And it doesn’t make a bit of sense

and neither does this and and that’s not a title nor a real sentence but its all I can do right now. So go ahead and suspend all your notions of grammar and spell check or punctuation…because at this moment it’s not about what’s right or what’s proper…it’s about unloading in the only way my mind can at this very moment…if I’m ever gonna get any sleep tonight or this morning or whenever…It’s 1:47 am and Bill Withers Lovely Day is on repeat. Subconsciously I know it ain’t a lovely day and it hasn’t been for quite a while, but it’s one of my favorite songs and I need to hear it. It’s the only song that can make me feel happy when I’m discouraged and hopeful when I’m just a bit weak. And for that, im grateful for just the melody alone. one day amidst april’s final days I woke up and discovered that time doesn’t wait for anyone. It was a casual but massive blow to the core. I could have vomitted. My father was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and an enlarged heart, deteriorated heart muscles and risk for serious blockage and other hollow cardiological (if thats a word?) stuff that I’m just not equipped to process. This life, this life…the doctors and the nurses explained it to me and I looked it up on the internet but I still don’t get it. how does the person with the biggest heart in the world end up with a defective one? Shouldn’t enlarged mean good, not bad, not functioning irregularly, not overworked, but good, but great, but will beat forever! Why can’t it mean good? But there is good, there is good news. Aggressive heart treatment has rendered his health improving exponentially, less medicine necessary, less hospital visits necessary, less of me calling to check up and more of me feeling awful everyday for not calling more, for forgetting to call because im so busy and important, for feeling like I have to be prepared when I do call because I can’t let go of pass hurt, pass misunderstandings to even celebrate life and love, why can’t I can’t pick up the phone and call more without anxiety? Why didn’t I just call BJ when she didn’t show up for work for two days? 55, a co-worker, a quick friend, confidant, and probably one of few or two people that have ever truly listened to me and actually heard. found dead in her apartment…a cerebral aneurism. I wonder if she suffered. I wonder if she tried to call for help. Why can’t I remember the last conversation we had? Why didn’t I call her on that Friday when she hadn’t showed up for work again? Why was I too lazy to even find the number that she gave me that was so easily accessible had I just taken the time? I’ll never forget the very moment I thought to myself that I should call her and then I just didn’t. But what does it matter now because I now know that even in thought I was too late. she passed on sometime after 3pm on that Thursday. What if it had occurred to me sooner and I had called on Thursday before 3pm...what would I have said? But I have to stop wondering. I have to silence the restlessness and find some peace enough for sleep this night. i should be grateful (i hate that word) calm, less worried but its hard because i wanna be a kid again. i wanna be back on my block where everything made sense and sleep was abundant, 120th & Michigan jumping double dutch listening to rap music on my boombox convinced that i was gonna be the next around the way girl buying penny candy flamin hot cheese doodles and grape pop, walking bare foot in the street watching the teenage boys play baseball in the abandoned lot on my corner. in that world people didn't grow old they didn't get sick and when they died it didn't mean that they weren't coming back, but that they would be gone just long enough for me to forget that I would miss them. In that world the neighborhoods around me were constantly changing but it wasn't genetrification...the white people were just moving to the burbs and according to my cousin thats where they needed to be, erect a gate and lock them out, he said. now look! in that world i didn't have to worry about my parents because they worried about me and that was enough worrying for God, man and the law. but its just not that simple anymore. time has just flown by and no matter how much I prepare (anxiety x 10 = overachieving highly functioning child of a former alcoholic...thank god for heart conditions...i suppose) my coping skills lack serious emotional sophistication, the kind that would keep me away from doing this...oversharing on this blog at this hour when sleep should be easy. and i am sorry for it. Just when I think I've mastered being in charge of my life, something happens to shake up the puzzle and suddenly the pieces don't fit and my emotional faculties point to childhood for the answer, or maybe the escape. It wasn't as if life was easy...by age 9 I was fully aware of most aspects of my life. I was one of three black kids in my class from K-6...so I knew I was different and I knew what the world thought of it. I was raised in a single parent home and I didn't need mollie orshansky to calculate a poverty line to tell me we were poor. my parents were indignantly unamerican so we stood out amidst the mass of southern emigrants in our neighborhood. i may not have known about functional alcoholism until i saw it on oprah, but i had enough anxiety to know that we had a some issues. But through it all, I was still happy. I didn't care about what i wasn't because i had enough of everything else to sustain me and sleep wasn't such a hardship. my parents loved me and provided what they could and often what they couldn't. I said at the start of this year that it's all about about happiness in 2006 and I'm clinging to it with everything I have left, even it means reverting to childhood for a little bit of comfort, a few moments of clarity or just a few hours of sleep.