I was starting to gather the items I thought I would need for a day of slipping off into hiding when my alarm went off.
When I woke the memory of "not wanting to do the day" stayed.
I didn't want to go to work.
I didn't want to workout.
I didn't want to be the one to wake Beach. Or the one to place a cup of coffee down on BC's nightstand.
I didn't want to be sheep dog of our morning.
Instead of working out I sat for a long time. Eventually, I got warmed up. I turned on the tiny screen saved on my computer... but instead of starting the circuit I sat back down on my yoga mat.
The weeks and weekends of summer tumbled across me like the ocean. In my line of sight the handdrawn calendar on the board. The days cresting with times and names. They tumbled from Monday to Monday.
I thought of the dream again. Where would I have gone? I remembered the wieght guilt and fear that always overcast the freedom of skipping school. It was never worth it.
I paused my "instead of" thinking to make coffee. I returned to it only to put it on pause again to wake Beach. She fell back asleep.
The kitchen was white and clean. The new kitchen table BC brought home over the weekend blank but inviting; promising for long mornings of school work. The whole house was clean, even BC's areas in the yard thinning. We are doing well.
I remembered the way it all looked to me on Saturday night when I returned from visiting the elderly lady I have taken to checking in on over long weekends. She lives in an apartment building not too far away. An apartment building I used to deliver boxes of food to for the food coop when they asked for female drivers to drive to sensitive locations. Beach would help me. Once a month we would load my red VW van with brown boxes of fresh bread and produce.
I sit with this woman in her little crate of a home and we talk. I fix her dinners she picks at. I give her a palm of pills she takes.
I listen to the stories of her life. The ones she has held onto. They remind me of the random collections of things I took from my sister's apartment after she died.
Some of her stories stick like smoke to her and others fade like unfed fire. Sometimes her stories repeat. But over the weeks they have filled in. Details left out return.
"I haven't thought about that old house for years," she said of a childhood home in California.
She has changed to me. Her stories filled her in. They fill us both in. She remembers my name and uses it. She tells me she likes me coming because I am nice. I wash her random collection of dishes sitting in the sink. I throw out spoiled food. She likes that I swear. She likes that I am curious about her. She likes that I am there.
She doesn't remember that we both lost a sister to drugs and drinking. Each time we tell it to each other, for the first time again, she smiles with amazement at her luck to find the strange woman in her apartment understands the darkness of the room behind the early death of a sister.
This weekend when I left her I pulled the door to her apartment closed and watched her face disappear.
Instead of working out I sat thinking about her; thinking about my own mother, my mother's mother, the past, and the future. Thinking about closing doors. The 6am news turned to 7. Coffee to BC's nightstand- better late than never. At 7:01 am I returned to my life coming out safely beyond the breakers. Treading water, hahah, I float. BC sinks like a stone in water but I float.
I get dressed thinking of the lake. Remembering the feeling of the cold water popping as I cut through in the deepest dive I dared to make.
Instead of being a good granddaughter or even a good daughter, I am a good strange. Instead of grace or faith or even hope I have stories that run generation to generation.
Instead of picking up the blueberries I dropped or the coffee cup I filled, I left them. I wasn't early to work but I also wasn't late.
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