So, I'm still not totally clear what I'm allowed to say and what I'm not allowed to say on this blog. I realize there are limits on images, and owned intellectual property. I also sense that I should watch my language, or at least disguise it. I'm pretty sure there aren't many people looking at this, but I want to say, that sometimes I think about things that are slightly upsetting, and if you, reading, are a person who gets slightly upset, this may be the time to stop reading. I only want to express myself, and I don't know how. I've been looking for a year and a half to express myself, and its only come out in inappropriate bursts, usually in a proffessional context, or not at all. I go up on highs where I am so happy with my life and where everything is going, and then I fly down to lows where I question my relationship and I feel so lonely, and I can't escape my thoughts, and my own body begins to turn on me- my jaw and shoulders start to cramp up, my belly gets upset, and acid begins to build in my chest and throat. These are usually the first signs to me that I am under stress, I've learned to avoid my brain so well, that it can't tell me anymore. It can't tell me a lot of things anymore, and I tend to ignore the few things it can tell me, or I learn about them too late, like after the moment I might need the information. Today, I think I am a bit hormonal. I have reasonable frustrations, but they are elevated to tears and confusion a bit too quickly for even me to process. My mother died a certain way. It's a horrible way and I'm not sure how the censors would treat it. Or maybe its just horrible to me, like I want it censored from my mind. It's ironic really, she would never allow me to see scary movies growing up because she was so worried about a horrible image indelibly marking my mind. And here, her death, is the most indellible mark of all. Movies show the way my mom died quite frequently, particularly in Westerns- so you could probably guess how. I'm thinking about the closet she died in today- which is a new thought for me, and the unbearable tragedy of how alone she was- which is a reocurring thought. That closet was at my grandparents home. They have packed up and moved now, to get away, and because she was the one taking care of them, even though, of course, nobody gave her credit for it, or helped her do it. They also, including my grandparents, wouldn't help her with herself, but that is another post. I guess that room was her's growing up, or at least in high school, when they moved into the house. The Valley was a new place then, and there were dirt roads on the way to her high school, the same high school I went to 30 years later. When I was a kid my aunt was living in that room. She, like all of us, moved in and out of my grandparents house sometimes. At that time she was in wardrobe, and costumes, for movies, and she had the most fun things in that closet. A keystone cop hat, a Southern Belle ballgown, a Dr. Spock looking head thing with pointy ears, wigs with long long blond hair, and disco clothes- sparkly gowns, tiaras, high heels. She would dress my sister and I up in all these clothes and we would parade around the house like disco queens. My parents would laugh and we would worship my pretty, slightly drug addicted, stand up comedian aunt. When she started to find god, we spent time in that closet finding material and glitter and items to tear up, in order to make crowns and capes for the Virgin. We would decorate her and make her beautiful, and parade our queen around the house the same way we had paraded as disco royalty. This creeped my parents out quite a bit, but we still loved it. Then my aunt moved out and it became a closet full of games and joke books. I actually suspect those things had been in there all along, but we didn't notice them because of all the other great stuff. We ran up to grab a game, or my cousins and I would sit in the room and tell each other jokes out of the book. My mom moved into that room only a few months before she killed herself. It was her final room, she had gone back to that place she had been a teenager. After my mom died, my grandmother announced that my sisters and I needed to clean out her room immediatly. The room was so filled, even her bed was covered. Either she had given up sleeping altogether, or, as I suspected, she had curled up around the stuff for the 2-3 hours of sleep she had a night. She didn't need sleep, only during her lows did she need sleep, and her room brimmed with crap. I won't get into the room right now. We saved the closet for last, each of us standing in the place she died, imagining the moment at different times throughout the day. My friend who helped clean the room, she didn't realize that we were all pausing in that space, although she knew the spot, and I think she paused there for a moment as well. We found many disco jackets from when my aunt lived in that room, and lots of games stacked on the floor from when it was a game closet. Honestly, I can't remember everything I found in there, and some of it were signs of her spiralling down- lists, notes, accusations piled all over the room. The book Beloved confirmed to me that my sisters and I had been in danger for our lives at times. When we were alone, my sisters and I puzzled over the mechanics of her death, something even the autopsy report hasn't fully explained to us, we puzzled over the closet door, the light fixture above. I don't understand. I don't understand any of it. Why didn't anybody help when we were begging for it, how could she love me and still do it, how did she actually do it? Did she change her mind in the middle? Without getting into details, she must have followed through to the very end, even when her body was giving her its stress indicators. I don't understand how she fought nature so completely, how she could be so intent on dying that she overrode the body's desire to take another breath. She may have had a little drugs in her system, I found some blow in the drawer, but for the most part, she was not sedated, she did it, or the sickness did it, but really she did it, and in that closet that I know so well, with all those pretty things around her...