Holding Down Fort Virgil

I've spent the last five days all by my little lonesome, while El Hijo went to Kentucky to help his family with his father's eye surgery (successful, so far). I have mentioned before that I don't do so well on my own. I have a tendency to wander around out of boredom and being the stick-poker that I am, find new things to poke with a stick and get all riled up. I've managed to keep it mostly virtual, though, engaging in a couple of Internet Fights. Those are always fun. I've obviously blogged more regularly than I normally do. But I'm certainly doing better than the last time around. Minus the part where I poisoned myself with bad meat and spent the next day paying for it.

I've had to teach this summer session (which I am blogging about soon), so that helped me maintain some level of presentability. If you read the old post, you'll discover that I spent most of the last summer that this happened lying around like an alcoholic middle-aged man, sleeping in my clothes and going to work in said clothes the next day. I've done somewhat better this time around. I've at least eaten things that weren't horribly out of date (minus the incident with the bad meat), but they weren't particularly healthy, either. It was mainly an alternation of steak and frozen stuff. I did manage to shower and keep clean clothes on this time. I've been semi-productive. I managed to send out a few more "paper bullets of the brain" (students, where does this reference come from??); I taught without cursing; I attended a "heritage" festival and managed to drink Yuengling at my favorite bar and later that night kill a bottle of Dom with D/B while discussing the unsatisfactory nature of the possibility of a revolution any time soon; I had a delightful lunch meeting with a former student of mine (I hang out with some of them, but I can count them on one hand); the cats have not killed me (Fanny usually tries when she realizes El Hijo is gone for a significant amount of time -- I have no idea why).

My PTSD is still kicking really hard, though, and that's just so disappointing. I even went to therapy for it over a year ago because the physical symptoms were getting too rough to deal with -- it's never mental (except in the wee hours of the morning), it's like muscle memory. My therapist said it's psych trauma memory and that certain situations can trigger it like muscle memory, in a way, and that made a lot of sense to me. It's been fourteen years since my father died and the trauma that went along with that over the next couple of years. But I still cannot sleep in a bedroom by myself -- if I'm the only adult in the house, I have to sleep on the couch. I still wake up at every little sound, even cats scratching in the litter box at the other end of the house. That's because when I found out my father died, I was laying on my bed with my headphones on and my eyes closed. It's going to sound stupid, but there is no other way of explaining it: I was lying perpendicular to my closet and it just felt like the closet was ... breathing. Like it was alive and something was going to pop out and get me. Something really evil. I couldn't keep my eyes shut, because it felt like a monster was just waiting for me to get settled in so it could rip into me. I've never been a person to be afraid of the dark or of things in closets. So it was incredibly weird and unsettling to say the least. Just then, my sister (then 15) burst into my room, and I will never forget the look on her face as long as I live. She was talking and I couldn't hear her because my headphones were really loud (I was 17). But her face said the world had just ended, or a bomb had dropped, or something horrific had happened -- or as it turned out, my dad had shot himself and my mother had just found him. What I thought was a breathing closet was most likely my mother's screams, which my sister says she still hears sometimes at night when she goes off to sleep, and my sister's feet pounding up the stairs to my room, her screaming too.

I'm glad I didn't hear it and I'm grateful I wasn't the one who found Dad. Because I can remember him just as I saw him last, in his checkered blue work shirt, smelling like Spearmint gum with a cup of coffee before I went to work that early Spring morning at about 6:30 a.m. He smiled and kissed me and told me he was proud of me for working on my Spring Break. And that's how I want to remember him. It's also why I'm a fucking work-a-holic and no one can tell me they're proud of me and it mean anything near what it meant coming from him. Ah, well. It also meant my sleep went to hell and never came back. I used to wake up in the morning and there would be nothing on the bed but me -- no pillow, no sheets, nothing. Before I slept like a log. No more. I also cannot have my Ipod turned up too loud. I can't be in a position where I feel like I can't hear "what's coming", and that's why sometimes I end up on the couch at night, hoping to prevent "what's coming" from getting there. Therapy helped *a lot* because it helped me figure out what the triggers are. But it didn't stop the sleeping habits I have; it just reduced their prevalence. Oh, and it got rid of the ripping gut pain I used to have every single fucking day that would bend me in half or put me on the floor. That's a huge bonus.

I had a particularly rough night last night, as I couldn't go to sleep until about 2:00 a.m. and I was right back up again at 5:00 a.m. like a lightening bolt because I could've sworn I heard somebody coming through the back door. There was no one, of course, there never is. But it was impossible to go back to sleep after that.

I'll be really grateful when El Hijo comes home in another day or so. In the back of my mind, I'm a tiny bit fearful of what my life would be like if Dante were grown and gone and something happened to El Hijo. Hell, I'd probably move into my work office and just put a sleeping bag in there. Sigh.

Yours neurotically,

-- DV