Anyway, I came home and took a nap. It was wonderful. And then I woke up and took Emmy outside and there was this young man standing outside talking on the phone by his shiny red hatchback. I squinted in the sunlight. Then I hobbled back inside with my dog and felt a lot more like the Hunchback of Notre Dame that I would have liked.

(in all honesty, I wish I had boots like that.)

It isn’t so much that I was adandoned in a church as a baby or only befriended by a jerkface clergyman or that I have a thing for gypsy girls named Esmeralda. The real issue is the slightness of my excursions from home of late. Studying is to blame of course, so I suppose it’s only the old thing of The End of something. My exams went well, my time was well spent in preparation, but . . . there is much more time today than I’m used to.

Sometimes I think that it would be good to move away, really. Just any old Somewhere Else. This place has already been scribbled on too many times. Case in point: Today I was late for my exam so I had to make it up at a coffee shop across from UC while my professor graded papers. I don’t know if you know this, but a few years ago this particular shop used to be called the Buzz?  It’s called Taza these days. The entrance is met by two flights of stairs, one to the order counter and the other to the seating area. Anyway, the one and only time I have ever been to the Buzz was with Mark the First, my affair du jour in something like 2002. Not expecting the plethora of stairs, I promptly fell down all of them in what can only be described as one of those long cinematic type scenes where everything slows down and my body bounces horribly from one cement slab to the next, legs flailing, patrons looking up sharply and over their shoulders with alarm. The tinkling of ceramic coffee mugs, the chatter of college kids, and the faint drone of indy-pop music are all silenced as everyone waits, in slow motion, for me to stop falling. Finally, when I reach the last step, time speeds to normal, sound resumes, the waitress rushes over to ask if I’m alright and Mark, leaning over to help me, says, “I’m not going to lie to you, Marianne: a lot of people saw that.”

It was distracting being there. And all over the city it’s like that. I drive home and pass by the Walgreens where Mark the Second and I used to go to buy sodas and cigarettes and talk about his life in the Drug Years. I go to work at the shelter and am reminded of when my clothes used to strain over my belly where it held my sweet little Natalie, before she had a name, when she was still the Biscuit. I go up to Field’s Ertel and think of the snowy evening when Simon carried me so my feet wouldn’t get cold. I drive down Creek Road, I go in the house, and the curtains are all still there, and its overwhelming how tactile the remembrance of my mother is, like she’s still there. In all my usual places, I think of the grief dinners and grief breakfasts Stephanie and I had.

Are memories such a bad thing? Of course not. The real trouble is that many of them are unpleasant ones. Not unpleasant in and of themselves, but in situations and with people that turned out unfortunately, either through my own action or inaction or through that of who I was with. I don’t think of myself as someone who’s been prone to disaster, and in fact, there are so many blessings that God has bestowed on me that I shouldn’t ever be able to complain, about anything, ever again. And it isn’t as though I always remember these things. I can be mindless and free of them. But their propensity to come to me unbidden is unsettling.

Maybe I’ve done what I was here to do. Maybe it’s time to be moving on.

Wait, lemme think . . .

No, no, it’s a valid question . . .

. . .

Anyway, today I’m taking off.

I’m hoping that in doing this I might be able to sleep tonight. As it turns out, for the past, let’s say, three weeks I’ve turned into a raging insomniac. Please keep your suggestions to yourself-believe me, whatever it is, I’ve done it. I’ve tried a glass of warm milk before bedtime. I’ve tried both Sominex and Walsom. I’ve tried staying up all day after not sleeping all night to get some rest the following evening. No luck. And so, in the immortal words of that tramp Don Draper from Mad Men (or Dick Wittman, take your pick), “You think about the problem as hard as you can.Then you forget about it.”

So, I’m watching a strategic examination of the battle of Gettysburg on the History Channel and interspersing it with harried trips downstairs to do laundry during the commercial breaks, and what do I find on coming up but a Marlboro Menthol Light cigarette butt wedged into the cracked linoleum of the third stair. And I realize that I haven’t smoked for a month and a half and I don’t even miss it.

I remember when I had that smoke. Mark and I were sitting in the dark talking about the Biscuit to be. I knew the way that it had to be. He tried to convince me otherwise. But I knew. It’s seems strange that he should say that we could keep her, that this was what it took to make him shape up. As if he would ever shape up until he was good and ready. He couldn’t shape up to take care of his own self, what would make him think that he would shape up to take care of someone else? Chance after chance poured on him and wasted, every one.  I say “strange”, when what I mean is “maddening”. And that was the way that it always was and always will be. Him telling me that he had just gone along with it to make me happy, me making a decision that brought me no happiness at all.

I wrote letters to Natalie after she was first born. But I stopped. How many times can you say you miss her before you know her heart would fall asleep reading it? How many times can you recount every moment of four days and how special, how honored you felt to be looked at by her, to be the first thing she ever saw? How many times can you break a the skin of an old wound and set it to bleeding again?

Though she is well worth the wound . . .