Wrote an absolutely scathing angry letter to our landlord this morning. Didn’t send it. Woke up from an immensely satisfying dream – in the dream I was in a nasty, brutal fistfight with a person that I genuinely cannot stand and in the dream I fought this man with tooth and nail until I knew he was going to leave me alone, until I knew he was never going to bother me again, and I knew that I was safe from him forever, and it felt good. Crucially, nobody got hurt in real life, I am not capable of hurting anyone in this way in real life, I am not strong enough or mean enough to do that in real life, but the catharsis of imaginary safety in the dream made me feel better somehow.
Woke up more angry than I have ever been, I think, which is to say that I woke up grieving. Took all the upset energy and bundled up and went out to clean off a thick covering of snow and a stubborn layer of ice on two of the cars, turned on Steve’s car and sat inside until the ice melted away from the windshield and walked up and down the sidewalk a few times between the front door and the car so he wouldn’t have to break a new path through the snow and this is how we love each other in the winter in the north.
I get home from work night after night covered in the greasy stench of scalding hot dishwater and scorched cooking oil that never really washes out of my hair and skin, smelling like my own blood, carrying the humiliation of being constantly spoken to with a kind of self important contempt that is not new or unfamiliar to anybody who has ever had to tolerate a certain kind of man, only to have to walk across a flooded living room floor with a carpet that is so saturated with cold water from the winter storms that it squelches through my socks and splashes as though I have stepped in a puddle on the sidewalk outside after the rain and I am tired and all I want is to walk over to the kitchen and get myself a cup of coffee and some food but to do that, to walk across the floor of my home, I will have to put on my mudboots.
I am so tired.