Where I’m Meant to Be
A bubble of warmth envelops my body under the blankets. It’s freezing outside, and I can see the hail and snow dance with the frenzy of a couple that have one night left to live and love. I snuggle in closer to her, feel her curves fit along me like a key in its lock. This is where I’m meant to be.
We had spent the morning sledding down roads covered in slush, alone in the endless hilly suburbs, the snow blindingly bright in the rising sun. All our neighbors had made the more intelligent decision of staying inside, but we live the day like there won’t be another. We’re snug out here as well, tightly packed into a cheap red sled. She’s basically sitting on my lap, which does both wonders and problems for me depending on the bumps. We fly down, snow spraying up and blasting our faces as we try to keep our eyes open, with water trickling down underneath our clothes. We giggled every time at the bottom without fail like the toddlers we are, she proceeded to push me into several snow banks to get a headstart in the races back up top (leaving me with the sled). I consistently caught up to her and “slipped”, ending in her inevitable victory, and back down we would go. She was permanently aware of how close we were, and took undo pleasure in my heated face as she squirmed into her nook in my lap. Finally, once she had exhausted both of us, we went back inside to warm our icy extremities and her hands found their way under my shirt, much to the complaint of my skin.
“Well I guess the snow means I can’t go get that gift that I definitely didn’t forget at the store.” I say with a sad face. I watch her face fall for just a second and my face opens up in a wide smile.
“Jerk!” She says as she pouts at me and punches my shoulder.
“Sorry, sorry, but really I wish we could go out for our plans. This storm’s the worst for Valentine’s Day.”
“That’s okay,” she comes in for a hug and she continues with a whisper in my ear, “this is where I’m meant to be.” Her sweet voice sends chills down my spine, and I start attack-kissing her, little pecks all over her face and neck until she’s forced to run away laughing.
We cook my choice for lunch: Indian style curry that warms me up almost as much as she does. A knobby snowman named Olaf, (big Disney fans), and many snowballs follow after we’re done eating. A shower together, “We’ll huddle together like penguins for warmth,” she says with a small grin that tugs at the corners of her mouth. Dinner’s amazing, her choice of spaghetti and meatballs, and she covers for my abysmal taste for spicing and I get the grunt work done. There’s a unique satisfaction to eating a meal that you have made with your own hands and with a loved one.
Gifts are given to many hugs and only a little crying. Hot Cocoa with mini marshmallows is the chaser as we watch Hercules and sing the songs too loud and off key. I find myself interlocked with her under the blankets watching the storm living in its own moment. I give her a quick kiss on the back of her head, and wonder at how this is real life. This is actually happening, this is my life. What have I done to deserve such a perfect day?
She starts to do the worm against me and I laugh, jolted slightly from my comfortable position. The blanket shifts as well, and some fresh air drafts in.
“Now I’m cold,” I pout at her.
She flips over and looks me in the eyes, “Well I have a remedy for that…”
This is where I’m meant to be.
In a nut shell
Some call it neat. Some call it straight. Like his daddy before him, Samuel Cowell didn’t call it but it called him, straight out of the bottle. The cheap stuff, Old Crow bourbon with the strangulated black bird looking to fly away each time he released his dirty palm off the label. He liked to save the empties, laying them flat, stacking them up into a glass fortress behind the shed with a foolish sense of accomplishment, half expecting a letter of appreciation for his abject depravity. It was his wife’s job to clean up after him, but she knew better than to cross the line. It was drawn around the extended perimeter of the shed behind the house where Samuel engaged in rituals unfit for neighboring civil eyes.
It was just the four of them rehearsing their unique family daily song and dance routine. Samuel, his wife Eleanor, and their offspring, Louise and Ted all ate the lies, all lived the nightmare as one flawed fractured nucleus. Neighborhood woody station wagons passed to and fro right by their front door clueless, traveling safely under the speed limit carrying well rested happy children. Ordinary unsuspecting people walked up and down the sidewalk arm in arm right outside their curtained windows missing every crack. Once a week, their front door would open to the paperboy and as he waited for his fifty cents he would peek inside, all the way through to the back storm door with a clear view of the shed in the background. How could he know? He took his money. He smiled. He said “thank you″ and left to collect the next coin.
