In good new blog form, I am excited about my new venue for self expression and want to post again. You know, until I get lazy and something less interesting to me now peaks my interest later. That said, here I go, here I go, here I go again, girls what's my weakness? BLOG.
Its 11am. Today's the first day I've gotten to sleep in since last weekend. Only in my mind it feels like everybody else gets to sleep in all day everyday and I'm the only one who ever has to wake up early. I'm the martyr and everyone else's bliss is my torture.
Sunday and Monday nights I worked 9pm to 9am at the hospital. So Friday and Saturday before, I went out late with my friends Melissa and Brian to try to adjust my sleep-wake schedule. Melissa and Brian are a brother and sister duo that I met on Myspace circa 2004. I commented on Melissa's Myspace page back then because she looked pretty and was drinking a cup of tea. Ever since that photo comment, our 21st-century internet friendship has developed into an every-other-century amazing real-life friendship. Thank you internet and thanks Melissa for being so bold. The summer Myspace found me and I met Melissa was also the beginning to another chapter in my life that I want to write volumes about sometime. It was the summer that I moved to Phoenix to start the chapter titled Medical School. Since I don't have time to write about medical school, I'll just relive my first experiences dating Phoenix's sun.
Immediately upon moving to Phoenix I was introduced to it's sun. He was there when I arrived in spring. He's there when everyone arrives, it's his way. He greeted me with crisp, cool breezes. This was in contrast to my ex-boyfriend at the time, Tampa's sun who came with baggage: three thousand percent lung-choking humidity. Phoenix's spring sun also provided color contrast to the mountains and clouds. Royal blue set against the burlap brown ridges and whitest of white clouds. In Tampa, the scenery always seems dulled by water laden air and haze. It had a beauty to it, but it was foreign and I-just-wasn't-that-into-him. Not so with Phoenix's sun. He seemed so familiar, like we'd dated before. I remembered him from my youth in Seattle. He was warming, but not too warm, present, but somehow smaller in the big west sky. Something about sharper colors makes objects in the sky seem smaller to me. He also set in the same way. Though behind different mountains, Phoenix's sunset carried the same pinks and purples of home which darkened slowly to bright stars. Tampa sun always set to unfamiliar easter pastels and darkened quickly to pail blue with barely visible by stars. Phoenix's sun welcomed me with wide arms and I leaped into them. Then came our winter.
In a normal novel, the jubilant summer of a relationship cools into a fall of discontent followed by a frigid winter breakup. My relationship with Phoenix's sun is remembered with the seasonal clock shifted. Our summer was spring. Our winter was actual summer.
When I moved to Phoenix it was into my grandparents' 20-foot long 5th wheel that they let me borrow until I found permanent housing. They live in Yuma (still) and retired the trailer for traveling when they turned eighty-five. It was living in these close quarters that my relationship with Phoenix's sun began to sour. He turned up the heat - to 120 degrees.
On the trailer park clothing lines, he knowingly let me bleach the sunny side of my clothes after drying them 30-minutes too long in his care. He would force me to take the clothes off immediately after hanging. Incredibly, they were already dry and again if I didn't, he'd throw bleach on them. He also used to wake me up sweating. He turned the RV into a 20-foot long metal rotisserie. I learned to accommodate him by swimming several times each day in an overheated-by-him pool just to "cool off." After which I would shower with ducked head in the cramped RV plastic shower-coffin using only cold water in order to acclimate to the sweltering air. The heat and shower humidity always brought sour memories of my ex, Tampa's sun.
Phoenix's sun was also cruel to his ex's. In that RV graveyard, my temporary home sat parked next to his lost loves. Fifty-year-old petrified mobile homes containing even older petrified people who once cared for him. Now, their marriages with him survived only by blackening the windows so thick with insulation that they couldn't see each other. His spouses never went outside unless they had to. Even then, they would shade their face with big hats and glasses so as not to see him, much of their skin scarred with scaly pink cancers. They served as a constant reminder of what a relationship with him could mean if I stayed. Ultimately our love had to end during the rolling brown-outs. Phoenix didn't have enough electricity that summer to power everyone's homes. L.A. was also experiencing the same problem that year. I came home one day to a note posted on my rotisserie that said, "Due to overwhelming electricity demand and a recent transformer fire your power will be turned off" and it listed a date and time. That date came.
While my previous description makes it seem like I had no climate control, I did. The RV A/C was our battered child. She choked and coughed on my roof through Phoenix's dust and did her best to blow something less than 120 degrees into the RV. She struggled so hard that I had to divide the RV in half with a sheet just to keep a small part remotely comfortable. Sadly, our other lovechild, the fridge, was on the wrong side of the sheet and curdled milk like he was a microwave. Well, when the power finally turned off and our neglected child-on-the-roof went silent it was time for my relationship with Phoenix's sun to be over. The rotisserie had been upgraded to a convection oven.
It was a good run for those few months. And like anything that reminds you of home when you've been gone so heart-wrenchingly long, it felt so comforting while it lasted. He made my move to Phoenix much easier and gave me a reason to be excited to look up again, especially after my previous relationship with Tampa's Sun. Ultimately what he taught me though, was that I have more hope in my little finger than his sunburnt, petrified ex's do in their entire lives. Many of those people are probably still living in that RV graveyard if they're not already dead. For me, it was only six months.
As I look out the window now at the comparatively melancholy, well-shaded sun of Seattle I think of how far I've come. Seattle's sun is cool, often absent and seems to have a lot else on his agenda besides hanging out with me. Perhaps he suffers seasonal depression too. We will never be able to play the way we did when we were both young, but I still love him and always will. He was after all, my first sun love.
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I wonder if I'm ever going to wake up early not feeling like life's martyr. In telling these stories and remembering how far I've come, I hope that I can live with more perspective and recognize just how lucky I am. I already feel better after writing this and want to run outside with my arms in the air screaming, "Thank you!" I probably won't and I'm not dressed, but just in case, you should come over to my corner. It could be interesting. Thanks for reading.
motivation motivation etc. etc. love you
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