02-24-05 @ 2:56 am EST

Written offline, 2/22/05.

The furnace broke down last night.

It's been giving us trouble for a couple of years now, but we've always been able to jerry-rig it to work, at least temporarily. This involved duct-taping a switch/button inside it to keep it depressed and every time it refused to come on, one of us would go down, peel back the tape, push the button a few times, tape it up again, and then the furnace would kick on. Well, we tried that and everything else last night...and it didn't work.

Dad continued trying it several times as he got ready for work. I stayed in my room crying. He didn't know I was crying until right before he left. I was crying not because of the growing cold but because I knew it was my fault--even if part of me didn't believe it, another part did, and I knew Dad did too. Not long ago we got into a HUGE blowout over the hot water handle breaking again...because I had fiddled with it to try to turn it off further (it was dribbling...I can't stand dribbling water, it's such a waste--and yes, *I* was the one running the water when our last well went dry!). He swore and yelled and fumed and tried to fix it when he should have been getting ready for work. I sat in my room and cried harder than I have probably ever cried, except maybe when Pepper died, and I don't think I even felt so awful THEN. I was so afraid of everything. He came in and I was huddled up as small as I could possibly make myself...streams of mucus streaming from my nose... >_< ...the bed and my clothes all wet. I couldn't even speak, just make weird noises. Shaking like a leaf. He apologized. He said it had been his fault, for not fixing it a week ago (it too is jerry-rigged), and he was in a bad mood because he had a cold. I accepted the apology but I could not stop crying or feeling absolutely awful. It was hours before I could even show my face properly, and I did not feel right the rest of the day. I ruined the entire day, for all of us, just because of a dribble of water. My fault.

Well...I felt this was going to be an exact repeat of that. So I started crying in advance, I was so scared. I kept myself as quiet as I could, but Dad at last had to come into my room to say goodbye. This time, he got mad at me...for being upset! "For God's sake, Rachel, stop doing this!" he said (and not in a sympathetic voice, but a frustrated, angry one). "I have enough to deal with without you adding to it! You depress the hell out of me." I remember that last sentence word for word--"You depress the hell out of me." I'd never thought I could depress him, I just thought I could make him mad for always messing things up. He said the heater wasn't my fault, but just the other day he was hinting that it was. An argument about a container of water not always being replaced on the heater (and it had been my idea to put it there in the first place) led into an argument about gas prices! "I'd LIKE to turn it down a few degrees!" he'd said (it's kept at 73). "You should dress warmer!" When I said that wouldn't help (and it doesn't), he said, "You should get used to it. Toughen up!" Well, it's not like I LIKE being cold! But for some reason, if it drops below 72 degrees (and I can FEEL the difference between 73 and 71), I feel absolutely sluggish and miserable; I can barely even make myself get up to go to the bathroom or to make something to eat. It's so cold to me that I can't even sleep; only because Ma got me a down throw can I even sleep comfortably in my own bed anymore, without shivering and shaking under that lousy thin blanket. I don't know why I'm such a wimp, that's just how it is. Winter has always been my least-favorite season.

So of course the furnace breaking would be my fault--my fault for always wanting it running up to 74 degrees when it should be lower. My fault for even being alive--as I see it, even now that the furnace is running again, if I were simply not HERE, Ma and Dad could afford everything they need to live comfortably. I wish every day, even in my good moods, that I would just not wake up tomorrow. Everyone would be so much better off...especially me.

I tried not to cry so hard but Dad's insistence that this wasn't my fault didn't help much. He said goodbye, left for work. I awoke Ma with the message he gave me to call a family friend to check it out. I was so upset, that I'm pretty sure the tone of my voice and the look on my face when I awoke her made her think somebody had died. >_< Sorry Ma. She called the guy four times but he did not call back. The temperature dropped. And dropped. And dropped. She made a few more calls, learned the guy has a GIRLFRIEND (and he's married I think, and gets drunk a lot according to her, how does he even get any business??), and finally got a recommendation for another place since she didn't want to call Warner's except as a last resort--"They charge like $100 an hour!" Harry & Jerry or Jerry & Harry, it was called. She went to town to get some money from the bank, and I gave her my money in case it was needed. Go figure, always after I win something from eBay a bill is overdue or SOMETHING breaks down!

Harry--or Jerry?--at last showed up. We showed him the furnace, what was wrong...it had a bad igniter. He warned us that our furnace is outdated, no longer manufactured, and getting harder to repair, but was able to fix it. (Cross fingers/knock on wood; it's running at the moment, and will be running for a LONG time to catch up for the ten degrees which were lost. It dropped down to 63.) Every time Ma asked to help he refused--"You're the customer!" She tried to tip him with my money--I agreed to it--but he refused it. I feel kind of bad. He mentioned his wife is very ill and I bet he could have used that money just as much as we could. The bill ended up being somewhat over $100...nowhere near the few thousand dollars I had had terrible thoughts it would be, to replace the entire thing.

