chapter twenty.

who are you again? oh yeah. well.

no news about pudgy today in case you were wondering. i wasn't up when school started and i missed him. it's funny - now i'm making it sound like my life revolves around pudgy and his school mates! well it doesn't, but pudgy has become a character in the sitcom that is my life, and i was wondering if we'd see him again, although since he evolved so much yesterday - being with a friend and all! - it's probably normal that we won't see him for a while. such are sitcoms.

last night i decided to paint my kitchen cabinet doors. with markers. neon green, neon yellow, neon pink and neon blue. it actually looks very cool, to have those spots of many colors amid all the blue. i started after i came back from dinner - the boyfriend took me out and then dropped me off - and it took me most of the night. which is why i was asleep when and if pudgy passed by. but anyway, now the kitchen stonks of cheap ink and my landlord would kill me if he saw the result of my inspiration, but i think it looks pretty fucking sweet.

this morning (last night, if you prefer), i decided i wanted tea. i went to this little health food store the boyfriend introduced me to (and i fell in love) and i bought twelve different kinds of tea, all in bulk. and then i came home, i mixed them all up - well, not all - i chose four or five and i mixed them together and i steeped my mixture for a long time and i drank it and it was good so i made another one and another and another. i'm quite hyper now, thank you. actually i am already doubting that i will veer be able to sleep tonight at all. not that i'm quitting my newly found insane tea habit. i like it. and when a cup of it gets too cool, i add another kind of tea and then i reheat it. the english would probably have my head for what i do to their national beverage, but fuck 'em. i know very precisely how to make proper tea - i've read everything i could by douglas adams, and he's brit enough to know and want to educate the masses - but i simply prefer my own radioactive potion.

i think i can already safely predict that tonight is going to be one of those nights when i'm too hyper so i take something to bring me down and then i get too down and i need uppers again, and then i'm way too high so i take some other form of downers, and... well. those nights often end up lasting for a couple of days. then i fall asleep wherever i am, confused to the point of not remembering whether i was even high to begin with. i've been told i'm not always pleasant in those circumstances, but who cares. and sometimes i am. sometimes i'm very funny and entertaining when i go on long up and down binges. when things are going well and i'm happy and for example it's one of those perfect winter days with a bright sun that warms nothing at all and people outside are smiling as the light reflects on the pristine snow everywhere, but they also walk very fast and try to cath up with their visible breath, and i'm inside and i'm warm and i see it all, and joy swells within. when that happens i can be enteratining. and i dance and i sing and i fall without any reflex to break my fall (and therefore i don't get hurt). and i laugh. i laugh because i fell. i laugh because falling to the gorund often gives me the hickups, i have no idea why but it does, and having the hickups and laughing at the same time hurts like hell but it's even funnier when it hurts so i laugh even more, and hickup even more, and that can last for a while, as i giggle and hickup on the floor.

one time a long time a go i was babysitting my nephew and he was a very active baby - toddler by them i guess - and he barely slept and i tried to keep up with him and i was completely baked and i took - i don't even remember what, something to wake me up and keep me up - and when my sister got back, the nephew and i were rolling on the living room floor, drinking ketchup from a hundred little packs of ketchup i'd stolen from the corner greasy spoon and laughing our head off every time we opened a pack. there was ketchup everywhere, though mostly on our faces and clothes and hands and the floor, and we'd been opening some with his cute little plastic hammer, popping them straight from the floor and trying to catch the squirt in our mouths, and his mother was not quite happy to find us in that state. plus, the little guy was usually forbidden any kind of sugar, so i had loaded him up for most of that day and the next. i got a long speech about never babysitting again and how irresponsible can you be and what were you thinking and he's the child you have to be the adult and did you think i wouldn't find out and that's not how i want my son raised, there are rules and he needs to obey them, life is not the roller coaster ride you make it out to be, blah, blah blah. the whole time, he was behind her, filling his pockets and socks (a trick i had shown him) with the remaining packets of ketchup, and he even slipped a few in her coat pocket, from behind, and he had the nerve - i must say i was proud - to put some in her boot. when she put it back on to leave she screamed bloody (ketchuppy) murder. i gladly took the blame for that one. and as she left, insulted and snarling at me, i slipped the boy a high five. good boy. question authority, bypass authority, annoy authority.

i like that story. it reminds me that i love my nephew, that he's a cool kid. it also reminds me not to have children. i'm clear headed, tea notwitstanding, to know that those kinds of things are fun and necessary - in my book - experiences of childhood, but that they should reoccur in a daily basis. well, you know, mostly on account of all those laws and shit about sending children to school and all. i don't think a child i would raise would do well in a traditional school, or surrounded by normal ordinary boring kids, and boring ordinary subnormal adults. and in any case my sister eventually came around. it didn't even take long. it just took her usual babysitter to have the flu one night and be busy the next week, and i was back on the babysitting roster. and sinc ei don't get paid for it, i can say yes or no at will. from what i hear, that's not quite how it works when the child is yours.

