the habit of being

We got a ride with a Vietnam vet who didn’t seem older than thirty, though his youngest children (twins) are 27 - Steven, called “Mosquito,” who only dates white women because black women have “too much attitude.” His father was the first black mayor on the East coast and his sister, a doctor, is profiled in a book called Women Leaders in Public Health.

We visited the largest cross in the Western Hemisphere. Or maybe second largest, because another one was more recently erected in Illinois. The site also featured a series of statues depicting Christ’s crucifixion, a replica of the Shroud of Turin, and a memorial “Tomb of the Unborn” dedicated to all the “innocent victims of abortion.” (One week until my next period. In his journal, he called me a weight without substance, and said he’d never raise a child with me. I hope I’m not pregnant. I don’t feel pregnant. What does being pregnant feel like? Nothing, until you get nauseated after a couple months, probably. Think of something else.)

We’re headed for Corpus Christi, Texas, now, because it’s warm there and not likely to storm soon. Then maybe on to New Orleans again to catch the tail end of JazzFest (if we can buy tickets off someone). Oklahoma is grassy and windy, as expected. It’s supposed to rain a little tonight and a lot the next couple days. J is out looking for an appropriate campsite. We do have a tarp, afterall, though the tent was stolen back in California.

Mosquito referred to me as J’s “lady friend.” I gave J a frienship bracelet in Santa Fe, if you could really call it a gift when it was bought with communal cash. He doesn’t want to be a hippy, he says, because it trivializes his world view. It seems too happy a world view for either of us, but really, things aren’t totally ungood. He says he’s glad to be with me sometimes, though he went to the trouble of recalling everything I’d said to him yesterday in order to point out that I’m never appreciative of his kindnesses, after I called him mean for saying the author of my yogi book was full of shit. He was right though, about my unappreciativeness, so I felt guilty and easily upset for a while afterwards.

Guilty is the color grey, which I wear easily and often. I wonder if I am even capable of self-improvement. I do try. I want more than anything to make him happy, even if can never undo what I did or bring back what we had. I though about my pearls on the ride here. I never really mourned for them, for they were a symbol, and seemed to die when he told me to take them off, back in Desert Hot Springs. They were taken from me before they were stolen. He’d say I gave them up long before, and I don’t feel like I can argue. I can’t. Though I never wanted that, and created a space for myself where things were different somehow, and I didn’t realize I was cracking the foundation until the world toppled down on my head and smashed him in the process.

I miss my pearls. They were perfect and made me perfect in his eyes. I’ll never be his pearl again. He called me a black pearl once, or said I should get one, in an antique store somewhere. Redlands? It was a month ago today I took off my pearls. I just realized it. A little less than a month since I took the Tylenol, one by one, relieved at having finally started it. I didn’t finish it; he stopped me, and only thought the worse of me for having tried.

Such a sad state. I wish I could say I was out of it.