February 13

The beginning of the year, with all its thieves and messes and pains, has left me heartless.

I was born in September, before the hurricane. By winter, I’d caught the thing that fucked my lungs up for good; now they’re half scar tissue and the other half’s water.

January 31st 2003, the four of us talked about Joan Osborne’s ‘One of Us’ and laughed about the way we laughed but then there he was, standing aside with me saying “maybe we should, if you want it” and I signed some kind of death warrant, signed myself away for a little while or maybe forever, depending on how you look at it.

A year later and the one who came after is grabbing me by the hair and calling me whore, calling me fickle, calling me bitch. Plus ca change, you know? 

And in 2005 he wanted revenge for my whoreishness and my fickle choices and my bitchery, but most of all he wanted revenge on me for leaving. He wanted to see me burn, he wanted to see me cry, so he told me I was sick. Sick, sick, sick. “What if you’ve already given it to your family?” I swear even from this distance I saw the corners of his mouth twitch. 

Maybe 2006 passed me by but I know I was working and I know I got a C in a history paper for the first time because I was too sick to read the questions, too sick to hold a pen.

But the next winter, I got a job. I was nineteen. Within weeks I was sitting-up bed-bound, sick to my bones with pneumonia. And the next February, Grandma died of the same thing.

See how it follows me around. Sickness and mistakes in the first two months of the year.

In 2009 it snowed. Feet upon feet of it. So much the ice rink closed. And he took me around the bars I’d never seen before and he held me in his brittle arms and he said “let me read it, let me take a picture, let me see you again, let me take you home” and I hardly acquiesced to anything but the drinking.

And then came 2010 with B and her selfish heart and her dry hands and her soft cheeks and her “I’m worried” and her pause before her “about us”. Her lack of drive and inability to deliver anything she promised. That February, I got sick. Glandular fever took me out of school and out of anything but rest and old childhood movies for a month. And then she left as soon as I was better, and I found myself back in counselling before spring.

You see, it never changes. These things never change. They are patterns, and patterns. will. out.