'87

This is the first time I've been able to nail the year down for that summer. I kind of remember wanting to find it a few years ago, but it got lost somewhere in my brain again. I think I'll be able to remember it this time.

I keep my college transcript in my sock drawer for when I need help remembering what happened when. I've never been able to correctly remember 1981-1990. When I try to reconstruct around and between the semesters I can clearly see I attended, I can barely hold on to the slippery bits that won't let me permanently pin them to a timeline.

I remember being there. I remember doing things. I remember people. I remember my job.

That summer was the second time I remembered her.

Memories are tricky things when you get blindsided and go off the rails for awhile.

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Somewhere out there in the 3 million words I have scattered online, I remember I wrote something about when a guy I was dating that summer asked me if I'd ever made out with another girl, I didn't say anything and remembered her golden hair while I kept smoking, staring at the city skyline in the night.

No, I never have, but that was the moment I knew I could have if she had ever wanted to (which never once came up, but just saying). I was too wasted to feel the sad lurking deep down, and it would be nearly 30 years before I even figured out why I was so sad underneath everything all the time. I never told him he triggered a memory that would haunt me the rest of my life. Never told him about her.

That was a key moment. I knew in that moment I didn't want to be with him, and that I was making a huge mistake being all that way from home in the first place. After that night I started drinking continuously around the clock until my body started fail mode, which took less than a month.

And then by the time I left and barely made it back to Missouri, that memory had been locked back up again and I didn't think about her any more for a very long time.

I didn't notice until Pinky blog that I have a depression pattern every single year around her death day, and it took a couple of years even pinning down that's what it was.

You can lock memories away all your life, but you can't unlive them. Anyone could point out that it's  best not to dwell, and I can easily say yeah, I didn't dwell for how many years, right? But ever since the memory finally came back, I keep running into it. The really interesting thing is seeing all the hints I dropped to myself for so many years on my blogs.

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Maricopa County is well documented for marijuana busts. I was there in the summer of '87. If the drug lord I hung out with then is still alive, he's about 50 now. I met him when he was 17, fleeing California and taking over territory in Peoria. He apparently grew up in the business. I met his dad, probably somebody famous as underground crime families go.

I was dating a different guy, completely oblivious and more on the idiotic side of screwing up his own life, and I never mixed the streams. No one ever knew who I knew and where I really was from one moment to another. No one knew until I started blogging that I had a close shave with never making it home alive.

And after I recovered I continued to make more mistakes until my world was so dark that there was just no saving myself. All credit goes to Scott stepping in with all new distraction that got me back on track with raison d'etre.

And right now he's watching Live PD. 😂

I feel very sick writing this post. Every time I write about her I feel very sick.

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I watch an awful lot of stabbing on Gotham. For several years awhile back, when I was very very ill, I couldn't watch anything bloody at all on TV. I guess I'm ok now, I'm watching all kinds of murder on my Gotham rewatch. I've been noticing how many of the villains stab right into the neck, into a jugular, slick as slick, very pro. I've been ranting for years that that's exactly what I'd do if I were killing people with a knife, stop messing around with stomach or ribcage and just bleed them out fast. Well, Penguin has several very interesting realistic moves that show me they did their homework. How many shows don't even bother with actual anatomy and just poke swords and knives and whatever into characters and they magically just die so easy and quick, right?

Per the first link I made up there, I know entirely too much about death. And knives. And anatomy.

Oh, well.