Solstice

Driving back from NC. That’s where we were. It was the solstice, the long one, and an argument ensued and I broke down. Wendy asked me to lay back and close my eyes for a while. Why does everyone seem to get married? Why this pairing?
I guess I was sunk again into one of my ways, my depths, and the negative excitement of arrival ensued and I broke down. Jennifer asked me to go away for a few days and think about all of the things I had said to her. I went away and thought for a while and came back and had tiny burritos for lunch.
I was locked up in the penitentiary in Oswego when an elephant walked through the door wearing a sting of freshwater pearls and a Hunt’s beans can on one front leg. The elephant was walking on it’s hind legs and had its trunk looped on the tail of another elephant, but only the other’s tail was present and nothing else. I talked to my mother on the phone and slammed the receiver down. Hilda suggested that I call my father on the west coast and discuss what had gone down. I told her I would and left for the Cask & Flagon and never made the call. He and I haven’t talked in years.
I was making my way across the Eno river when a submarine tree limb snagged the leg of my pants and I went under for a mile or two before resurfacing in a patch of purple poppies with a orange road and concrete ditch going through. I took the road until it reached the other side of the patch, where Olga was waiting and she told me I needed to get my shit together. I went away for a while and had regular bowel movements and ate nothing that could not regenerate naturally. My BMs were not solid for years.
I made a point of saying to her grandmother before I left the hospital. She lambasted me in the car that I need not do such things, that it comes out hollow, that either, “I love or don’t love, it’s that simple.” That, “You are full of such horseshit, why can’t you just be.” Lilly suggested that I go and make amends with Edith at the textile mill and things would be some better. I went away to Anchorage for an extended month and came back with frostbite in my toes and seasonal depression.
I was batting in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and a runner on second. My team was down by one and the pitch came. I heard the crack of the bat and saw the trajectory as the ball sprung from the bat; I didn’t look for where it went, or at the scoreboard, fans, here or anything. I ran the bases making sure to touch each one, all the way back home. Christy tells me on good days that I hit a homerun, on bad ones she tells me that the center fielder caught it just at the top of the fence. All other days apparently it went foul.