Ma went to work late and now I'm home typing this when I should be writing. I went and sat on the heater for a bit. I mulled over the snow falling outside and some various other dumb things. Then I realized...I didn't even feel thankful that the heat was back, no matter how much I had missed it.

I just realized--well, I've KNOWN, but haven't really thought about it much--that gratitude is something I have great difficulty expressing, or even feeling. It's not that I'm ungrateful--I AM grateful, for this heat, and for the encouragement I get from people, and for everything good that happens, no matter how little it is. It's just that...I can't dare allow myself to express it, or even fully realize it...because as soon as I do...it'll be gone.

It's been this way for years. I know from experience that the moment I show too much gratitude, the very thing which I am happy for will be yanked out from underneath me, taken away, will disappear into thin air. It's happened for years. I used to dedicate my stories to people when I was in school. All those people I dedicated them to? Ended up turning on me or forgetting about me. So I stopped dedicating my stories to people. It was too humiliating, always having that shortsightedness in print. I believe my last dedication was in D Is For Damien, to my supposed "boyfriend," Eric V. "You rooted for Damien and muttered over Mabarak," I said, or something to that extent; "for that I thank you." Because, I wouldn't have even finished that story, which was in progress for years, if he had not bothered reading it and wondering what was to happen next. (The ONE good thing he ever did, I guess. He never even got me a gift that I could keep--he made me a drawing, then asked for it back! Meanwhile I'd had Dad carve him a WALKING STICK! Asshole.) Enchanted by the dedication, he said to me once at the fair, "I'm your Damien. I'll never hurt you." (Another thing I still remember word for word.) He even stuck a baseball cap on his head and turned the bill up, just like Damien's goofy headwear. (I forgot about that detail until now.) Not too long after that?...he called me to ask me to go to the movies, I said I was tired and would think about it, and he promised to call me back the next day...never did...it was six months until I heard back, and then only because I asked for something of mine returned. I was the one who hung up on him when he tried to call me, but it was a little after the fact, don't you think? (The last words I ever heard from him--"I know you're mad at me"--before I said, "I don't want to talk to you right now," and hung up the phone. The closest I will EVER come to having a significant other, and look how wonderful it was. At least I never really cared for him.) And he'd already broken his word. That was something Damien wouldn't have done. Haven't dedicated a story to anybody since. I still feel bitterly over Damien just because of how he had the gall to compare himself to him. He dirtied my own beloved character with his words.

The only incident? Nope. Every time I said thank you to somebody or got too happy about something going right, that person would just bail out or something else would go WRONG. For every good thing, there was something bad to negate it, or make it even worse. And online, it just got more obvious. The list of seven or eight people I thanked publicly at the end of Manitou Island? Promptly bailed out. (I removed that list...you won't find public thanks from me anymore, no matter how much I might like something somebody has done. Sorry, that's how it is now.) Every last person I expressed gratitude toward, and thanked publicly, and even THOUGHT of trying to award in some way...? No longer in communication with any of them.

The very last one, who I actually DID thank a lot, and publicly, I have not heard from in about a month, and has not replied to me yet...I have no idea why...I really DID think this was the one person I could thank and the good things would still be there aftwards. Now I'm seriously wondering. I do not know what went wrong when I was trying so hard for once to be grateful...and I wonder if maybe that is what went wrong, right there. I was TOO grateful. I was TOO happy with their attention. So of course, the good thing gets taken away. And so by now, I'm just terrified of being too thankful of anything because that's like a jinx and I can't stand that. I would rather not say too much of a thank you, and be thought of as kind of rude, than say thank you a million and then have that little bit of a good thing disappear, because by now, I have very little of the good things left.

And as a result, even the good things now just set me on edge and make me wary, rather than happy, like I should be feeling. Because as soon as I'm happy they'll be gone!

Which is why, now that the heater is finally on, I'm knocking on wood and saying to myself, "Just watch, something ELSE will happen...that was too easy..." Rather than being happy that it's getting warm in here at last, and being satisfied with that one little thing while it's here. Because when I'm happy, and everything is right at last, I just KNOW that state will not last long at all. How's that song go...? "Something's gotta go wrong, 'cause I'm feeling way too damn good." Pretty much. I know that feeling.

And that's today's deep thought. Maybe I'll get to the one I REALLY intended to write about...before the furnace went out...later on.

If the furnace doesn't go out again.