Dead Girls Don’t Need To see

I am terrified that the powers that be will find reason not to give me the keys, or that something awful will happen. I think I underestimated the sheer strength and power of finally being offered a home for just me and the Boy after spending a life on the road and on the run, unsafe and unsettled. I feel like I am about to collapse.

I can’t order the beds, I can’t buy any sheets, I can’t bring myself to get light bulbs. I need glasses but haven’t dared fill my prescription. Dead girls don’t need to see. I can’t breathe. My heart is racing too fast, and I keep on crying. I have not had a home for most of my life, without exaggeration, I have been homeless more than I have been in a house. When I have been homed it has been in a place with a man who is either hurting me, or using me, and it is not my space to do with as I like. I have to mind my p’s and q’s, and edit myself. I could not buy Georgia O’Keefe posters, nor hang my clothes in a wardrobe. Pig used every scrap of space in wardrobes and drawers, my few things used to get draped across a chair. Billy used every single bit of storage, every cupboard and every drawer. My things never left my duffle bag, not ever. I was standing on his floor and he would never let me forget it. This is going to be my floor. Except I keep thinking something is going to go wrong and I will have to come back here, and I don’t think I can take it.

What if Housing doesn’t turn up with the keys. What if the sky falls in? What if all the what ifs turn into what happened. I couldn’t take it.

So instead I am sitting here drinking tea and playing my guitar and trying not to have a heart attack or a nervous breakdown. Every time I try and settle down and calm down I keep crying. It is, to be frank, too much stress for me to handle.

Sober, a job, a home, my son. Living in my beloved San Francisco. A year to get from here to fully self-sufficient. The ability to cook in a kitchen, to smoke on my own fire escape, to play music and shut my door, to write at a desk instead on perched on my bed. I have come a long way from my notebooks and typing on a tiny ancient cell phone screen. I have a lap top and some headphones, and a good fuschia pen and the nice notebooks with the hard spine and strong covers.

I am trying not to dissolve into a broken mess of weeping and worrying that it will fall apart. Who wants to hear that, anyway? There is always a lingering sense of having to be ok. I eat my thc, and I drink my tea, and I play my guild, but not after 8pm. I am trying to hold on until Monday afternoon. I am kind of scared of how scared I am.

Not only that, today has been hot. 85 degrees, not like San Francisco at all. Too hot for me. Hot and people are acting up, the heat brings the dying to life.

I have to make it to Monday without getting distraught. This chance at a home is a wonderful thing, and I never thought it would be so difficult.