A Slight Nod to Freedom in The eye of every storm

The Fourth of July finds my wife hunched over a whisk bowl, ceaselessly churning a mixture of cocoa, flour, baking powder, and other various ingredients into a form slightly thicker than freshly poured concrete. Her firbomyalgia inflames her shoulders, and each pound of the whisk onto the edge of the metal bowl sends flashes of pain through her shoulder, across the universe, directly and succinctly meeting my brain in a perfect mash of pandemonium and suffering.

Twenty-two hours ago, I came home from work and took two Klonopins, a Lunesta, two benedryl’s and nighttime Theraflu (god-damned cold, its fucking July in Tejas, and here I am, cold). I laid down in bed while she watched Television and read a little, dozing lightly for two hours or so, until I woke up refreshed and ready to start my day for no apparent reason, save the exception my anxiety would not allow me to oversleep my work, some four and a half hours later. I read most of a book, got up, showered, drove, and worked for sixteen hours.

Here at home, I looked at my bank account and we worried about finances and conjured mythical projections of how the next two weeks wandering worries would present themselves and in what devilish forms. She sat on her laptop and I dozed between the two worlds, exhausted and spent from the day.

A bowl shattered on the slate floor, and an obfuscated obscenity hurdled into my swollen and infected ears, an Olympian hell-bent on domination, yet clanging every metal bar into the tracked ground in its wake. The dog and two cats scurried out of the kitchen, parting different ways, each of them, in search of their own safety in the primal fight or flight which grips us in moments of uncertainty.

Strange. Five years, they’ve lived with us, but still get easily spooked. They’re treated better than most people in our lives, Kings over the land of slate and wood, often acquiescing to our occasional egress within their divine land.

Whatever mixing in the kitchen concluded, she sits stoically sore on the couch, exhausted and beat, not wanting to see her family tomorrow, yet so steeped in tradition, her tea fully brewed years prior. My eyes meet hers, and we’re both tired. Hour twenty-three finds mine red, swollen, an unable to control tear ducts, and hers, defeated, exhausted, and uncertain about this disease she doesn’t understand, complicating her efforts to meet with her Native American family to celebrate this sacrilegious holiday.

“Ah, shit,” she says, rubbing her hands over our basset’s ear. “I think I just saw a flea. I just did Watson’s treatment the other day.”

Instinctively I scratch my elbow, sigh deeply, and gaze into the empty Bud Light can, debating on sleep or another. A sixteen hour shift awaits me tomorrow, just starting eight hours later than this mornings ungodly hour. For her, an hour long drive into the Texas country down a road that never should have existed looms larger than a prairie sunrise. Historically, if Justice and Truth and Honor were real, our Universes would’ve never collided and exploded into this one new, beautiful universe we call Ours, no matter how tired, no matter how exhausted, and no matter how complicated.

Ah. The American Dream.

Last updated July 04, 2017