when it rains

i wake up in hailstorms and windstorms and at night i pull the covers up so tightly it hurts. five blankets and fifty pounds of weight. i share fleece and down with my sister, to keep us warm in a house that hardly stands, that i can hardly stand to be in, i share these blankets with her and the weight we transfer back and forth from our family, i tell my aunt, it feels nice to have somewhere to put it. to let someone else walk for it for awhile. and although it kills me to see her cry under the unbearable heaviness, i need a moment, i need a minute to breathe and my shoulders shrug a little lighter, my head a little clearer, if only for a moment, a moment, and then it passes, and i walk with fifty pounds of everyone else. because they are my family, they are my weight and if i can make things a little more bearable for them, i will. i'll try.
its groundhog day, last night t asks, appropriately if i want to watch that movie and i just laugh because that is my life. im waking up the same every morning and all the things from yesterday just carry over. nothing is different and i try all day long, these angles and these slight adjustments to make things change. god, god, grant me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change, the courage to change the things i cant and the wisdom to know the difference. maybe im changing. maybe i just dont care what you think anymore.
i drive the valley and watch the colors change and listen to my dad shuffle back and forth in the kitchen. we cant sit still. we sit around tables covered in food and anxiously put things in our mouth instead of words, instead of i love you and all i want to do is drink and find that place i love and love to be, where you are there, smiling at me and loving me, except it doesnt exist and youre not real either, that you doesnt exist anymore. i made you up. i made it all up.
my dad and i cry in the living room, all the things that once were me are mocking me, like clocks and dressers, candles and baby pictures, sweaters i wore to keep me warm are threadbare and the smells in the house are just his and they are lonely and sad and i cant be around them, i cant stand to have that loneliness rub off on me, i have my own. josie drives me to my car one morning and its so beautiful we both just laugh and say "come on!" like how can it be so incredible and how can a morning be so lovely in comparison to everything else. the sky opens up like heaven, if that was a place, it would look like this, clouds like water and sun hitting every leaf so that the valley goes gold and we breathe it in and it fills us up like we are children, like it could make us better and sick at the same time.
at the house im house sitting there is a view from the farallon islands all the way to you in oakland, to my family over there, sleeping and waking up in houses only five exits from each other and not knowing how close they actually are. i drink tea in the mornings outside before everyones awake, make movie scenes in my head, split screens of my mother and father waking up in different houses, the moment their eyes wake up and they are in bed, adjusting, opening up to the day and i put their faces next to each other, you havent talked in three years, say something, say something, and for that moment in the morning where everyone places the parts of their day and their life together before they get up and get distracted i wonder what theyre thinking of. i wonder if they can feel each other, mornings they used to wake up next to each other, distanced but together, i wonder if their thought are of each other, ever, at all. my family is falling apart around me this christmas and i take the dogs on walks and turn on streets that used to mean something to me, pick holly and crush the berried beneath my fingers, write my names of fences of houses i dont know the name of the people who live inside anymore and try to find something to call mine. but i cant, its all gone.
aunty lois says take me to my room, im going to throw up, when forced to be at the christmas party and i know exactly what she means.