The squirrels are the only creatures who seem to love the palm tree in my front yard, for my husband, myself, and my neighbors certainly don’t. To hire someone to clean the palm tree costs about $2000 and to remove it the same, so we’ve been pondering removing it for a good year but can’t make up our minds. There isn’t much mind being made up in this house about much of anything. It’s a problem. My only mind making happens in periods of mania where rash decisions are anything but wise and seem made without any manner of forecasting the future discomfort they will inflict. Thus, decisions either get made and regretted, or not made at all. I’m still unclear which is worse.
But the palm tree needs to go. I think.
There are so many weddings this year. Well, two. My cousin’s which is just a short flight away but an expense of perhaps $3000 after taking grandma to watch the kids and booking a hotel room that can fit all of us, which isn’t easy to find. Waiting to book the hotel room means prices go up which means I spend even more. Then there’s my sister’s wedding, which she is rushing to get done this year supposedly, though no date has been set yet. Her and her finance are off on a whirlwind adventure of seeking out wedding venues just like my husband and I did six years ago.
Six years ago was an entirely different time. Almost so ancient it merits its own series like Bridgerton although that isn’t actually based in any real time so this particular comparison doesn’t work and yet it feels like it does — because was that life six years ago any more real than the world created by Julia Quinn — because what was life actually six years ago? Was it real?
My father still alive, a bit of denial through the entire family about the situation at hand and falling for his lies about the fiscal health of his and my mother’s bank account. Six years ago before two children who are very much humans now. Six years ago before the worst manic period of my life where thank god I managed to only let words not actions inflict the innocent, even though I ruined a few of the things in life that were actually good because that’s what I do apparently — self sabotage so the things and friendships that actually are wonderful are poisoned by this mental health catastrophe that goes into hibernation in my brain and comes out every once in a blue moon and turns me into this over confident person I most certainly am not. So there’s that. And I live in fear of that person coming back though I tell myself I’m older now and wiser and I can control that part of me if she surfaces again and I’m too tired now anyway to have that kind of energy where even if I thought I might be charismatic I’d surely prefer to dream the reaction to that charisma over act upon it. It’s interesting, though, how certain I am that I’m bipolar and yet not being able to convince any practitioner of this because I’m too ashamed to explain exactly who I’ve become in the past or maybe I try but no one believes me when I seem like just a depressed person trying to exaggerate the past. Or maybe I don’t even believe it because I force myself to forget out of sheer embarrasment and regret that spins like a spiked pit in my stomach whenever I’m jolted back to a time when I wasn’t really me albeit I was still me, I wasn’t like, schizophrenic, I was just — some other me who was sad to the point of wanting to crater in but that isn’t even it. Just craving some kind of connection, I guess, in this delusion that maybe such connection might exist somewhere, but then in falling back to earth realizing no no no in fact there’s nothing to connect to and you are best lost on an island and not having this notion that someone will one day find you there and rescue you from yourself. Because that doesn’t actually happen. And that’s ok. What’s not ok is when you start getting confused about what’s real or what isn’t. When your mind plays tricks on itself. It’s scary and upsetting. So you want to keep yourself stable now. It’s all that matters.
Six years later, you have a house, you have two kids, you have managed to hold down a job for four years and see your bank account grow with stock that you don’t deserve but you got nonetheless. And you’re six years older which shows in the few strands of grays in your hair and the paleness of your skin and the aches in your joints which you realize are just beginning. You’ve experienced the beginning of a global pandemic, like everyone else, and the era of covid, which may not go away anytime soon. You have PTSD from it like everyone else, but perhaps it saved you, locking you in your house and not letting you escape into the world with your impractical imagination.
But it would be nice. To just find peace with it all. This world. It isn’t much longer that I have to experience it. Who knows how long. I’d think 40 years of health if I’m lucky. Half way there. If it was climbing up a mountain I’d feel good about making it to this point but it’s not, it’s life, and there is nothing else once you get to the top. And so here I am, living a depressed but more or so practical life, and trying to decide which kitchen table to buy because I ought to make decisions faster than once every two years, so maybe I can do other things in life, other than searching Wayfair and watching the sun hoping it will go down quickly so I can just go back to sleep.