On a Saturday afternoon, pointing towards the detached structure out back, eight year old Ted said to the man known as his father, “Hey Daddy, whatcha doin out there all that time in the shed?”
In reality, Ted knew exactly what his father was doing in the shed out back, intentionally poking the bear with his question. He’d been beaten before for less provocation and he wasn’t about to hold his breath waiting on the first blow. Upright as Douglas MacArthur, he stood in stoic defiance before his abuser, ready. He not only expected an onslaught, he craved an onslaught the way Jason next door craved vanilla ice cream. If given a choice, he preferred a belt to the back versus a punch in the face. Black eyes messed up his pretty face. Either way he was looking forward to the fight.
“Boy we’ve been over this already. If I told you once I told you a thousand times. None of your goddamn business! When I’m out there just busy yourself in here with the women. Be more like them. Your mother and sister know better than to ask me what I’m doing in there. This is my house, god damn it and as the man of the house I’m entitled to my own personal space. The shed is off limits to you is all. The sooner you learn up to mind your tongue the better.”
Surprised that his father kept speaking instead of making use of his demonic fists, Ted continued poking, enjoying enacting his version of Russian roulette. For Ted making others feel uncomfortable was becoming an art form. As a problem child and as a source of pain for the detached family from day one, he exercised his skill relentlessly. His much older sister spent most of her time away from the house and his mother spent all of her time either doing household chores or lying down somewhat unresponsive after taking her nerve medication.
As his father walked away stepping outside of the house, Ted followed
stalking his prey speaking antagonistically to the back of his head. “Why do I see Jason and his Gramps next door going in and out, in and out of their shed all the time with tools. What are you doing in there that I can’t see? I see them next door with tools. Big ones and little ones. They look cool. Screwdrivers. Hammers. And saws too. I think it would be really cool to learn how to fix stuff and build stuff with tools. Isn’t that what sheds are for? To store tools and work on stuff? Are you working with tools out there? I don’t recall hearing any hammering or sawing coming from the shed. Don’t we have some branches out back that need cutting? We got a saw in there I could learn to use?”
Ted’s father was getting older. Tired. He stopped walking and turned abruptly to face his maddening son. He knew there would come a point in time when his son would fight back. He needed to start distancing himself from perpetrating the physical abuse.
“Listen up boy. Keep out. Ya hear me. Case closed. If I see you messing around out here or even asking me about the shed again I’m gonna give it to you. What for. You know I mean it. So just shut your nosy ass pie hole boy and go back inside. Don’t you got some books need reading up there in your room? Or why don’t you go and find some friends to play with in the street. Stick ball. Kick the can. Whatever. Just keep away from me and my shed and stop asking so many damn questions.”
Ted felt deflated when his father uncharacteristically turned away from retaliation and continued to walk away. Failure was not an option. Life was just too boring without the familiar feel of a leather belt against his back, knuckles against his flesh. As he watched his father enter the shed, before he could lock the door, Ted staged a breach he was sure would get him over the finish line.
“I know what you do out here. Sometimes you forget to lock the window when you go to work and I’ve climbed in through the window. Most people don’t keep pictures of naked women wearing ropes and chains in tool boxes meant for tools, do they? Don’t worry. I won’t tell. I like the pictures too.” Ted did not admit just how many times he had snuck in the shed. He had been living on a steady diet of pornographic bondage and erotic mutilation from the time he was three or four, while little Jason next door was being read mother goose nursery rhymes rocked on their porch by his mother.
******
“Officer. It was an accident. I told the boy to never touch my guns. I keep my guns locked up all the time. Honest. I was just cleaning this here one out back and when I went to take a piss, I guess Ted got curious and wandered in the shed and picked up my gun. He’s always been a mischievous little fellow. When I walked in on him I guess he got scared he was gonna get in trouble and I was just trying to wrestle the gun away from him and that’s when it went off.”
