I'm Going Where?

So I'm going to Birmingham this weekend.

Yeah, I blinked a time or two myself when I said it out loud earlier. It almost seemed like I'd somehow gotten transported back to 2009 by accident or something. Although I suspect there won't be any drama this time because it's Kitty I'm going to see.

Ok, truth be told, this ain't the first time I've been to her new house. She came over here Friday before last, and I went back with her that Saturday afternoon and came back to my house on Sunday. I helped her do a few things around the house, and we shopped for home decor. And I did the fake flower arrangements on her fireplace mantle, LOL.

But even so, that was just a quick overnight jaunt, and to be honest, it shook me up quite enough inside. It wasn't her fault, of course, and it's not like I wasn't expecting it. But still, just being there and going to some of the old places seemed incongruous. In other words, it was heart-wrenching.

So I expect this weekend will be rough as well. But spending time with the most important person in my life is way more important than my personal hang-ups, so when she invited me, I didn't think twice about saying yes. I'll deal with the pain later.

I've got baggage from that stupid place, though, that goes way back before I ever even thought of any of them. It's where they sent me to the specialist when I was 6. About the ugly thing on my leg, you know. I went to appointment after appointment after appointment, but it didn't matter. The doctor knew there was nothing they could do. My parents knew there was nothing they could do. Even I knew. But I guess we kept going back in hopes of some sort of miracle, even as we watched the ugly spot spread and destroy the fat and connective tissue on the outside of my thigh. By the time I was 10, I'd given up. My whole outer right thigh looked like hell--the lesion looked worse then than it does now because it was still spreading, not burned out yet like it (more or less) is now--and I walked with a strange gait that wasn't quite a limp but wasn't quite *not* a limp, either, because the disease had made the affected leg shorter than the other.

I try not to talk about this shit because I'm fully aware that it's just a batch of first world problems. The doctor did, after all, tell me I was lucky the shit wasn't on my face, as that's apparently fairly common in people with this stupid disease.

But, yeah, that town and I go back a long way, and very little of it has ever been pleasant. That's where they told me my granny, the one and only person in this world who I think ever came close to understanding me, only had 6 months to live, after all. That was my freshman year in college, and I've felt adrift ever since.

I try not to let it bother me. Funny how often it seems to happen, though.

I remember back before Christmas, I'd met Kitty at a Ruby Tuesday back this side of that accursed shithole. This was before she moved into her new house (clearly). We were eating, and she started getting calls to her phone. Apparently, she had set the ADT alarm thingie wrong at their house on the way out, and the motion sensor thing kept going off. We finished eating, but it became obvious that it wasn't going to stop happening. We'd intended to do a little shopping after we ate, so, rather than abandon me for 45 minutes to go turn it off and meet me back where we were, she asked if I wanted to ride with her over there. I didn't *want* to, but I didn't want to make life more complicated for her, so I agreed.

I didn't go in, of course. When she hopped out, I smiled like everything was ok and sat quietly to wait while she did what she had to do inside. But just being there in her truck in the driveway was like having a stake through the heart. I'm pretty sure I talked to God more in the 5 minutes I sat out there in the driveway than I ever did in the nearly two years that I was actually welcome there.

"Why are you punishing me like this?" I asked, knowing that there wouldn't be an answer.

But somewhere in the night, the answer came back: "Maybe it's not me. Maybe it's you who's punishing yourself."

All my other thoughts came to a halt. The "answer" I got wasn't like a great voice from the Heavens or anything. It was just a vague feeling down deep inside me, but it was powerful enough to put the quietus on all the guilt and the pain and the suffering. It stunned my brain into a shocked silence, enough so that when Kitty came back, I was able to smile and not sound like a basket case.

It still hurts, though. The guilt, the pain, the suffering--they haven't gone away. I don't know that they ever will. I don't know who's punishing me, but there's no doubt in my mind that I deserve it.

I have more I want to say, but I'll do it later. It's time for my spinach pizza to come out of the oven. For now, I'll just say that I'm going to push it all aside and enjoy my time with Kitty this weekend. I'll deal with the pain and shit later. Kitty is far more important than my flogging myself over what should've been.