raspberry dressing you can't escape even if you wanted to, which I don't. She brought a bottle of white and a loaf of homemade bread and wouldn't I have to be crazy to break up with a beautiful, loving, intelligent woman laden so heavily with delicious fruits? The scale certainly dips heavily towards yes.
This idea of sharing your life with someone is kind of tricky and I don't want to pretend that I know anything about it, not that I would be very convincing even if I were pretending a knowledge about it, and surely not convincing enough to fool Lorina or earn entry into the Book of Right.
I just now fell into a sort of narcotic cat nap and when I opened my eyes the screen was full of letter S's.
I was going to write my mom a letter today but I haven't even sent her the three I wrote last week so who am I kidding writing letters and not sending them off in the mail?
I did call her a minute ago and she sounded tired so maybe she is having nightmares again; the doorbell rings but nobody is there. My sister is visiting her this week and that might be making her nervous too because she probably knows the plot to upset her autonomy is forward moving. She probably doesn't remember that I was there for the month of January, haphazardly pushing the buttons of the machine that would bring a stranger into her life, to live with her, but part of her remembers it and that part might be coming back to conspire with the part of her that is anxious because my sister is there introducing the same kind of crap I was introducing, although likely with more finesse is my sister introducing it.
I can hear geese honking out the window to my left at night now because I put this aside for a few days so its not right after breakfast anymore, or for that matter, Valentines Day. Lorina is in another state entirely, attending a bachelorette party, which makes me a little nervous in that hey what happens at the bachelorette party stays at the bachelorette party sort of way. Ultimately what saves me is that I don't have the strength or willful endurance to be as insecure as I sample at being, and uh, ok dammit, I trust Lorina, even if only in equal measure to my insecurity regarding all things her, which occasionally is a very fucked up way to be but for now will just have to be good enough. Besides, if you removed all my petty insecurities I would be so excruciatingly incredible that no mortal woman would be able to be with me, without bursting into flames, anyway. But mostly what I think about when I hear bachelorette is who was that chick on that show a couple of years ago about a single gal looking for a groovy hubby? Its as if the name is on the tip of my tongue.
You can't always be autonomous is what I had knowingly explained to my mother in January.
Sometimes you have to let people help you is what I had said.
I drove 22 hours straight with only a 30 minute catnap to arrive back here from Texas on the 3rd of this month. For the home stretch I came through mountain passes on both sides of Luray with dusted snow on the black pavement at 2 a.m. As is often the case around here, even when its not 2 in the morning or snowing, I was the only one on the road. I was lonely as I considered that everything and everyone on the other side of the mountain had been wiped out by an apocalyptic event. It being so cold and sparsely populated here you wouldn't even smell the demise of humanity for quite some time. It would be as if the apocalypse never happened or as if the humanity never existed. You might see people sitting mannequin-still in their cars obliquely angled to normality but you wouldn't think much about it if you minded your own business like you're supposed to. I was driving very carefully, winding downward now, as I imagined black ice under the thin layer of snow. It felt sort of pointless all the previous day's road rushing. Though it was a driving record for me, over 1200 miles in a single stretch of driving, with only over the counter energy drinks to fuel me, so I could pin that medal on my bony chest if I did indeed make it down the mountain instead of off the mountain in a fiery crash of sparks and smoke and flying metal ending upside down in a frozen creek bed with only the predictable desolate flickering meanderings of my last few cognitive moments to keep me company before the final darkness.
I arrived back here and crunched over snow and onto the breezeway and then into my shiny clean abode scrubbed by Lorina and there was the rhododendron cutting on the table that won't stop blooming. And some love messaging written on paper and a cat that only briefly considered had I been gone at all who rolled over on the wood floor and sprawled belly open to the latent potential of my kung fu warrior death blow.
Lorina slept elsewhere and I was too wired/tired and crazy to my core to go over there and wake her up and say baby baby I'm home. I'm crazy. What? Yes, yes about you, but if I could only keep my mouth shut I wouldn't add some less romantic self-absorption which would cause us to sit together in a quiet and awkward silence while you debated with yourself my merits or lack thereof and I not to be out done would do the same right back at you, until I switched sides to join you--just who the fuck do I think I am?
Instead of that I had a glass of whisky and searched the spidery corners of secret places until I found a dead roach, which I crumbled up and laid lengthwise along a section of a feathery page torn from a bible and then I sealed it with a lick and set fire to it.
I did not drift off and then abruptly wake up just as my truck rolled off the side of a mountain. Nor did I leave my body and float purposelessly near the ceiling. I slept in a dreamless void and woke up later in the afternoon to a world that would, despite its abundant allures, take some getting used to. And that's as far as I've gotten. But I will keep you posted as events unfurl in the wind making the flag look like all its stripes are not connected even though through other sources we are led to believe that they are not only connected, but parallel.