******
After the cops left, believing every word, Samuel Cowell put the murder weapon away in the gun case, locked it, and got to thinking on the events of the day and how he was satisfied that what never should have happened in the first place was now a problem solved. He was finally off the hook. Deciding it was best to destroy the history of what no one living in his house wanted to remember anyway he reached into his safe and pulled out Ted’s birth certificate. Before he lit a match to it, his wormy eye caught the word unknown written inside the box marked “Father’s name”.
Ted’s father wasn’t the only one in the house glad that it was over. No. He was sure of it. His wife and daughter were just as relieved. They would not question Ted’s demise, since Samuel was not just Ted’s father, he was also his grandfather, having raped his own daughter one night when he was black out drunk.
When Louise, the young woman known as Ted’s sister, who was really his mother finally got up the courage to leave the house for good the following year to marry Johnny Culpepper Bundy, she rarely thought about Ted.
She thought about him as much as she thought about the stray dog that once bit her on the leg, ultimately euthanized by the pound, and only when and if she noticed the fading scar.
https://www.oxygen.com/martinis-murder/who-was-ted-bundy-father-grandfather-mother#:~:text=Michaud%20said%20that%20Bundy%E2%80%99s%20grandfather%20%E2%80%94%20the%20man,father%2C%20Rule%20wrote%20in%20%E2%80%9CThe%20Stranger%20Beside%20Me.%E2%80%9D
demons
adults gave them to me
when i was small.
too small to understand.
and so i thought they were mine.
i deserved this gift,
asked for it,
they belonged to me
and I to them.
i must feed,
care,
shelter and obey.
these demons,
not of my making.
who adopted me.
followed me into the world.
their puppet on strings.
until
one day,
i cut them
In bitter ink
It came down to a letter of apology in her mailbox, a plea; I didn’t usually beg for anything, or feel much beyond fog, but this was going to be bad. It ended while I browsed through dresses at the local thrift store we both loved.
I thought about your apology, and I don’t accept it.
The horror of wedding dress shopping: I had stared her other bridesmaids in the face and only spoke to them in deadpan, clipped sentences. They were sheer perfection; if I could make them objects, they would be Marie Antoinette’s petit fours, exquisite in every layer. Their engagement rings glistened in the sunlight of the boutique like savage little smiles. I hated them, all of them.
There’s of course Isabella and her perfect life, who made my fall from grace possible. My smiles at her were darts. I didn’t speak to her at the bachelorette party I was supposed to have planned; instead of planning it, as the maid of honor, I had simply let my burn-out from work guide the lead-up to it, doing nothing to make it memorable. I pushed cake around my plate; my feelings of inferiority making me arrogant with petty blinders.
These women had everything I would never, ever have: fiances, husbands, shared apartments in the city, dream jobs that took effort to achieve and discipline to maintain.
Really, how could they? Honestly, their makeup even probably washed itself off after dark. Or, perhaps darkness is beyond them. One of them is is a therapist, helping the sad and dejected while never having experienced that herself. Before my sister loved her as a sister-in-law, we agonized over how little she must really understand her clients: her completely normal brain chemistry had never left her lying on the street corner, drop dead drunk and dirty. Dirty: another word that wouldn’t have crossed their lipstick stained, supple lips.
This is, of course, to say, I wish it had gone differently. Of course I wish I had thrown a fun, good bachelorette party. But it was beyond me to want to be anywhere near these women, and if we’re still to be honest, it’s torture just thinking about them.
Perhaps I am a terrible person, and I have certainly spent my fair share of nights wondering if I’m hopelessly, hopelessly awful.
After my sister told me she wouldn’t forgive me, I checked myself into a psychiatric facility to both cure my work burnout and hope she would see my sadness, my helplessness. She didn’t. When I checked out of the facility to go home, she didn’t return my texts that I had made it out. Neither did her fiance. They both ignored it all; everything from me was unwanted and toxic, a reminder of my selfishness.
My sister will, it’s obvious, never forgive me. I wish so badly I didn’t suffer from burnout, but that would be me pitying myself.
