hold the regrets

nothing to write about. nothing to talk about. i utterly fail the telephone. my brain and hands are on autopilot and bored tearless and fearless and flying through slow cool dreams. robotically i perform my most necessarry duties as late in the day as possible, loaf around and read and watch a movie and recite books by memory to my girls as they flip the pages back and forth. it feels as if I am the snow outside, looking in the window at the warm house and fractured family, slowly melting into this dark cowl of night.

Lyli and Scarleht’s concepts of time are evolving rapidly right now, having both added the words ‘soon’, ‘almost’ and ‘mai-yo’ (tomorrow) to their formidable employ of the word ‘now’ and the phrase ‘right now’. We stay in a hotel for a night in The Dalles (like anyone not from right around here knows where the hell that is), forced off the rainy dark roads for the first time in all our road trips. The girls love it, run shrieking down the hallways, jump on the bed for hours. We horse around, order salmon thru the roomservice for dinner, look out the window and babble at the highway outside. We practice our colors in English and Spanish, their favorite is ‘Morado’. Upon finally reaching Portland on Saturday morning we visit Auntie Jess and Uncle Mike #2, check out the farmer’s market at PSU and have a lovely scramble at their apartment.

Mike gives Scarleht a Rubik’s Cube with financial advice for stickers. A women at the market spies her tpy and explains to her son that it’s a Rubik’s Cube. I correct her, saying “Actually, it’s an financial Rubik’s Cube.” She replies right off the cuff: “Of course, what else would she have?” We part ways without another word and get lost in the crowd. After claiming the purple wooden cow in the center of the market and fiercely defending it from a few other rug-rats, Lyli notices a little boy crying with his papa. “Eyo-person cwying.” We go over and Henry (as we are soon to learn) stops crying. His papa and I chat for a few seconds, nothing meaningful really, just tiny-chatter and then gone in the sea of people as my Chai Latte arrives.

A nice break before the return of the I-5 demon gutter run back to Oly and the shelter of home. I drop the girls off with Steph and try to work at the bookstore but I am frazzled from eight days of travel and can only manage meager efforts while I reboot my head.

They’ve started asking “What is it?” “What is that?” “Whata Papa Do-ink?” and I love it. Now I can really start to craft their moldable little minds into the sharp tools they will need to combat this future world we’re throwing up. Just kidding...? sort of... I toss an old animal textbook down on the floor and Lyli flips through it for almost 20 minutes (longest single book session I’ve noticed yet).
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Please and Politely have become everyday words we work with to learn how to live with each other in relative peace. I almost broke down in tears last night when Lyli and Scarleht both said “Thank you for cooking dinner Papa.” Kisses and hugs all around. I am short of breath. Their long sentences string together with a few enunciated words, new and old, at the beginning, a series of tonal approximations of the words they already know (cadence carrying meaning as well as words), and then another series of new and old words, fairly well articulated, at the end to cap off the thought.

Scarleht practices her mad jump skills on the couch to my left as the fire crackles in our woodstove. She climbs up to the arm of the couch, balances perfectly and then leaps off, landing upright on a cushion. Only days ago she was still diving head first, with no thought of landing the jump. I shudder, picturing my children base-jumping off skyscrapers for kicks or maybe cash if they have some crazy government job to piss off papa (or pay for my kidney machine).

My mood seems to be a slowed down version of my girls’, shifting several times over the course of an uneventful day of talking to myself and echoing my children. Mercurial and tempestual and drifting with the winds as I wrap my nightmares up with dreams, sprinkle sugar on top after baking and devour, hold the regrets.