Gray MacArthur

Gray died the day before Easter. We thought he would rise again. I met Gray through a personal ad about 20+ years ago. He had an ad placed in the Village Voice which read something along the lines of, "cantankerous bastard looking for a cantankerous woman to bicker with". I read the ad and laughed out loud. His was he only personal ad I ever responded to. Every time we went for dinner in the city we parted fighting. Usually it was after he regaled me with racist jokes about blacks or faggots. (I think I once tried to run him over in my car). His two closest friends, myself and another man were gay and black. We once got kicked out of a bar when he began his parrot nigger joke. The bartender kicked him out when he perceived that Gray was being insensitive to me.  I loved him. Madly. His voice was like nothing one has ever heard before. It was regal; sophisticated and made for the theatre. He read for the blind but got asked to leave when he began to ad lib, to his own amusement, what he would rather have read. He weighed 90 pounds soaking wet. He was funny in a way that was clever. He called me in the middle of the night always. Never did he call me during the day. It was always at 4am or some such ungodly hour. The great thing was that I could call whenever I wished as well.

He died of cancer. The nigger and the faggot were with him at the end as he had no immediate family. Only his corneas where salvageable.

When I tell people I am called by a friend in the middle of the night I am often responded to by a statement that is appalled in nature. I have to defend myself and him. I found it comforting. Comforting and warming. I liked being needed and called upon at all hours. It made me feel loved by him. He had numerous cats, two at a time, always the same breed - ugly as hell, always under the furniture never to be seen and always called 'Tench and Headache".

Gray was born in Italy. He was raised in Buffalo, NY. He spoke French and had lived in France during the war. He had met the likes of Richard Wright the author and had cursed him out as he had been rude to Gray. I can imagine him telling Wright the parrot joke and it not going over too well...

I am going to miss him. I am running out of my loved ones. If I could have one more moment with him I would ask for three things. To hear his voice again, to once again say I loved him and to hear, one more time so that I could commit it to memory, the nigger parrot joke. 

May you be with The MacArthur Clan in heaven and may they all be gay and black.

Hymn For Him

I like him. He's doing everything right so far. He's easy to talk to and talks honestly back to and with me. He's funny. He's strong and ruggedly handsome. We have many things in common. We both like wood and the colour scheme of blue and white. We like to peruse flea markets. We both like to be in our own beds and like our own sleeping space. His hands are bigger than mine. He takes charge and makes me feel safe. We both wear glasses and can't see shit. He likes to meet my friends and to go places with me. My friends say he is, "really nice," behind his back, to me. His moustache tickles. He makes me feel safe by being straight forward and keeping his word. He's commanding and gentle. He looks after me by looking in my refrigerator to see if I have enough food to eat. He brings me food to add to my refrigerator. He shoos me away when it comes to my carrying the heavy things. He takes the heavy things out of my hands to carry them for me. He likes my cat and plays with him. He's not afraid to tell me how he feels about things. He checks my windows to make sure that no one can get in to harm me. His hands and fingers are large and when I look at them I feel 'girlie'. He doesn't get bent out of shape when I talk to friends; both men and women. He likes to look at art and collect it - just like me. He wants to see me swim. He talks to Freda on the phone when she calls. 

Well heck, I just think he's a hunk of burning love; don't you?

The Boots

I had some boots. Black suede ones that I purchased about 25 years ago. I wore them with love.

Then I gave them to Maud. Maud was losing weight and needed new clothes and a new look. I have no recollection of her wearing them but when she died I got them back.

Once again I wore them with love and felt Maud's feet mould around my feet again. I had them for almost another ten years.

Then Zoe came, Maud's daughter, and she wore them while she was with me. Then I told her the history of the black suede boots. She wore them and perhaps she felt her mum's feet, along with mine, mould around her feet. Perhaps Maud's steps with her as she traipses around. 

All I know now is that the boots are in Massachusetts again being kept in the family of large footed women. I feel happy that those boots were made for walking.

I Am What I Am

I'm done with court. My fingerprints will be erased in 6 months or so. That part of the struggle is behind me. What's still ahead is deciding if life in New York is what I want; where I want to be. I miss Buffalo but might consider North Carolina where a dear friend has set up house and where she says things are good. I am dating a man for three months now. So far, so good.

I had a bad reaction to a drug this past week and it scared me so badly that I was sure I was going to be trapped, like an acid trip, in its grip until it ran its course. It ran a course that limited itself to severe pain in my arms for close to 24 hours and a generalized feeling of dread which hung over my head. 

I am learning the importance of women in one's life. How they are never to be forgotten in favour of a man. I am learning much and I am learning these lessons over the supports of medicated hands. My sense of dealing with reality has changed.  I feel no hunger for emotional food just now. I feel content having things lay where they may. I don't fear my phone or the people that seemed too tedious to talk to before. I am heartened to see that slowly but surely I am collecting a group of friends that invite me and come to me when invited. It is all happening despite my surety that I could not do it again. 

Life can happen while one is busy feeling insecure. 

What Must Be

My medication just got increased. I am still out of work. I have to let go of the common worries of money and those types of things. I have to truly believe that I am in the hands of God. My own hands have failed me. Perhaps failed is the not the right choice of words. Perhaps inexperienced hands would be a better choice. I have learned that the age I am now is often a triggering age for uni-polar or bi-polar disorders to rear their heads. I will not say, "ugly head," because I feel no shame in what I feel as I am sure most people have felt what I have felt on some level or another and feeling shame will only exacerbate things not only for myself but only serve to make my readers feel potentially shameful too and that is not a thing I wish for. 

