It is 6:43 am in the Mile Hi city. Normally, by now I have showered, packed lunches and made a pot of oatmeal. Today? I have checked my email, looked at MySpace and ordered several documentaries from Netflix. Ahhhh, Netflix. Ahhhh, internet. This is going to be a problem.

Thank God at least my coffee pot brews when it’s supposed to.

Guess what I’m doing right now. Go on, guess.

No, not that, you perv. Guess again.

That’s right, I’m sitting here, on MY own couch, in front of MY own fireplace, watching American Idol on MY own tv with MY own Comcast account (they are the best…they are) blogging away on MY own internet connection, listening to the dishwasher wash MY own dishes while MY kids sleep in THEIR own room.

Wowzas.

I have a cable account and an energy account and a lease and they are all in my own name. I have never had utilities in my name before. When you have close relatives that are, um, fucking crazy, you learn to appreciate the value of a level of anonymity. The last time I had my own apartment I was 20 and all of my utilities were included in my rent and I didn’t feel the need to have a phone and Al Gore hadn’t invented the internet yet (shit, I am OLD) and so here I am, age 24*, doing this all for the first time.

It feels kinda nice.

So, I am going to be back on the blog. The baby, she is crazy big. She talks a lot and flirts and dances and is still knocking me out with those American thighs. The boys are bigger and smellier and adjusting to their new old life. I am calming down, and not as lonely as I thought I’d be, though honestly it is weird to not bounce dinner ideas off of anyone and it’s weirder still to have no one to break in the couch with, but I can handle the menu and I suppose that if I tried really hard I could break in the couch all on my own. Shit. That was supposed to be in a thought bubble. Sorry.

Oh, I almost forgot. I have CLOSET SPACE. C-L-O-S-E-T space. My darling ex, well, he really likes clothes and shoes and ties and belts and stuff and he hoards them. He has always filled every closet we have ever had. And most drawers. I have never had places to hang my clothes.

Until now.

I LOVE being single. Love it.

*maybe in dog years.

I started this blog almost two years ago and now, two years after I’ve linked to him, and after the blog has gone all underground and shit, finally Walter stops by. And COMMENTS.

Seriously, welcome dude. Nice to have you.

I can’t believe I put this off so long.

Tuesday, just a couple days ago, was a big day for me. A BIG day. Like, historically and shit. 15 years ago on Tuesday I left my mothers house, and much like Lot, never looked back.

Except that every January 9th, I kinda look back a little. Not enough to turn me to a pillar of salt, mind you, but still. There is definitely a sideways glance in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean at some point in the day.

My mom, she really, really doesn’t like me so much, and she never much has. I guess the day I was born she handed me to my father and said, “Well, there’s your daughter.” And that was that. My dad would come home from working the swing shift at the steel factory to a baby girl in the same diaper he left her in 12 hours before and a wife saying, “You need to change your daughter’s diaper.” Even he didn’t get it. He says I was a good baby and that he never could manage to understand how a woman could hate her own child so much. But she did. She does. Bygones.

My mother had this habit of coming to my school and sifting through my lockers while I was in class. This habit lead me to develop two skills, the throwing away everything not essential skill and the being a really good hider skill. I had lockers all over my high school full of my poetry books and notes from boys (one boy, really) and then the one locker containing no more than algebra and blueprints. I can memorize a lot of three series numbers at any given time.

Anyway, one day she came to school, found something she didn’t like, yanked me out of school and a few weeks later she let me out of my room and enrolled me at a new school. Three weeks later, January 7th, she did it again and I snapped. I call my dad collect from school and told him in no uncertain terms to get me the fuck out of there that night.

While I was calling my dad, she was talking to the principal who informed her that I had been making some rather teary-eyed lunch-hour phone calls to my dad. At this, she snapped. (I should add that we were never, ever allowed to talk to our father without her in the room. Ever.)

I got home that day, under strict orders from my dad to keep my head low while he figured something out, and walked into a war zone. She was crazed. Now, she’s a paranoid-borderline schizophrenic manic-depressive, and to get more crazed than her normal took some doing. She managed. The short version of the rest of this story is that I ended up on one line of a phone, my mom on one, my dad one the other, and I was asked to leave. Right then. Period.

My dad told me to go pack and told my mother that something very nasty would happen to her if she so much as looked at me funny. I had no idea where I was going, but I packed everything I could into the two school backpacks I owned and waited. And waited. And waited. And then the phone rang and my dad informed my mother that I would be on a plane within 48 hours. and that she wasn’t allowed to hurt me. And so she shouldn’t bother trying. I just sat in my room.

January 8th I went to school and at the end of each class handed my books back in and said goodbye and please don’t ask me any questions. My brother had gone to this school two years before me and so they all knew enough about my family to accept this. I got home from school that day and went back to my room. And waited. And waited. A knock on the door at about 6 came from my mother, who informed me that I would be going to church that night and had better get in the shower. On my way to the shower my brother said some snarly, nasty little thing to me and my response was, “I’m leaving. Happy?” He smirked at me and walked away. My mother yelled from the bottom of the stairs that A) there was to be no trace of me in that house after I left it and B) that I could never come back. I got in the shower and got out to an empty house. My mother, brother and sister all left while I was in there and I never saw them again. I went to church, came home, and threw my whole life in a dumpster.

January 9th my friend from church who lived down the street came to try and talk me into staying. She offered to take me to my dad’s friend’s house, who was taking me to the airport. She dropped me and my two bags off, Jacki dropped me off at the entrance to Philadelphia International Airport, and I made my way to the terminal. And waited. And waited.

