It was a pretty busy weekend. I’m so excited that Keetster is here in town visiting and that I got to hang with my peeps all day Saturday and Sunday.Aside from the boring usual stuff like getting into another vocal challenge with a drunk at my pool hall – I had a blast catching up with friends that I haven’t seen because I’ve been under a rock for three months.The greatest part is… I realized I’m not a freak! I love it! Sometimes I feel like an anomaly that no one can ever love or understand. I alternate between challenging drunk bullies at a game of pool to writing poetry for my baristas. I warble between isolation and hyper-socializing and some days I am quiet and thoughtful then others I’m as crass and vulgar as a Rancid Pervy Pirate with the vocabulary to match. I think I’ve begun to wonder if I will ever feel normal when I’m being myself which is at best… strange and worst clinical.
Then my friends from Alaska visit. We sit together drinking coffee or eating or just driving around town and all of the sudden I’m not a freak anymore. I am not judged and I’m not judging myself and it’s as if I have fallen safely into that space where no one expects me to be one thing or another – I can just be. Friends. My friends whom I’ve known for more than half my life. They call me on my shit and crack jokes at my expense then kindly set themselves up for reciprocation. Alaska did something to us. It made us something that cannot be articulated, or explained.
As I sat with Awesome and Keetster for dinner, we toasted to escaping with our lives. It’s only a half joke, because as we recount the things we did as kids – there is more than just a little amazement that we are still somehow alive and in possession of all our limbs.
(for example I once tied off my repelling line wrong and as I fell off a 60ft. water tower the only thing that saved me was a piece of metal on the ledge that snagged my sports bra and held me there until the D-brothers could climb up and pull me back over the edge – or the time Meme and I cracked ice on Robe lake to go skinny dipping in winter)
How are we not dead? There are so many other stories some more horrifying and others just plain disturbing, but the point is…
Something happened in Alaska to our little town and how we bonded through repetition and trauma that I have not seen duplicated in any other city, town or time in which I’ve lived and despite how hard it was sometimes – I count myself one of the luckiest people in the world to have that life in my background, these friends in my world and that bonding as a part of my frame of reference to the world at large.
I realized over diner and drinks that I am not a freak, I have just been too far from my roots for too long. It was a long much needed soak this weekend and I am feeling more myself than I have in months. They have reminded me of my Wild Woman, and I’m glad to have her back.
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