Old Familiar

A little love died yesterday. She was an old familiar.

Friends for ten years, lovers for an eye-blink a few winters back, and now, suddenly, nothing.

Suddenly? Perhaps not.

The demise had been long drawn out. Love in an iron lung. Friendship with defibulators.

I gave out second chances like lolly-pops on Halloween. I was the sucker.

No more, though (I tell myself).

Though my capacity for forgiveness may seem (impossibly? foolishly?) endless, lines can still be drawn through it, and where lines can be drawn, lines can be crossed.

"My boyfriend doesn't want me to talk to you or see you."

The End.

Had he asked me, I might have told him,

"I equate her vagina to the Gaza Strip: As much as I'd love to visit, I'm not going near it while it's occupied."

Which is true, but I doubt it would have helped.

So, I go home early, for once.

Mom's place. This is an old familiar too.

The house has changed to the apartment, but the some things are always the same..

The Everything Drawer.

"Do we have any string?" "Buttons?" "Sheep shears?"

Look in the Everything Drawer.

Some people would stare, mouths agape, at this amazing drawer that is usually too full to open.

Sometimes I like to imagine that there really is an Everything Drawer, containing the universe, inside out. In want? Just reach in. It's in there. It's all in there.

And feeling in want (of an old familiar), I place a call, and head to a friend's house.

The town I drive through is an old familiar, too. The streets, the houses, the burrito joints, and the hills; they were all my childhood playmates.

I get into a hot tub I've been soaking in for more than a decade.

I think.

When my old familiar and I transgressed briefly from peculiar friends to peculiar lovers, it was in a hot tub. The public hot tub on the corner of the street that my mother lives on, actually, which makes me think of her every time I see that blue and white sign, which is unfortunate, as I pass it at least once a day. So, I think, maybe this other hot tub will help me erase all that.

The hot tub works wonders on my shoulders, but does little to soothe my heart.

The heart aches.

Prepared as I was, there is only so much bracing yourself you can do, and nothing ever seems quite so senseless as the murder of a friendship without cause.

"One day," I tell myself. "I will learn to only give access to my heart to those who will care for it."

So I would like to believe.

In the surrounding days there will be much to distract me. I'll be rehearsing in a trapeze, only to look up and see Joan Rivers watching me from the audience. Or the battery will wear out on the clicker that turns on/off my car alarm, and I will be forced to drive for two miles through city streets with my car alarm blaring bloody murder (amazingly only getting pulled over once). I will eat the world's best food, spend some one-on-one time with my mom and with good friends, and soak in the sheer beauty of this place I am lucky enough to be calling home for another three months, but this divorce from my old familiar is going to hurt for a while.

Until, one day, it doesn't.

-BR 8.22.2007 11.42.pm