"My Men Turn to Me for a Sign..."

[psalm_onethirtyone]

A few notes.

We got almost all the moving done to-day! Only I shall have to get a new boxspring, because it turns out mine is rotted through and was only holding up because of the crossboards underneath. Luckily we have a spare, so we won't need to buy another. To-night I sleep on a mattress on the floor; it and my gutted bureau and nightstand are the only pieces of furniture left in my room, except for the treadmill hulking evilly in one corner.

While I was going under my bureau to clean out all the things I'd shoved under there over the years, I threw away over two years' worth of eating disorder material I'd written for myself: everything from food journals to calorie counts for hundreds of different items in hundreds of different restaurants to little notes saying 'you're a fat fucking lazy bitch and if you tried harder you could do this'. There were notebooks full of my exercises, and notebooks that mentioned every time I 'indulged'--sometimes under the heading and date there are entries the entire text of which were 'one half a piece of hard candy' or 'some powdered sugar that was in the air and got in my mouth' or 'two chocolate chips'. And then more notes.

And I threw it all away. All of it.

Happy new year, everybody.

My Papa's Waltz
by Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I held on like death:
Such dancing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step I missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

Comments

[rainbowjehan.livejournal.com]

Isn't it? I found it in a book of 'light verse'.