Fake Your Own Death

When I was going through a difficult break (as opposed to all those easy ones, you know, the ones where you fake your own death), I rented a one bedroom apartment in a complex that I came to refer to as the Misery. Each building had four apartments in it with the mandatory beige renter carpet and peeling fake linoleum kitchen floor. It wasn't much but it was here that I would resurrect myself, phoenix from the ash, etc. You can see where I'm going with this line of thought.

My apartment was surrounded by three women's apartments. The women were all over 70 (one was 97!) and one of them had the worst luck in the entire world. The oldest of her six children had died, all her teeth had fallen out because of some medicine she'd taken, she was allergic to the adhesive for her dentures which caused her gums to swell and bleed, and she'd managed to bloody her own eyes with the end of a broom while sweeping her storage cage. I did not feel like a phoenix. She'd wait all day for checks that never came and cry on the steps of her apartment when she got tired of crying inside her apartment. I could hear her when I had my window open, an echo, I suppose, of all the grief I didn't want to acknowledge, much less express, like the taste of ashes in your mouth.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Kris Kristofferson

Song to drink to for the day:

"Ball and Chain" Janis Joplin

Benedictions and Maledictions

Honeymoon

I had one once, in San Francisco,
that mystical city that demands
you love it. My wedding ring felt
so heavy I’d hide it at night, buried
in a hotel drawer, looking at my
sleeping husband, wondering what
I had done. For a week, we wandered
the city, so different from Texas,
the only place I’d ever really lived.
On the last day, I saw a poster of two
beautiful men kissing. Underneath,
a caption cautioned everyone to practice
safe sex. You’d never see that in Texas,
I thought, and smiled. The world seemed
a little bigger. On the way back to the hotel
that night, I noticed someone had scrawled
faggots in blood red across the poster. The hell
everyone talked about had followed me, with no
hope of any rapture except the kind where
the blood ran from the faucets, a brief marriage.