when i was little i liked to hang out with the grown-ups. i liked to sit at the dinner table and listen to my parents and relatives talk about grown-up things, and i thought about all of it very seriously. i have always been very serious and earnest, as opposed to jaded and ironic. there's something about grown-up talk that is comforting.
when i was 19, brannon and i were together and i slept at his apartment on hawthorne almost every night. and i always had the distinct feeling that it was christmas. it was a combination of the old house smell and cigarette smoke smell -- which reminded me of my cousins' house in wheaton, illinois, where we spent our christmases -- and lying in his bed in the morning hearing brannon and his roommate talking in the kitchen. the distant conversation echoing down the woodfloor hallway through the closed bedroom door and the delicious feeling that there are people nearby whom i love and whom i can join when i feel like getting out of bed, and the prospect of eating breakfast with the newspaper, and that the day is all my own. christmas.
i've always liked to spend time alone, but when i was with gabe (age 16) the dinner table and grown-up talk became comforting because it kept me from my dark thoughts. i hated being alone. then i got better slowly, in portland, and preferred more and more to spend time alone, if i wasn't with donna. alone time seemed more productive and richer. now, something inside me is broken and i had to come back here so i could sit at the dinner table long into the evening and listen to my parents talk about mundane things to drown out the thoughts that keep rising to the surface of my consciousness, and that bittersweet feeling that makes me cry, i just ignore it and let the conversation flow over me.
time moves faster for grown-ups. sitting on the porch after we ate, my mother wondered what time it was, and both my parents looked at their bare wrists. i told them it was 7:30. my dad explained that he'd lost his watch on our trip to chicago "a few months ago." i said, "you mean when we went in january? that's not a few months ago! you still haven't gotten a new watch?" god, january. i've changed ten times since then.
in january dave had just left and we were still mourning him, and i had just ended my 7 month coke habit. back when i thought cocaine was a serious thing to do. in january i overdosed on heroin and c. saved my life, it was about my 6th time doing it, and donna told me if i ever did it again she would leave. (about 2 months later i did it again and kept doing it. she didn't leave.) after i recovered from the od, we left for san francisco with charlie. (that picture of me on the san francisco page was taken about 3 hours after my overdose, in the car headed south.) in january we started hanging out with sam, the fantastic, the elusive, before we really knew him, and we all found heaven on acid.. and i had just decided to change my major to anthropology, i still had my bike, i hadn't yet discovered how to break myself by doing heroin repeatedly, and i still thought that the secret to happiness lay in an arvo part symphony and the shapes that bare tree branches make against the sky.
it was just a few months ago.
when you're me, things change quickly, a day can hold the beginning and the end of something, a week can be a lifetime. and i hope that this part of my life will end soon, in the next few days maybe, because i have had enough and i can feel the new dawn coming.