Sick

My baby is sick. She gets ear infections, I never did, so it’s hard to imagine how it feels. Yesterday we had to take her to the doctor for the 4^th or 5^th time since early October. 

For the past couple of days she wraps her legs around my waist so she cannot be lowered into her crib, crying in pain as she is laid down. She has a look in her eyes of an old man who’s lost some of his faculties. The dark circles under her glossy eyes and a pale pallor seem to point to a dangerous illness. I race to the doctor’s office from work after Guy calls me, very worried. He’s been watching her all day. He’s nonchalant, so when I hear his concern, mine rockets to the moon.

She reaches for me immediately and clings like a little monkey when we meet at the doctor’s. The nurse retrieves us quickly. They need to weigh her, and she won’t allow herself to be lowered onto the scale. They have to tear my shirt out of her clenched fingers. She begins to cry. She turns red and looks devastated like her world just fell apart, as she reaches for me. It seems to take forever for the electronic scale to register her weight. She continues to reach for me the whole time, begging me with her eyes, “Mommy? Mommy? Mommy?”  The nurse tells me to stand behind her, a whole person away from my baby. With each passing second Rx looks more and more desperately into my eyes, tears running down her face. It becomes torture, it’s been at least 15 seconds. I don’t care what the nurse says. I repeat over and over, “I’m right here, sweetie, I’m right here.” I decide that weighing her right now is stupid and unnecessary. I wait one, two, three more seconds…they can’t stop me, I’m going to pick her up off the cold stainless steel machine. I go in closer and suspend my hand inches from hers, knowing any second the scale will register her weight – any second now – and I can plunge forward and grab her. Her hair is wet from tears when it ends and I pull her to me as she thrusts her head into my shoulder. 

I won’t let her go again.

My First

I didn't have sex until my second year of college. The fact that I didn't get a boyfriend freshman year killed me — and I had at least two major crushes. But then, magically, a boy liked me the next year! A cool boy. A leader-of-the-art-pack boy. Super cute. And Jewish, which made my Southern Baptist mom very very upset. I got a lot of weird shit put in my head about that – "He'll dump you eventually because you're not Jewish", "You two are doomed. That's all there is to it."

He was beautiful to me. Even though he had a funny eye that went in. He had thick, curly hair, long. He was so funny. He would throw me up against a wall to kiss me. Hot. I would lay in bed and look at the back of his head and say to myself: that's my boyfriend. He's my boyfriend.
 
I was so happy to finally find someone who wanted to have sex with me, I smiled the whole time we did it. He said he'd never done it with anyone before who smiled the whole time. We were 19. We went for tacos when we were done. I remember the light from a streetlight shining in through the convertible white 1982 Chrysler LeBaron's windshield. It had been his mom's car. I was wearing my swirly Grateful Dead dancing bears t-shirt. It was magic.

Then he slowly started to go crazy. Always seemed a little "crazy" which I clearly love, but uh…this was different. He started to get mean around year 2. And scary. He also seemed to be truly unaware of things he had just said. And that wasn't the only weird thing – he could also smell my period exactly one week before it arrived. He couldn't explain how, just that he did. Every month, predicted it 7 days out. This meant he couldn't take women's studies classes.

We broke up for six months around year 2, then got back together, then I told him I was moving back to San Francisco. He heard, "Let's move back to San Francisco." I was still pretty lame (spineless) so I went along with it.

When we got here, we moved to a crappy area by SF State, because he was to finish his education, while I had quit. Cheap areas over there are crappy and isolated. We didn't know the City well enough to know where we should live. I got a job three buses and over an hour away at a deli. I'd had only one job and it had been as a food buyer for a health food store on campus. I also wanted a food job because then food is free. A huge bonus.

He was pretty crazy the whole last year we were together. He just got meaner and meaner. He started to throw things at me. He once threw a record at me that stuck in the wall (in a strange coincidence, a future boyfriend threw a cassette tape at me that stuck in the wall). At the end, I fell in "love" (from afar) with my coworker at my second City job (selling bongs in a smoke shop — awesome!), but it still hurt when he told me he had slept with his coworker. That was it. I got a room in an amazing roommate house in the Haight and my incredible 20s started with a happy happy bang.

But, we were still friends, only some of it "friends with benefits". 2 1/2 years after we broke up, I was finally able to know deep in my heart that he was truly in mental trouble.

His final decline started when the Internet was launched for public consumption. The year was 1994, I think. Maybe '95. He built his own tower ("CPU" as they were called). It had 75MB of RAM. That was SUPERFAST back then. It was hard to comprehend. (Now we're at 49,152MB). He built a website about Cydonia, which is the face on Mars. He wouldn't stop talking about it. He spent ALL of his time online. I think he even got work coding HTML, so it was all he did. Maybe a year after that, he started with the weird talk. He'd say, "The sufis are after me." Ok, the Sufis? Um, well that's odd because at some point when we lived in San Diego, he moved into a house owned by Sufis and they were really peaceful, so I never figured that one out. When we went out, he'd look over his shoulder. Right shoulder, left shoulder. He talked about a "paper trail" on him, "They'll find me through the paper trail." I knew then. I mean, I suspected the worst, that he really was certifiable. I told him he seemed really paranoid and he flipped. Screamed at me right on Market Street where I lived. I didn't see him again for years.

After I married my first husband I ran into him. The year was 1999. We were walking down Church Street and I saw a friend who knew my ex very well. They had been roommates. I was talking to my friend, and when I was done, turned to the other person at the table. I could not believe my eyes when his familiar face came into focus. It was the ex! He had lost most of his hair and was wearing a baseball cap. I introduced my husband to him and he was cordial. He had just graduated from State with a physics degree.

The end.
 
My friend told me about a year after I ran into them that he had moved to Hawaii and become a limo driver.