---

it's later now and i'm drunk. quite drunk. i chose alcohol as a downer tonight, because it works well for me, and because once i open a bottle i finish it and once i finish it and its sister, eventually i collapse into a drunken stupor, which is one of the nicest stupor for me, but then again that's because as long as i don't trespass my personal mixing limits, i don't throw up. i don't know what i'm doing here. a feeling about something to finish. do you love me? that's the drunk in me talking. i embrace my inner drunk like some people their fucking inner child. why not, esti?

throwing up is not even that bad. i had my bulimic episode in my teens, who didn't? it was the fashionable thing to do back then, the proverbial cry for help that is not quite a suicide attempt (although i've had my share of those too - no, not really - i've always thought that if i intended to kill myself i would, no questions asked - the last thing i'd want if i was suicidal would be to end up and the emergency room with my stomach being pumped - how the fuck is that supposed to give people the will to live back? i never understood that. what i meant is that i've had my share of suicides and suicide attempts in my life, they just didn't have me as the instigator, slash victim, slash criminal (how ridiculous is that, that suicide used to be illegal? what was that, a message, to the distraught, that if they wished to off themselves, they should do it well, or else they'll go do it in prison? what the fuck?)). i figured, why not? i can eat for two like any other chick! so i did. and a lot of good that did me too. not. but i got out of it, mostly when i realised throwing up didn't even bother me anymore. i figured, sweet, i've defeated my body's natural impulse on another playing field. that was enough of a victory to me. i didn't need the skinny at all costs part.

one thing i'm not good at, never have been, is endings. deaths for example. oh i can talk and i can rant and rave about suicide and other people's death - people i don't care about or don't know or never wanted to be close to. but people i actually love dying? or animals? no way. i can't deal. i've had a fucking shrink tell me that's what i'm trying to avoid, what i've tried to avoid all my life, dealing with the loss, any loss, of loved ones. well bravo shrinko! did it take all four years of your degree to learn to diagnose people like that? bra, fucking, vo. idiot. as if that wasn't everybody else's problem too. trying to avoid an end, trying to delay everything in every way possible, because eventually people understand, grasp, what finite means, and i just fucking happened to grasp that at a younger age than the median. how that makes me fucked up and not the rest of the world, i've never understood. why i'd have to learn to deal with loss better either. fucking hell, who ever said a human's life's goal is to accept the unacceptable? and whose to say what i should do, one way or another? but this is bigger than me. i say no one has to accept the end of anything. stop accepting. anything. refuse. question. say no, in big fucking bold letters in that bubble above your head. say fuck you and say never. never say never? that's bullshit. don't let the fuckers win, don't let them be right not even once.

i'm dying. did you figure it out already? that's what i've been avoiding, what the boyfriend, with his sweet sweet red eyes, has been avoiding. and if i hate losing, i also hate avoidance. but tonight i'm drunk, and i might as well face it. well no, i've faced it a long while ago, and my decision when i came face to face with my death was to refuse it. it and all the fucking doctors who had nothing better to say or do. they don't care. they're trained not to care. the rest of us, though, are stuck caring, caring an awful fucking lot, about what little existence we have. and i fucking hate my little pudgy sometimes, to think that an ugly fat kid can live beyond my years, will be able to fuck when i'm - i don't even know what i'll be at that point - what are you when you're beyong worm food? worm castings. worm shit. and then what? and then i'll be good fertilizer. woohoo. like each and every fucking one of you, i'll reincarnate into fertilizer. are you as thrilled as i am? probably not actually, because i like flowers, and fertilizing soil will be more than i've done, in the grand scheme of things, than i've done in all my fucked up sacriledged, sabotaged life. which is such a sentimental way of putting it that it makes me want to thrwo bottles at the wall again, but no, the boyfriend is asleep, he gave up when i was still high on the radioactive tea and passed out before i opened the wine, and as one last nice-like gesture, i'd like to let him sleep. i love him, you know. as much as i've ever been able to love. and i've got a hard time telling him so, but i think he reads me better than anyone, and he knows.

i don't want to drift into sentimentality. i still have a few weeks to go, and we're leaving tomorrow. he's taking me somewhere down south, for me to see palm trees finally and to say goodbye to the sun. i've said goodbye to snow already. and it was ever my favorite.