I Started Missing My Boy Again Yesterday
It looks like the depression has made an encore appearance. I went to a housewarming cookout yesterday in New Jersey at my friend Chris DiPinto’s new house.
The place was filled with aging punk rockers and metalheads like myself, all of us ranging from 30-45 or so. Chris and Sophy have a beautiful boy named Damien: he’s about 16 months old, and at that incredibly cute stage when the kids first start to get the hang of walking. In fact most of the guests had kids somewhere between Damien and Sam’s age, and it really began to get to me.
I watched Damien go walking around searching for his daddy, crying when anyone else gave him attention. He’d go up to Chris and grab onto his index finger: it filled up the little guy’s entire hand. It’s obvious the boy idolizes his Papa.
Me, I don’t see Sam until Thanksgiving, and then only for a week. I haven’t seen him since September 9th. I’m sacrificing October (I’ve never had him for Halloween) so I can have him for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, but his mom has already tried to equate a weeklong visit that starts at the end of the month and ends in the beginning of the next as Sam visiting every month. “It’s getting a little expensive, and I’m not sure how much more I can afford to do this,” is how she put it. I had to take that notion down immediately, calling her out on what was Bush-style parsing. But again, it emphasizes what an inherently dishonest and trustworthy person she is.
I came home from the cookout around 6:00 pm, and promptly went to sleep for a few hours. When I woke up, the wet blanket on my head feeling was back. My stomach was rumbling, tying itself in knots in hunger, but I had no appetite. Food tasted like cardboard and I put off eating dinner until very late. I stayed at Christina’s and the last thing I remember before falling asleep was crying into my pillow.
I normally don’t remember my dreams, but last night was a doozy. I was being hounded by a killer, a tall skinny man with a beard who, in the dream, was someone I’d known for a long time, perhaps a brother or close friend, even though the only brother I have looked nothing like the man in my dream. He was trying to kill me with a knife, a large Japanese vegetable knife. Everywhere I went, the man showed up. He stalked me silently around my house (in the dream it was my parents’ house). When I went outside, he was there. It wasn’t one of those panic dreams where you’re being chased: the entire sequence in the dream was calm and collected, just persistent.
It finally ended in a locker room at the YMCA, when he slashed at my pants with the knife. As my trouser fell to the floor, he pointed at my genitals and began to laugh and laugh.
I woke up. It was 8:00 AM.
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