love and death.

It is 11:38AM. I sit spent, completely nude on the bed that i am borrowing and it occurs to me: my dad will not die now. I do not know how I know this but I do. Call it intuition.

Each morning I rise with the purpose I have risen with for over two years now: I will go exercise. It does not matter who is beside me, it does not matter what my day after the exercise will look like. I will move, I will sweat, I will take this time to physically process my emotions in my own way. It will be a blessing and a curse.


It's confusing to understand the function of this in my every day life. How it both helps and hurts: how I can keep the sanity of a routine and also the insanity of goals that can never possibly be met. I can never work hard enough, can never be thin enough, can never deal with my feelings concisely enough. I will run and run and run and try but the carrot always dangles, just a foot or two away.


As I ran today I thought of my father, the good stuff. The way he used to buy me a dozen chocolate donuts upon my arrival to his cigarette smoke infested home and stored them in sweaty zip lock baggies so that I would never be without. Within a day or two the donuts would be melted into disgusting stale oblivion and he would buy me fresh ones, even though he was poor and even though ten or so of the first batch would end up in the trash. He was good like that, care took in his own fuck up alcoholic way.

I cried for a moment remembering those moments of my life with him and then I threw the rest away. Like the donuts, the feeling only remains fresh enough to indulge for a moment and then it feels disgusting to entertain the notion of partaking in it.

This morning the class I took at the gym was taught by a queer who looked just like the wonderful doctor who baby-stepped me through my eating disorder recovery. With just the same tone of voice my doctor used to urge me to eat the instructor bellowed "HARDER!" into her headset microphone.

The irony was not lost, and as I'd been ruminating on what it is like to have people care about me (what is like to receive the tangible actions of love) the real break came through: people love in the best ways they know how. They love only with the verocity with which they think they deserve love. For my father, it was fresh donuts. Nothing more, nothing less. With my doctor it was the agony of participating in my weigh-in each week, the directness to demand that I be kind to her, and the gift of consistency. Through-and-Through.

One love is not better than the other, it just is what it is. Either way, its given to me, wrapped in a package and delivered direct.

With this realization, my father lives. For now. For today. I can rise from the foot of this foreign bed and shower in warm water and the depth of that reality. No one related to me would ever really go without a fight.