I’ll still finish her story, but Nane is never going to hear from me again if I don’t hear from her again, I missed chatting with Maliheh last night, and I woke up with a backache.

I miss having a full-wave waterbed. As soon as we get a place of our own and have a bedroom that’s not so damn small, I think I will get one. Foam mattresses are great. It’s just that they sag over time.

We rarely get take-out, so on his way home from work yesterday Tom stopped and grabbed some fast food. I made sure I didn’t eat much all day so I would be nice and hungry and could really enjoy it. But after I’d eaten my burger, fries, Cheetos cheese puffs and drank my strawberry soda, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. As a person who is twice blessed, I have at least two things to look forward to each day – him by day, her by night. But instead I ate myself to sleep. :( And she’s been sick too, and probably could’ve used the “company.”

In the message that was waiting for me when I got up, she said she didn’t have a fever but was still sick. She also said she was about to tell me something about her nobody really knows – an earth-shattering biggie - and that’s that she likes to sleep with the light on when she’s sick. Normally she likes it dark, though.

First of all, there’s nothing wrong or earth-shattering about that. Secondly, if she’s been in relationships before, wouldn’t her exes know this?

I posted all of Evil Amongst the Evergreens in my story journal and started posting Digital Confessions.

Jesse’s been out tending the land, as usual, and has already come and gone a few times. I think I’ll stick my earplug in soon.

There’s nothing like stepping out of the shower smelling of bleach. :( Why’d he have to go and dump so damn much in the tank? Thank God for perfume!

Once a month Tom’s going to make a Walmart run so we can save money on non-edibles and stuff like that. I keep a master grocery list and make the weekly list from that. That way I can never forget anything. And if I get into something new, I add it to the list. It really helps make the shopping more organized and faster.

Okay, the house is clean, the laundry is done (for now), and so now I’m free to goof off for the rest of the day. I’ll still look for MT work and get chapter 5 of my story going on and off, but it will be nice not to have any more cleaning to do.

Later…

“I said F chord. What do you not get about F?” Stephan, AKA Steve, said to me one weekend in 1989.

“But F is kind of hard to play,” I said. “Especially with steel strings instead of nylon. Besides, I’ve been focusing on the keyboard more because it’s easier than the guitar and my calluses have softened and my fingertips feel like I placed them on the stove.”

Laughing and rolling his eyes, Steve took his hands from his own keyboard and then took my guitar and placed it on his couch nearby where we sat in his tiny living room. We lived in the same apartment building.

“Okay, just sing,” said the 6-foot, 4-inch black guy with the friendly white smile. “Cuz lord knows that’s about all you can do well enough when it comes to music. Just sing.”

And so he played while I sang. And 22 years later I still wonder whatever became of the guy that would have loved to have married me had I not had to have my cake and eat it too, and be attracted to a person I may be intimate with. If I had been one of those looks-don’t-matter types, though, I never would’ve met Tom. But Steve was such a great guy. His last name is fairly common so I couldn’t just look him up. Especially since I don’t even know what state he’s in these days. He was originally from Chicago, was working at Westover Air Force Base in W. Springfield, MA, then supposedly moved here to Cali. But Cali alone is a lot of ground to cover. I really wouldn’t even know where to begin as far as finding him goes.

They need to create a different kind of Facebook. A lost and found kind of a site that lets a person type in the name of a person they’re looking for, where you knew them, how you knew them, what you knew about them, and then if a person wants to they can type in their name and see if anyone’s been looking for them.

And whatever happened to Angie, the girl from Natchaug Hospital I briefly knew in 1992 before leaving for Arizona? I was 89 pounds, barely 4’ 11”, and had recently had a breakdown. She was my roommate and she liked to write in a journal, too. One day she got upset about something and decided to take it out on me by threatening to put my head through the wall.

Tossing my little pink teddy bear aside, I jumped up off my bed – so what if she were more than a few inches taller than me and a hell of a lot more than a few pounds heavier – and charged over to where she stood to brush her hair before the aluminum mirror. “Don’t you ever threaten me! Threaten me again and I’ll make you just try to put your actions where your mouth is!”

She turned around and stared into my eyes. She must’ve seen something pretty scary in them because she took a step back, apologized and left the room. That was cool. I didn’t want to fight. But I didn’t want her (or anyone else) thinking they could threaten me at will either.

The next day she asked to be moved out of our room.