I'm not writing a post today. I am in a mood.
A bad mood, I suppose you'd say.
I don't feel like hiding behind metaphors, or wrestling with an oxford comma. I feel like fragments. I feel like short sentences.
I feel short.
Short-tempered.
This is the type of post that I intended to write on my secret blog. The sort of post that is really a journal entry. The sort of post that isn't prettied up enough to mean anything to anyone except to me, but then, maybe one day it could.
Many Rarasaur blog posts blossomed from a seed I planted in my journals.
My secret blog is called:
the girl behind the dinosaur
and other footnotes.
And I love the name, though you'd hardly guess it because I rarely write there. It is a bonus section of content for my Patreon supporters. Supporters who, let's face it, are the reason you're reading anything at all right now.
.
.
I wouldn't be able to afford to be blogging, at least not the way I blog. The computer, the internet, the wrist bands, the phone, the projects...
When I came home, it was to nothing except what you all raised for me. I work an hour away from my home, for a small business. It is fulfilling. It is home. It is not going to make me rich. Most months, it will not even make me solvent.
When I say I had nothing when I came home, I mean I had very little. A dozen articles of clothes, a few stray books that Dave kept, a broken laptop. I had to buy soap, shoes, toothpaste, towels, everything. I had to clarify my legal status and get through parole which wasn't inexpensive either. Every time I get a little ahead financially, I am sucked right back down.
I'm not complaining, of course.
I make choices.
Between shoes without holes in them, and a blog, I choose blog.
I'm not complaining.
More of us have this story than not, and I am lucky.
Every thing I do have, with few exceptions, has been a gift. The things you see in the back of the videos, the clothes I wear, the foods I snap photos of- I am gifted, constantly. I am cared for.
I am also tired.
The problem with being broke is that you can be broke anywhere. It's one less string you have, tying you down.
I used to have so many strings.
My car was totaled two weeks ago.
.
.
My left arm hurts. Dave's car is gone now, as gone as he is.
Oh.
Well.
One less string.
I don't have to stay here and wait in a five-hour DMV line like I did this morning. I don't have to wait in a line to be told again, and again, that I can't do the things I need to do.
I can go anywhere.
I have nowhere to go.
This sounds unhappy, doesn't it? I'm not used to that sound in my own voice, but I wore it on my face all day. I tried to buy myself a lemonade with tear-soaked eyes, but the waiter saw my face, and made it his treat.
I am lucky.
Tired, but lucky.
I can't find my ring. It's probably a sign.
.
.
My short hair needs a touch up I can't afford, or maybe it just needs to be washed properly, but I can't lift my hands enough to do it, so we'll see. The boys I like don't care for short hair, but I cut it anyway. Find yourself before worrying about boys, people keep telling me. As if there aren't 3000 posts on this site written by me, talking about me. I know myself, even if I don't know which direction I'm going or why I'm even here anymore. It's such weird advice to give. Move your arms, kick your legs, find a raft, wear a life vest.
I'm not drowning, friends. I am burning.
That's needlessly sharp. I can't help it. That particular kernel of advice is getting on my nerves. My nerves are messed up which is why my hands hurt. I need an MRI, they say.
The insurance will pay, but I can't find the title to the car so everything to do with the insurance is on hold. Once upon a time, I could have paid for it all myself. Now, not so much.
I think a lot lately about the things I could do that would justify my staying in one of the most expensive areas of the United States. I could work again. Not the 9-to-5 that I've always had, but my work.
I can make your business profitable, beautiful, purposeful. I've done it to hundreds of others.
But that was then.
Then, when I had strings.
Then, when a trip to the DMV didn't spiral me into a mental depression.
Fine.
A mental unhappy.
The doldrums.
I've slid into the doldrums.
Part of it is the pain.
My arm just won't stop hurting.
And I just won't stop typing.
And I wonder if one day I'll have a little corner of the streets that are too expensive to live on,
and a little cardboard sign that says
#amwriting.
I am lucky.
Stupidly, ridiculously, unfairly lucky.
Blessed beyond anything I could ever deserve.
I am lucky to be living.
I am lucky to have seen so much die.
It's how I know that everything passes.
Even this.
This unhappy little post that I absolutely am not going to write.
.
