Lately I have been going to bed at night and staring at the ceiling fan as if it were a StarShip hovering down to zip me away. Where will they take me, I get to wondering. To a planet, maybe. Or maybe they just wanna ass-rape me and fill me with caramel filling and serve me at the buffet in one of the ship's six eateries. Either way, I lay there thinking about stuff: about how exciting it is to be moments away from heading out to space, to be seconds away from conversations with clay-colored Lobster Boys with laser eyeballs. Its enthralling. It's fucking ace, is what it is.
Then it punches me on my heart.
Violet. My butter bean.
I can't go to space tonight. I have Violet here in the other room crashed out on her elbows and knees, her tiny butt propped up in the air, aimed at the stars beyond the rafters and shingles above her dreaming head. I can't get on this ship or even the next one. She is over there working up ways to be needing me even in her wildest dreams. And I aim to please.
I give the finger to the fan. I tell it to go get someone else who doesn't have all these Earthly responsibilities like I do. The fan erupts in lights and roars, smoke that smells of fried honeysuckle fills the bedroom; Christ: this is gonna wake her up, I scream into the deafening hot wind.
Then.
Boosh.
It's gone. The StarShip. It simply vanishes in a puff of dust that settles down around me on my left side of the Serta PerfectPosturePimp, like a misty bird pee.
I get choked up. This part is super true. I lay there thinking about what almost just happened/how close I was to walking into the unknown, alone. And it makes me almost cry as I realize that I can't live anymore without my kid. She holds chains she don't know a damn thing about. Chains looped and knotted up and around my liver, my kidneys. Chains gathered all over my left lung. And my right one. New hard chains spun all through my ribs, like bikes locked safe outside a library. Chains to my eyelids. Chains to my teeth. Chains to my still kicking heart.
The feeling has been lingering all around rooms and streets with me lately. All gussied up in afternoon sunbeams smashing into golden leaves, this weird massive entity has been swirling in and out of my consciousness for the last couple of weeks. I get so blue sometimes. I deal with it, run with it. Try to rub it in my eyes and see the world as some sort of sad beautiful ball of dirt/bones/lust/fish. But these past days have found me just overcome with all kinds of newer pangs.
I fall into some dark ass well and a nine month old pulls me out. She heaves me up over the colonial bricks and sneezes in my face. She holds out a pinky like an offer.
Stay here with me, she says. We'll be ok.
It's all too much sometimes. It's me staring hard at her and her shitting like a buffalo while she watches Charlie Brown in a pumpkin patch.
Its a shotgun shell loaded with dimes.
I aim it at the fan/UFO/blues.
I squeeze the trigger with loving tears on my eyeballs. Then I sleep the sleep of the dead.