Something happened in the last 8 months that triggered a chemical alteration in my brain. Emotionally I am not the same as I was, say, a year ago. My sleep is deeply disturbed. I am fixated on washing dishes and rearranging the glasses on my kitchen shelf. I check my email every second or two as well as my phone.  

Zoe is here and I am thankful for her presence. She is the daughter of a very old friend.

Since my hospitalization I have not had a crying jag or thoughts of suicide. Until last night. I am feeling tense, anxious, and the crying jags have begun again. This morning I began the increase of medication; it is possible this increase is having this effect. I don't know. I am not having thoughts of suicide; just the weeping. 

I have just arranged to get a full medical work-up to rule out some things that might otherwise be responsible for my current state affairs. 

I wish I could draw as I have a mad urge to paint.

I'm Away For a Bit

I spent two weeks in the hospital. For weeks I had conversed with Freda and told her I felt like I needed to be in a hospital. She tells me, since my release, that I had told her this perhaps 20 times, over and over... 

I arrived at work at the very end of January; I had been crying uncontrollably all morning. I sat at my desk crying some more. Freda called and desperately tried to calm me down. She had me imagine horse rides on Queenie as a child. She had me try and recall bonfires on the shores of Rustico; everything was remembered and nothing caught my heart.  The woman that sits with back to mine came and still I sat crying while she began her work. She never knew I was weeping. I sat through a meeting with three interruptions, by me, while I went to the bathroom to weep. 

I have been crying uncontrollably for months; it became even alarming to myself. Listen, I have done all the things one should do to to prevent such an occasion but to no avail. I am in therapy once a week. I take my prescribed medications as well as the vitamins. I share my feelings with friends and reach out as well. 

Do not dare to judge me. Do not dare.

For six months I have not been able to sleep beyond 4-5 hours and that sleep was always interrupted by wakings filled with dread. I stopped taking the subway because I waited for the train and envisioned myself throwing myself in front of the train. It seemed a grand idea. So I began to take my car. Then my car became my enemy. I looked for places to smash it against a tree, drive it off a bridge, or careen it off the road into freezing water that I was sure to drown in. I became completely unable to get out from under the dreadful dirge that I felt.  

I was suicidal. My suicide made sense. My death was a thing I told my best friend, my closest friend, my safest friend, to forgive me for; even Freda had lost the ability to hold me here. 

I sent an email to A. A has known me for 20 or more years. She is an RN who directs a clinic that I used to work for. I trust her. I trust her from my toes. I asked her to get me a shrink for meds. I told her that on a scale of 1-10 I was a 15 of suicide. It was a friday and I felt if I had to go home one more time, for a weekend, alone, I was going to end it. I was not able to take another moment. She, being the woman I trust her to be, acted swiftly, immediately, and with the assurance of a nurse. She had me sent to the ER. 

I am grateful.

It is now almost a month later since things have transpired. I am on an anti-depressant - a new thing for me. I am also prescribed something to help me sleep. I am on leave from work. The sleeping meds are a bit too strong. I take it and find it difficult to wake. Without I find myself awake in the middle of the night. I have cut the dose and still I am not feeling square and pointed; things are not done and dusted yet.

Freda says I sound different now. When I ask her what she means she says I sound as though I am 'back'. She says I am present again; she says it is OK that I don't know exactly what it is that I feel. She says that I will make it; she is still my lifelong encourager. My heart. My lungs. The woman that represents a grounding. 

Me? I take one moment at a time. I still feel a bit scared because what happened was disconcerting to me.  I have been depressed in my life but never have I felt suicidal. Never. It was a landscape that felt unfamiliar to me. 

Rain

Something is not right. If any of you know what this is please contact me as I have never felt this way before. I seem to be having physical sensations that mimic partly, the rocking motion of the sea, and sometimes like I have fallen in quicksand. I frolic along for a few days feeling unaware of anything askew and then suddenly I am on the floor heaving up tears from my bowels. Do you feel this way?

Some say I am suffering from PTSS and others say the recent events triggered old PTSS and that I am simply - note the word 'simply'- experiencing the things I never experienced before. Metaphor: I was in a car wreck in 1972 and my spine and legs were smashed. I suffered brain damage and was left a vegetable; today I looked down and noticed the wheelchair and my assigned companion; yesterday I realized that all those that I remember from back in '72 are all dead or left to go on with lives without me. I am a metaphor for death. I am a pool of liquid. I can not staunch the flow

A Sound Emanates Like That Of An Animal

Freda called me this morning and she reminds me of things. She reminds me of what it was that my ex-husband actually did to me. It is not a blow by blow account but rather what he has reduced me to. She narrows it down to his having made me believe that I am unlovable. 

And then I loose it. Then that sound comes out. I heard that sound the day before I put Milo down. He howled from his bowels. The sound said: "Please, I've had enough". My sound dropped me to my own knees. I have had enough; I don't want to be here anymore. 

Nothing sounds sweet. Nothing seems believable. Nothing gives me comfort.

The Music Blaring In My Apartment

If you hear the music blaring in an apartment go see the occupant. It is me. I am crying. I am blaring the music so that you can not hear my weeping. There is shame in feeling such lachrymose.

Suicide

I don't feel like trying anymore. I don't think I live in a world that cares about anything and I wonder why I even bother. I am depressed. Even my friends don't seem to give me comfort. When I am not at work all I think about is suicide. I can't seem to shake this feeling. The silence around me is deafening. I feel uncomfortable in the world and I don't trust anything.

I know my loneliness is shared by others. But yet everyone seems scared to death to share their life with another. I can't bare the thought of going to my death alone. I can't bare it.