I was sure my mother was going to show up there, guns a’blazing, so I spent my wait time hiding crouched down in the botton of a phone booth. I cried and cried and cried and cried. There is no alone feeling that feels like that alone feeling, at least none I’ve ever felt. I boarded a plane that early afternoon and after two lay-overs landed at Stapleton International Airport shortly after dark.

And that is how I came to Denver. A lot is omitted from this little story, ’cause frankly a lot is still hard to talk about and some hurts just never heal, but there it is. Sometimes I think that I need to get the fuck over it and let it go, but sometimes I think it is good to remember the hard stuff you go through in life. No day or series of days I will ever have will be as bad as those were and I am tougher and bigger and more bad ass because of it. There are some people in life that you absolutely have to walk away from, and I was lucky enough to learn that lesson early on.

Anyway, on to the good stuff. 15 years to the day after that whole debacle, I signed a lease on my very own apartment in Denver after a rather hasty retreat from Vancouver a few months before. Odd timing, starting my life over the day I started my life over.

Funny how things always manage to come full-circle eventually.

I met Funny Ol‘ Becker 14 years and 51 weeks ago. He was sitting at a table in the cafeteria of our high school with a handful of other people. A very nervous, very scared Mr. Lady was introduced to everyone at that table, including the illustrious Molly and the subject of this post. I remember that Jon O. and Donga were eating blueberry yogurt and squishing it through their teeth that day. I remember Molly, I remember all of them. But mostly I remember Funny Ol‘ Becker.

I think he had braces then, and I am certain that he had some very sweet helmet hair. He made almost no notice of me that day, and that day is the day I fell completely in love with him.

Let’s just say he didn’t so much reciprocate.

We spent the remaining year and a half of our high school experience in this weird, awkward love/hate sort of thing. We ran in the same tight circle, so we were constantly in each other’s company. He was always polite to me and I was always a crazy stalker to him.

At least we were consistent.

We graduated and I never, ever expected to hear from him again. Well, I did. He called a few months after graduation, because every single other person he could possibly think of to hang out with was away at college, and he needed someone to talk to, and being the only option, I got the call. We went out. On something closely resembling a date. I can’t recall exactly what we did but afterwards we climbed the hill to where the train tracks lay behind my house and we sat until very late talking about poetry and literature and all sorts of things. It was, in a word, lovely.

The next day a note arrived on my door while I was at work; a random, kidnap/ransom style anonymous note. It had a poem inside and nothing more. Knowing full well that there was no way this could possibly have come from Funny Ol‘ Becker, I called him and had him help me determine the author and possible origin of the letter. A while later he confessed that it was indeed from him after all.

We were together for 3 years. I remember our first kiss, my first real kiss. I remember our first, um, well, maybe that’s not appropriate for a mommy blog. Anyway, we had three years full of too many moments that I will never forget. He always had a way of taking my breath away.

And then I dumped him (badly) and then we didn’t talk for a few years. And then, one day, for no real reason, we talked again. And we have talked ever since.

Dear Scott, you turn 32 years old today. That fact alone blows my mind. You were a kid when I met you, and now you are this very grown up man and it totally trips me out. The more amazing thing is that I have had the honor of watching you do all that growing up, and played a role in it, sometimes a lead, sometimes a cameo, sometimes merely inspiration. But I have always been in your picture, and I know that, and I cannot imagine for one single second why you let me stick around, but you do and I am forever grateful.

We talk often, sometime too often and sometimes not often enough. We talk about Star Wars and X-Men (in depth) and music and poetry and philosophy and breakfast cereal and everything in between. I think what I love about you the most is your consistency. You know exactly who you are and what you are and you have never faltered for a second from it. And oddly enough, you know exactly who I am and you stay anyway. I think it is safe to say that you know me better than any other person in the world. You have watched me got through every phase of my life so far and you have stood beside me through it all (well, except that seeing other people phase, but that’s totally understandable). I have cried more in front of you than any other human on earth, I have told you things I have not told another soul. I laugh with you and I feel with you and I am never, ever afraid with you. You are the one, the ONE, that I know for sure will never leave me. If you were going to, you certainly had plenty of opportunity. But here you are. You have listened to my heart break over and over again because of this guy, this guy I dumped you for, and you have always just been there, no judgements, no I-told-you-so’s, no nothings. You are just my friend, and you just care about me, and that is just that.

You and I have managed to salvage what was a rocky teenaged relationship that should have bitterly ended and turn it into the kind of friendship that people dream of having. I love you for every single little thing that you are. I love your bad jokes and your constant innuendo and your Dan Folgelberg thing and because I cannot picture you on that bicycle though I know you ride it everywhere and because when I close my eyes really tight I can still hear you sing and I have never heard anything in the world more beautiful than the sound of you singing and because you are amazingly talented and gifted and funny and clever and beautiful and mostly because I know with no doubt that I in no way deserve you and yet you are still here and my constant friend and you ask nothing in return and you never will.

I just love you. And i am not really allowed to say that anymore, given our history, but nobody said I couldn’t type it. Scott, I love you. I am always, always going to love you. I promise you that I will try my very hardest for the rest of my life to deserve the friendship that you give me so freely. I will be the very best friend I can be (and sometimes that isn’t so very great at all, but you already know that, don’t you?) I will never, ever take you for granted.

I hope you have a wonderful birthday.