perfect blue balloons

I was standing in the whipping cold holding 2 huge black trash bags wearing old gym shoes, tattered jeans, and a tank top. So you don't get the wrong idea that I might have looked anything other than the winner of Ms. Congeniality for Ms. Trailer Park I will help you out- the tank top is hideous. It was some sort of gangster tee before I cut off the arms and v cut the neck so I could box in it. My hair had long since transitioned from cute messy braids to 2nd winter homeless. 

I had stopped at the edge of my driveway, heading for the trash cans out on the street, to watch the girl (she's about 20 yrs old) walking down the snow spotted sidewalk. 

I see her all the time. 
Seven years of watching her as she walks past my house on the way to 7/11. She used to try to talk to me but after a year or 2 of my shortness she would simply talk to dogs. She and her sister pass by several times a day to buy all kinds of shit food, mostly large sodas. I assume Mt. Dew. They are a family of Tennessee hill people (I know not very nice but you get the picture). Everyone is a touch big, slow, too related, and too friendly with each other- yes, all of us on 10th have wondered aloud if they really were that kind of family. The amount of dogs having puppies and cars having tires doesn't help offset any rumors strolling the block. 

In fact, I suspect they are the reason the old Asian woman tells me that I have a good husband then angrily shakes her fist in the general direction of their house and says "not from Colorado." I've never fully figured out what she is trying to say to me, only that to her "Colorado" is something bad and BC is not that. I don't know how she knows him but I remember a time when I too was just his neighbor and I think I thought the same thing about him. It may not have come out quite the same, hey there, look at that guy surely he's not from Colorado but the idea of he's good, not bad was there somewhere.     

I couldn't help but pause to watch her: she is the sister of the man killed last month while he was at work up the street at the other 7/11. Killed over a box of smokes. I will never get beyond the senselessness of that. No one should. At least my sister died doing what she loved- drinking.

As the girl walked further away, bundled head to toe in Walmart winter wear, I was aware of the bitter cold filling up all the holes in my own clothing and my own strangeness. A hundred thoughts rushed through my mind. Thoughts that take me up the stairs of my sister's apartment, through the door, and into the tiny stale rooms with the hopeless fan buzzing full force at thin air. How can she go to a 7/11 like it nothing? Does he haunt her? Do they remember him? Does she even care? 

I stared at the back of her head as she bobbed away. Suddenly she hollered out, "He was shot". The words rose then burst, like an overfilled balloon popping. It seemed involuntary. But more than that, to me it finally seemed like something normal was happening. Some one was finally making sense. Or perhaps we were members of a secret dead sibling club and she was simply answering one of my unspoken questions. 

She walked on vanishing down the street. I finished with the trash, pilling it on top of a heaping city can filled with the whole reason I was such a mess. 
See at some point around 4 A.M. that morning, being alone with an unlimited supply of coffee and no one to stop me I had pulled all the furniture in my house away from the walls. Removed all the arts, stacked the books, and began cleaning and sorting through everything we owed- filling 3 bags for donation, 4 bags of trash, and piled unnecessary pieces of furniture in the back of the van. [BC is going to kill me.]

Late in the afternoon Sarah had called to check on me and remind me she still had my child from the day before. "You really must be geeking out. I haven't heard from you all day." She had laughed.  At that point in time I had yet to put anything back. And was standing in the middle of the front room like a full blown crackhead. Covered in my own dirty hand prints trying to justify (a little too late) how I was going to explain to BC that I had by myself carried a ceder lined mission style wooden bench/chest down his stairs to put it in the hallway opposite Beach's bedroom. At least I hadn't carried it up. 

That was about the 24 hr mark of what would become about 32 hrs of complete solitude (minus the phone call and the outburst from the girl). I had dropped Beach off to Sarah on New Year's Eve in the early afternoon with 20 bucks and a bag full of overnight supplies. I spent New Years alone; a lot of it in the hot tub drinking and obviously plotting deconstruction of my whole life.

Most of it had gone as planned except for that girl...when I think about her I guess we all walk around with invisible balloons that rise above us. Some burst from inside pressures, some from outside forces, while others seem to just slowly lose air. And some hang around over head for a long time before you decide to let them go.

When I close my eyes I often see my sister- for no reason at all.
When I am surrounded by people I tend to forget that I am actually okay.
When I am truly alone I am completely entertained by own foolish bravery and off center points of view. 

By the fall of dark on New Year's Day Beach had been returned to me and the house had been almost completely restored to its new, improved, less cluttered, and way cleaner, arrangement.

This I know: Left to my own devices I have the tendency to rip my life apart, to over inflate the weak spots, and run with scissors. But given enough time (coffee & oranges) I'm also not too bad at putting it all back together.