irrelevance and all is one

skin sags in folds out the armpits of my stained tank top

watching real house wives,

shove chocolate in my mouth and 

drink another cherry coke zero

everyone is in a reality show in a reality that’s familiar to all of us 

but not the same for any one of us. 

so who is watching yours? 

and how bored would they be?

let’s see let’s see

let’s see who tunes in:

set the scene: wearing the same strappy striped tank top and thin blue pj shorts i’ve been wearing the past five years, an ice pack wrapped around my throbbing head, tucked in the corner of the couch with my sleeping cat in my lap, a box fan blowing directly at me, drinking a cherry coke zero and eating a flan pudding, my legs swinging back and forth on a propped up foam pillow while real housewives is on pause, this urge comes over me to write my thoughts about reality tv and why it’s so significant, what is the bigger picture of the bigger picture (memory of contemporary art history your first semester at an actual college, first one of those big college rooms you always saw on tv, 36 years old surrounded by people younger but educated to be older as they started talking theories and your mind revved up soaking it in as fast as you could but still 15 years too late,…you walked away with an understanding of what meta was and is and could be, beyond the fourth wall, the pursuit of all artists to understand reality). 

today’s episode of:

The Pondering Irelevant Eyor-ian Slug

When One is Two is One: The drama of ptsd: 

life is full of crazy suffering and everyone fires through it so who would give two shits about yours?

but mine is unique, and unique is valuable if people are bored with the similarity. because the singularity is bored of itself.

it’s waking up to the realization: it’s lonely.

it’s heart is broken that two don’t exist, it was only a mirror it tricked itself into thinking was another being it had no control over and could love it of its own free will. death is the suffering of waking up to the truth: 

the person, the animal, the memory,

the reality 

that dies hurts so bad because their absence is the absolute truth

there is only one. there was always only one. even though you were:

sitting at her dying husband’s side holding his hand

sitting beside her seeing sick mother as the machines chant in prayer around her

sitting on the floor with her dying rabbit in her hands injecting her dead husband’s left over morphine down the little creature’s throat so the pain ends.

sitting in her car on the side of the road in the middle of the night and tracking down her husband in the middle of a sleeping country road, passed out from his drinking bender after he called her that morning sobbing he had a drinking problem and it was out of control. sitting in the car and gathering her courage, his gun was gone when she searched his room earlier. his brains might be blown splattered nonono. he’s fine he’s fine. getting out of the car and outta the dance into the same nightmare landscape of a dark country road surrounded by gnarled walnut tree silhouettes towering up through a shuddering rain that rises and falls. dread dread dread he’s dead dead dead nonono just knock on the window and wake him up. 

no. you. not her. him. not them. you.

sitting on the ground with your arms steadying him as he swayed back and forth, slowly curling up in your lap while you hugged him and kept repeating “i’m right behind you.”

listening to him sob and tell you he wants to die there is no way it’ll ever be different there is no escape no matter how hard you try and work and sacrifice, nobody will ever love us because we are broken, so broken we aren’t even fixer uppers there is no value in us, we learned that as babies. he wants to die he wants to die, have to keep calm and listen, but what if he did, oh my god how could i live, have to keep calm and tell him all the ways he’s loved and we need him have to remind him, but in a language he speaks and not my own. have to stay calm, he won’t look like himself, just get on the plane, get the rental get to the hotel and do things off and sleep for an hour because it’s been 24. and then get to his bedside to do whatever it takes to make him understand in a language all his own.

no. not you. not then. we.

sharing a childhood one in front of the other taking turns and both with the same name indistinguishable from one another, two vibes twisting and growing shading the sun fighting for sun wilting and nurturing one another back to health and until one wilts too much for too long and becomes a shriveled dead limb the other will have to carry until it wilts as well.

and off they go, play time ends, reminding you all along 

it was always only one,

not two.

back to real housewives wives and texting and knitting and drinking coke zeros but maybe with a lil whiskey now.