SaraEileen.com

Last night and today I read old journal entries, my own and other peoples, partly to learn and partly to remind myself of all the ways in which progress has been made in my life. The ground feels progressively firmer; I feel that I should put down seeds, grow wheat, apples, a home, plump stories.

Reading my Twitter stream over the past few months much happiness appears, very little of it specified. I have fallen back into old blogging patterns: to speak sideways, in oblique reference, without names or anything that could be interpreted as emotionally revealing. That’s how I managed to get through all of college with a relatively cheerful LiveJournal; I wrote the good things and referenced the rest.

But the references can only continue for so long, no? Because eventually I will want to write stories of my life again, and possibly share them, and at that point in time they will need characters besides myself.

I am seeing a man. His name is Zac. The process by which we have come to be seeing one another is a story unto itself, one that I may someday tell if I decide to put words to that month of strange collisions. Suffice it to say, he makes me happy. The decisions leading to said partnership have all been good ones, on my side. And of course he is a character in the story.

Saturday morning he and I were in a car crash.

But let’s back up.

Thursday my roommate IMed me to say that she had found a small brown bug on her mattress. Following from there, our super came, the bug was crushed, blood spurted forth and the little fucker with its last gory, disgusting burst of life confirmed the Haven’s sentence: bedbugs.

Please understand; we have been through this once before, with a bedbug scare six weeks ago. At the time I went so far as to bag all of my things, drink a handle of scotch and panic-attack myself into tears. But that was the last time, the utterly-unequipped time. This time, I was ready.

I left work an hour early, rode the subway, read my book. Walked home, purchasing on the way duct tape, plastic bags, two liters of Riesling and a very cheap vanilla vodka. Wrapped every single item in my room into a mountain of garbage bags, labeled everything, watched in amusement as my roommates became increasingly tipsy and we eventually all succumbed to our couch. I felt adult and accomplished and mighty, and like going on a bedbug hunt for vengeance. After all, I have lived through far worse things than bedbugs.

(Stitch suggests that I make an installation of bedbug art, following from the thesis that bedbugs are miniature vampires to be exorcised and destroyed with the use of miniscule stakes, cloves of garlic, minute crosses and holy water.)

Things have progressed from there. The apartment’s been sprayed, cleaned, disinfected. Not a bug to be seen. Not a single sign of infestation. Still, we have to keep everything bagged until the next round of spraying, three weeks from this Monday. The apartment is in chaos, like a hotel that moved in too fast. We keep trying to find things and then remembering…”Oh right. It’s in a bag.”

(We don’t have a greaseman anymore, because he’s in a bag. Somewhere. We don’t know. He’s a bag man.)

Anyway.

Friday night I rode a bus to Providence. Zac and I stayed up too late, and in the morning woke up early to drive to the much awaited KinkForAll Boston. Zac prepped the coffee the night before, had the travel mugs out. Two travel mugs. One travel mug top. Remember that, it comes back later.

We got up, made coffee. I failed to mention that the thought of the day made me nervous (seeing May again, he and I and Zac and Emma in a room together for the first time since…when? Since the last KinkForAll. Before then, in friendship, since before Australia. Since before all of our lives changed so hard.) We poured the coffee in the travel mugs, I gave Zac the top because he’d be driving, and we set off for the bakery to buy more coffee. Yes, we pregamed our coffee.

The actual crash I remember very little of. I remember Zac putting his eyes on the parking space he wanted across the road, and moving his hands to the wheel and stick to turn the car, a tight turn, no traffic. I remember him spinning the wheel.

Zac says that he noticed my scream before he noticed the crash itself; I don’t even remember screaming. I remember an enormous noise and then being covered in glass and coffee.

“Oh fuck,” he said.

“Are you all right?” One of us asked the other. I don’t remember who. I was soaked from knee to chin.

“Yes. Are you?

“Yes.”

“Fuck.”

And then I was terrified, for about ten seconds, a deep welling rush-replay, nothing to do with rational. Later I would gather specific fears to myself: that I could have smashed my head against the other window, that Zac could have lost his arm.

After that…it’s just details. I watched him call the cops, speak to the cop when he came, speak to the other driver, make phone calls, take information, call his insurance, give information, find a mechanic, process, think, rise to the occasion with grace. I called a ride, called KFA, took photos. We gathered our things from under the glass and left the car with a garage, door hanging open with the metal peeled back like a flower petal.

Eventually we went home, and I washed the coffee out of my hair, and we slept curled against one another, out like sleepy fireflies. We woke up to cook and make origami trinkets and have sex. We stayed up until just before the sunrise.

This was supposed to be a story of the crash, but of course it’s really a story about him; how different he is to my previous experiences, how like me in mind. How he did exactly what I would have done in his place, without once raising his voice. How we woke up the next morning and went antiquing together, something I have never done with a partner before.

He wrote in his journal that we are “seeing” one another. That sounds about right to me. He used the word girlfriend twice, and I laughed, because he used it with the cop who came to write up the accident, and with the woman who took his insurance information later that morning, as we sat in the car reeking of coffee, while I talked with my aunt, crushed glass under my feet, watched it stop and start to rain. It is a neatly packaged word for a way of being that does not yet need to be packaged.

I am happy. Not just with him; with my life. I work 55 hour weeks at my new job, but it’s a job that gives me responsibility and work I like, with people who value my opinion and trust my independent judgement. I continue to try to act as a lioness for the wellbeing of myself, my communities and loved ones. I continue to try and find time for creativity, but despite being recently stuck I can feel the bits of rock tumbling in my mind again, the telltale heaviness in my fingers that means I will paint soon, write soon, grow something. I will do this despite the bags, despite the melancholy of reading old journals, despite still closing my eyes and occasionally seeing glass explode through the air like a starburst, despite missing Zac and occasionally worrying on the uncertainties of all things.

So I’m sitting at my desk wearing my work pants, because my curtains are in a bag, at 9pm at night, because that’s when I get home from work now on a regular day. And this is my life: wrapped in plastic and constantly traveling through different states of limbo, an odd, contented wanderer.