waves

GAHHHH Grief is so weird, gahhhhhhhh fuuuuuuck. i'm at work and i just saw talked to the manager and he brought up an email I hadn't responded to. I explained I experienced a loss in my life and i almost started crying. I'm weepy now. gotta get it together, I am at work. It comes in waves.

I cried in the bathroom but pulled it together:

see

A part of me can't understand why I am crying so much. It's so unexpected. I was crying last week too. I felt almost normal yesterday. I hadn't seen Aric in 7 years. We broke up 15 years ago. We did keep in touch until the end. If either of us really needed each other we'd show up or at least I picked up the phone. A part of me feels like I'm a fraud or something though. Like who am I to cry? Like I wasn't the one who had to see him be dead. (his girlfriend is a saint and we will build her monuments) Turns out I loved him very hard. It was that first funnel of love.

Over heard just now at work, "I think I have snapchat, I down loaded it the last time we were together but I deleted it."

I was eaves-dropping. My whole life until this moment I thought it was Eve's dropping.

Turns out Aric and I talked about having kids, I wrote about it Feb 25th, 2001. I had totally forgotten but Eve was the girl name we had (I'd) picked out. I always wanted to have a kid. I did it too. I have a son who is 12 now.

The last time I saw Aric he cried at me. "It was supposed to be mine. You were supposed to be mine, it was supposed to be my baby." I just thought he was drunk, but he really wasn't. 

The bartender told me I had made a good choice.

April 20, 2013 ~ the last time i saw

Aric. It was almost like I knew I took

a series of selfies like this

The last time I saw him, though it doesn't feel that long ago, he looked at me and immediately started crying and said, "You look so old." I knew he thought I looked beautiful. He fumbled in is pocked and offered me an 8 ball. I don't really like cocaine and I turned him down. Drugs treated him different. Uppers helped him calm down he'd say.  He'd always been looking for the combo to get him out of pain. 

I did have a super soft spot for him, it's hard to watch someone you love suffer. He never would hold out drugs on me though. He was generous. I hate nothing more than hanging out with people who are on some sort of trip and don't offer to share. . . those are no friends of mine. (another red-flag from the last guy I briefly tried to date).

super sidenote:

i want to feel good in my body. ME ME ME. today that means sitting like a lion. embodying big cat. ooo and scorpion. Authentic movement. I learned that while studying Bodywork at the Boulder College of Massage Therapy. It was such an amazing educational experience. We had movement classes with teachers from the Dance Therapy program at Naropa. It was very cool and that makes me like 3 or 4 degrees away from Allen Ginsberg (maybe)!

goodness baby allen ginsberg was a babe! idh

My friend  just stopped in to get a massage as I was posting that photo and told me about the movie Fried Shoes Cooked Diamonds which is about the Boulder/Naropa/Beat scene in the 70's. I'm going to watch it tonight.

Today was one of those first spring days. I pulled my DVD's out from the garage because I've been craving a watch of one of my favorite movies American Movie and it's not streaming anywhere, but it's so great.

I first watched this movie with Aric. I loved it right away. The characters! Mighty was from Wisconsin too, Manitowoc. My son's paternal grandpa is from Manitowoc too. Small world huh? I used to tell Aric to talk to Wisconsin to me. I guess I'm a sucker for an accent. 

meeting mighty

With hindsight being 20/20 and all seeing red-flags from 2000 is easy now but I definitely didn't see them when I was 20 though.

Jan 20th 2000, I met my roommate as she got off work at Old Chicago's. She would serve me booze there so then everyone served me booze there. No one ever questioned my age, I was just in. She had recently started dating a guy that worked there and he was there partying with his roommates too.

I was bouncing around having a great time. Some cute guy that worked there invited us to a hot tub party. I went up to my roommate and told her hot tub party! Let's go! Her dude's roommate Mighty overheard this and not to be outdone said, "I've got rails if you want to come back to our place." Jen spent a moment considering the options and decided on the rails. I came upon a fork in the road and possibly frolicked in the wrong direction, but as my Grandpa told me, "It doesn't matter which road you choose, you always learn something." 

We made our way back to their place. It was a house on Monroe St and they called themselves the Kings of Monroe. It had the biggest evergreen tree in their front yard. It towering over every other tree on the block. Being from Oregon, I laughed. I didn't remember ever seeing such a big evergreen tree in Denver. We stumbled in and made our way down to the basement. His room was was dark and dirty. He chain smoked inside. He laid out the rails and I tooted one right up, but wait, this wasn't coke. It burned different. It tasted different. It felt different. It was different. It was meth*. We had made a false assumption about these rails. 

I went home but then talked on the phone to mighty until the sun came up. I was twitter-pated. . . good lord girl.

Mighty & Me in the basement

I did not finishing learning these lessons then and I'm still getting clear Sometimes you want to wear rose colored glasses. . . . then the red flags look like regular flags. Even with hindsight I wouldn't change being with Aric, I just wish I knew then what I know now.

see, them's just regular flags!

Another example, 7 years ago I met a very good looking guy at a party, he asked me out and when he came over to pick me up for a date he asked if I wanted to do some lines. "DUDE, it's 7 on a Monday. No, I don't want to do lines and you need to leave." I had it right for a second but he apologized, he just had it left over from the party and I relented. Hindsight: It was not just left over from the party. Coke was not the only drug on which he depended. 6 months later I cried and clawed myself out of that relationship but not before he royally fucked up my car. I regret that car thing so much.

I'm getting better at it though! My most recent attempt at dating, I clearly saw the red-flags and it only took 3 months to knock it off. Onward and upward.

*sidenote: it wasn't my first time with speed, I had had a creepy Filipino landlord introduce me to it a couple years prior, but that's a whole different red-flag story. 

Aric's last words to me in November were a sidenote