There are different sorts of sleep deprivation, my favourite being an all night festival of deviant sex acts, but the one I am best able to excuse (despite my utter loathing for excusism) would be last night.
Last night, curled up and breath reeking of the first garlic dish that I've ever managed to NOT ONLY COOK without retching, but eat as well... Curled up and warm and spent after an evening of the 8th tape of Evangelion (I don't have numbers nine through thirteen! Somebody help me!) and sake wine and sake martinis, and candle games, I was startled out of my Arkanoid reverie (I've recently installed the Gnome version off my boot CDs and am happily addicted) by the phone.
Ringing.
Insistently.
After a few minutes of staring confusedly at my alarm clock wondering why it sounded like a telephone and why it had gone off at two in the morning, I answered it to the sound of sobbing and apologizing all mashed into some green and oozing sort of misery.
"Giiiiiiiila, I woke you, didn't I?!?"
"S'okay, Tia, what's wrong?"
"It's not about Dan, I SWEAR"
So I laughed and dragged it out of her, the screaming match with her mother in the emergency room of the children's hospital, how right she was to be that shade of enraged and trembling pale at her mother's behaviour.
Oh Steven, I know how you must feel, when you write to me half the time, amidst curtains of tears and proferred hugs and feeling so utterly helpless to make it stop.
I invited her over, and she jumped at the chance to get out of the car she'd been driving up and around the highways trying to calm down but only becoming all the more agitated.
She came upstairs.
Realized I wasn't alone.
Turned the most exotic shades of blushing fuschia when she realized that she'd dragged me out of a warm bed with a naked man curled up in it, and when the jokes and tickle torture took her past the embarassment...
...she cried. We cried together, I guess, confused little me, holding a strong woman in my arms while she wept and plotted to poison her parents and wept some more until her shoulders couldn't shudder any more.
We watched The Breakfast Club, she'd never seen it.
I thought of my Maria, who's mother is so much like Tia's, and how Maria's has never even complained. I've never seen her shed tears and I don't know if I should admire her or worry?
I thought of my father calling me this weekend to tell me that he was dying of constipation and that I'd better call him every ten minutes just in case, because as he's getting older he's desperately lost to the realization that he's going to die alone.
And mostly, I thought how powerless, despite the fact that I knew exactly how it felt, how utterly powerless I was to do anything. Here I am, naively dreaming little monstre who wants to take the pain away from every teary-eyed child out there, and there I was with one of them right there and lost and shaking in my lap, and I had nothing to give her.
There's no quick-fix, I know that. But there's got to be some sort of answer, without patching the problem and making moruvem a la Microshit style.
I'll figure it out, you can fucking bet I'm going to grind my phalanges into it, and one day when my phone rings like that again I'm going to pull out my magic boston-cream-pie throwing gun and take all the pain away.
Because there are some things I refuse to understand, and one of them is why you would choose to make children just so that you can beat on them.
Here's to community service, I'm going to work some into my schedule as a start.
And here's to the dozen strawberry muffins that were on my desk this morning, because apparently I'd helped a little.
Just enough.
~