This sad tirade ends with Isabella requesting to follow me on social media; her likes on my pictures either just a reflection of her normal brain chemistry or forgiveness, or just sheer niceness.
I wish it had gone differently; my jealousy is a blood stain we won’t see washed off easily, a reminder that it wasn’t about me at all, it was just red and unfortunate.
This piece doesn’t make me feel good about myself, and hitting ‘publish’ makes me think of what this can contribute, but it feels good sometimes to vent; perhaps this can be a letting-go, if no one else benefits from it.
A Conversation With my Therapist
"Why isn't it okay to be lonely? she asked me.
"Well it is, I just don't like the feeling very much."
"Why isn't it okay to be lonely, Chloe?" she asks again. And it really feels like my brain doesn't know. It's just a feeling after all. How come this is so hard?
"I don't know. When I sit there I just think of all the people that are thriving right now while this is is so hard for me, and I wonder why I'm so broken. It feels compulsive, like I can't sit with it." The words kind of flow out of my mouth. I haven't really throught this far into this feeling before.
"Thriving? You think people are thriving right now? she asks in disbelief.
"Yeah, they're doing all these things, working from home, spending every day at home with the person they love, doing everything together. Stuff like that."
"Chloe, that doesn't sound like thriving to me. That sounds like desparation, surviving. Cramming as much in as you can in order not to feel. Would people be working from home if it wasn't a pandemic? People are scrambling right now, desparate to cling onto any sense of control that they can. Why won't you let yourself be lonely?"
***
If you're lonely too, don't worry. Being lonely doesn't have to be a bad thing.
Cancer
I love your cancer, it’s my favourite thing.
It’s harsh to say but alas it’s true. There’s something so fascinating about watching you struggle and paddle and wriggle and worm. Accept it my friend, let it take you with grace. It is fate after all. You should feel lucky, to be hand picked by the black. A delicious meal to be eaten. Do not be spiteful and do not be sad. What wonderful things were you to achieve hmm, oh a great many I suppose. It’s better for you and better for me, I’ll take your dust as your form fades. For I am decay. You may spit in my face but I’ll wipe it away with a grin. Enjoy your black babe that builds in ur blood, which smothers you slow and boils your breath. Remember my friend you may hate it but there is no cruelty behind chance actions.
Gift giving.
I met you online.
We talked for weeks. Texts and DMs, I'm not a phone kind of girl.
But for you I was.
I showed you my face, you showed me yours.
Truly, it was love at first sight. At least on my part.
Probably for you too, I'm quite cute.
We speak of our hopes and dreams. Our future goals and wishes.
It's easier to speak to you, so far away. No real or immediate threat of intimacy.
I'm wary of how open I am with you. I'm not versed in romantic dalliances.
Relationships, I don't know that I keep them well.
How would we be in person, proximate? That weighs on me.
We've done the watch party dates, we're mutual on all our socials.
You know me, but you don't.
I don't know how you did it, but you did.
Maybe you reached my roommate and plotted? Some hidden scheme?
Does she see my smile? How happy I am just to share words with your essence?
I think I've fallen in love.
Because you went and did it. I never thought anyone would.
I came home and there it was. The Valentine's Day gift package to shame all others.
You'd be working so we wouldn't videochat until the next day, you'd relayed in the velveteen card that came with it.
The detail, the specificity. Am I deserving of this attention? This care?
One Ficus elastica, burgundy.
A Snow Queen pothos.
Some pellionia I didn't recognize. Some peperomia I didn't recognize.
Three bags of a quality-looking potting soil and some ceramic pot that was thematically appropriate for the holiday.
Lastly a bar of chocolate.
How is it you know me, already, and from a distance, so well?
I don't think, I know.
I love you.
Borders
He is part of me
though he's not here
separated by distance
separated by fear
of what could happen
if he crosses the border into my heart
if he crosses the border into my town
in these days
of uncertainty
of appropriate distancing
of what must be
of what should never be
but he already has me
his voice is in my head
his hand is in mine
my protector
leading me to the sublime
every day
especially today
the day devoted to
those with hearts and
those who love
