My Whole Expanse I Cannot See…

So, I’m back from Cincinnati.

I just want to amend something from my last post. Saying I shouldn’t be thirty, I didn’t mean that literally, or mean that I don’t think I should be thirty. It was just rambling based on doctors a long, long time ago saying I probably wouldn’t tun one. I was being melancholy, introspective, but definitely not literal. I AM thirty, and so, there’s no should or shouldn’t. Like I said, I wasn’t really articulating well.

So, I got this tattoo some months back, while I was in Cincinnati. I got it my first few hours in town, we arrived and by nightfall I was having these lyrics etched into my leg. The lines are from an Alanis Morissette song, Flinch, off her record, Under Rug Swept. The song is really a story, six minutes of flash writing about this connection between two people, this consuming, unrelenting connection. These two lines, they’re my favorite, I’ve thought similar thoughts so many times.

These lines always remind me of someone, this person who’s always with me, even when she’s not. I was thinking about her that dusk in Cincinnati, thinking about how she has this deep affect on me. It’s like she has a key to everything in me, and I couldn’t change the locks even if I wanted to. The affect is beyond reason, and even when it hurts I cannot make it stop. It’s so like the way breathing affects me, the way a lack of air feels miserable, terrifying, and there’s not a Goddamn fuckin’ thing I can do to quell that lack, or change the way it makes me feel. I missed her so much when I woke up that morning, I missed her before I even left Tampa, and it hit me, it really hit me when Flinch popped up on my iPod just as we crossed that line into Cincinnati, it hit me that this one person means everything to me, that no one else holds so much sway to render me so completely happy, and so perfectly lost and melancholy. It amazes me how lyrics can pull so much out of a person, like some sort of magic spell that make the world clear as a pane of glass.

That’s all I care to say about tattoo #41.

(Oh, the grammatical error in the tattoo was done to match the way the lyrics are written on Alanis.com.)

So, I thought I’d write lots about my trip to Cincinnati, I thought I’d write everything, but I just don’t have the desire. I feel more like writing the Reader’s Digest version.

I went to have my trach looked at by the foremost airway specialist in America, Doctor Robin Cotton. He personally looked down the hole in my throat, changed my trach out twice. He decided my trach tube should be 5 mm. shorter. So, we’ll see how that goes.

I did a lot of wandering around the city, and it’s actually a very cool place, I just wasn’t in good spirits, because of some things that I don’t plan to write, probably ever. I got a tattoo my first night in town, sort of a physical reflection of my intense melancholy. It felt necessary.

In the hospital, I mostly spent three days watching movies, as my left eye was swollen shut because of a weird sinus thing, so I couldn’t wear my glasses. I’m a little blind without my glasses. Mostly, I was lonely. I thought I was past lonely, but before I left I became not-soo-certain.

Anyways, I’m bored, this is boring, and I don’t have the will to make it interesting.

So, I didn’t write anything from Cincinnati… I’ll explain further, but the short version is that my left eye swelled shut, so I couldn’t wear my glasses most of the week. I didn’t get to finish reading The Bluest Eye, or The Red Tree, and I definitely couldn’t write anything. I’ll elaborate soon.

Anywho, right now, I’m leaving Macon, Georgia, en route to Tampa.

So, right now, I’m at a La Quinta in Lexington, Kentucky, but only for another hour or two. It’s only about one hundred miles to Cincinnati, then I’m off the road. It’ll be good to get off the road, too much time for quiet reflection in a vehicle speeding toward somewhere I’m already nervous about going hasn’t been good for me. I’ve convinced myself into some pretty awful things, like, “You’ll never be anything more than you are right now, and you’re going to die a lonely failure.” I don’t always do so well alone with myself, I’m not particularly good company.

Last week was really weird, the morning I took to the road was exceptionally bad, and I’ve had too much time alone to think about all of it. I suppose I could write about the weird, but the bad I’ll just keep to myself. It’s weird when someone explains that they can no longer be your friend because you’re just too dark, they just can’t stand you anymore. That’s weird, and pretty unsettling. Maybe they’re right, that’s what I keep thinking. Maybe I just need to quit people, because I’m just too damaged. I mean, I could just pretend to be someone else, but that’s the same as being alone, except with a lot of work, constantly writing and being some character who isn’t you. I’m only genuinely close to one person, but maybe I shouldn’t be. I know she deserves way better than me. Maybe I just don’t have a home, anywhere with anyone. I hope not, but I’m almost thirty and that’s what scares me just now, that’s what’s scared me every day since I left Tampa.

I’ll write again from Cincinnati, but I doubt I’ll have figured anything out by then.