Waiting for the Pizza

There comes a moment in ash when you have to decide if the fire is out. If the trees may catch again, if you can start sweeping this mess, if you can reclaim. If the world is still there and if you belong or want to belong in it. 

I ordered a pizza and poured another glass of wine and watched television with Elle. I thought I was catching a stomach bug and I had spent half of my day off working and not writing and not painting and not quite awake. I laid my head on her chest and she kissed the top of it and I thought of all the things I wanted to do and of all the same things I wouldn't do. I was tired and worn from the job and afraid of each new morning and I was already regretting the fucking garbage I was about to eat but was too hungry and tired to get to the store to buy something I actually needed. 

I did miss the chaos. The destruction. I thought about it often. I thought I belonged there. In the mess. It was me and I was it. 

Elles heartbeat sometimes was irregular but now I could feel and hear it inside of her and it kept time and casually rolled on and on and I thought "Me too." 

"How d'you feel?" she asked.

"Hungry. Agitated."

"I'm sorry, love." She ran her fingers through my short and ever thinning hair and I thought it seemed as though my entire being fought the idea that I could let myself be happy. "Yeah, that sounds like me," I thought.

Cartoon on the television and I kept thinking about a story I had been working on a year before but had apparently dropped after two hundred odd pages. The characters were driving, last I left them, and they never came back and sometimes that happens to people. I thought maybe I had finished it and that was okay with me. 

I thought I might shit myself. 

Hoped the pizza would help that. Doubted it.

Elle laughed at the television and when she did, her arm tightened around me and I wondered again if I could just let myself be. Happy, content, whatever.

I would never be successful. I would never be wealthy. I would never be respected as some sort of creator, or person, and that was all fine. 

I would never be truly, actually, blindly happy or connected, or a part of it all and that used to worry me, when I was younger, but now not at all and that made me worry. I had become detached. I had become a face to the people around me and nothing more. I saw shapes of people and heard their murmurs and watched their patterns and I stood in the center of it all and I was not them. I was no one and nothing and that, that was fine.

I am not a bird, fish, tree, or human.

I orbit and observe and gather their charitable smiles and laughs and stories and treasure their distance and dreams and complete inability to see it all for what it is.

I stand on the sidelines and watch and I have no desire.

The doorbell rings and I get up and get the pizza. Tip the guy a couple of bucks and set the food down and Elle gets plates and paper towels and we eat and watch television and with a large red X I'll soon be able to cross this day off and then on to the next.

I eat too much food and my stomach hurts. 

Elle runs her fingers slow and soft over it. 

I am afraid of each new morning and that stopped mattering a long time ago.