New year's rulins
It was a thin night of sleep, my dreams kept poking through the weak spots in my consciousness and my heart refused to leave me alone. It reminded me of its presence, knocking at my chest, pushing its rapid beat into my head, my fingertips, my toes. These reminders of life aren't so bad: I am here, I exist, my heartbeat is palpable underneath my skin. The blood continues to flow through this interconnected highway of arteries and veins. It feeds me.
The moments are fleeting and beautiful. I need to stay in them, to experience them fully, while letting them go all at once. Each letter is a moment, each word, each breath and they propel me into the future whether I want them to or not.
In anticipation of the coming January, the long remains of winter, I've been thinking about writing a happiness list, a list of things and actions and ways of being that will keep me in the moment while reminding me that I have a future. What better time to start making that list than New Year's Eve? I suppose these are resolutions, though I've never thought of myself as a resolution sort of person.
Happiness List
- Read more novels: they remind me of the depth and meaning of life and also take me out of myself
- Get out of the house more often to write or just to free up mental space
- Avoid all glowing electronic appliances -- the computer, the smartphone, the rare TV exposure -- after 8:00 p.m
- Keep open to other people; listen to what they say and how they say it without projecting my own thoughts and anxieties on to their words, their silences, or their body language
- Assume the best, but pay attention to warning signs that the assumption may be wrong and act accordingly
- Stop wasting food
- Be authentic to my emotions without wallowing in them
- Recognize my needs and give them a voice: they have a right to exist and I have a right to fulfill them as long as I do no harm
- Listen carefully and respond thoughtfully when the time is right
- Be grateful
- Be gracious
- Trust when trust is merited, but don't make the requirements for trust so onerous that I trust no one
- Be trustworthy
- Be reliable
- Give more money away
- Respond more quickly to email from friends
- Talk on the phone to people other than my immediate family
- Return Adam's calls promptly
- Stop telling telemarketers that Jennifer isn't home and start asking them to remove me from their lists
- Let the love flow ... when that feeling of warmth emanates from my heart (it's happening right now, it's lovely), nurture it; direct it to the people I love, the people I like, and even those who have caused me pain
- Forgive myself
- Understand that everyone has their own troubles, no matter how smooth things might appear from the outside
- Be compassionate
- Do more of the things that scare me (a return to driving lessons, for example)
- Recognize the core of strength, the length of pliable steel that centers me and has kept me protected since childhood
- Teach myself new forms of self-protection and preservation that keep me open and connected to family and friends
Sure, I don't have items like "Help win war -- fight facism" or "Wash teeth if any," but I am no Woody Guthrie. And this is just the beginning of my list, a start, a way to frame 2012.
Happy new year to you. I wish you happiness, luck and love. Be brave, be honest, be kind. I'll try my best to do the same.
Woody Guthrie's 1942 New Year's Resolutions courtesy of Boing Boing, with thanks to Holly for bringing it to my attention.
Love carved into stone
I’ve always been a fan of what a friend calls the “Irish sports pages.” The people I read about don’t have to be famous. Their deaths don’t need to be tragic. It does help if the story is good and the details specific.
During the boy’s most recent illness, I read through a special feature of the New York Times online, The Lives They Loved, as he watched a movie beside me. The Times invited readers to send in pictures and stories about loved ones who had died in 2011. I read through all 290 of them (skimming some), sometimes crying quietly in response to something particularly sad – the deaths of children, of the parents of small children, or of those who were simply too young to die always get me.
Two things struck me about the stories. One – there were several people who died this past year who were elderly and had been married for a very long time, sometimes over sixty years (and often the husband and wife died within a short time of each other). Two – out of the 290 stories, two came from people who heard of an old love’s passing – and each person hadn’t spoken to the old love in decades.
These were two sides of the same coin – decades of love and apparent devotion versus the fantasy of what could have been without the difficulties of years and money troubles and miscarriages, of colicky newborns and midlife crises, of cancer and dementia and the surprise snap of suddenly brittle bones.
I could make it all up, affection, a life, the way we can look at old couples and think that all along it was wonderful, that the love that exists at 18 and 30 and 45 lives until death, that the physical need for each other lasted through economic stress and the snot-streaked faces of children, through the days, months, or years when there was just no way that they could be in the same room together without resentment rising up. I like the idea myself, that love can last, or at the very least grow and change, so that at the end of a long life together couples still hold hands and talk and joke.
Even if there were difficult times, you wouldn’t read about them in an obituary, no matter how open the pair was in life about the ups and downs of marriage. We don’t expect candor in a death notice (though I did like the one on a grandmother who could be cranky and who said in her late nineties "it's better to go in your eighties" -- there's honesty). And anyway, death smooths over difficulty, the stories of those who have passed become soft with a slight sheen, or maybe no one tells the stories anymore, happy that the whole thing is over, that the struggles are done.
But I also want to believe the fantasy of an everlasting love, simple and basic, with just enough struggle to make the ending sweet, a place in which those of us who are halfway through (or more) can project our hopes for what is in store for us, despite the internal snap of crisscrossed wires and the prickly closeness, the push-pull of connection, dependence, and autonomy. Yes, this is what got under my skin about both the glossed-over marriages of fifty years or more and the romantic yearnings of people for loves from earlier, simpler times. They appealed to my idealistic, romantic side, the one that leads me to unrealistic expectations, who hopes for complete understanding without difficulty, for a place that I can rest despite my internal intimacy alarm system.
I want love to be easy. I want all the puzzle pieces to fit together. I want each of us to be free and clear of problems, able to devote ourselves fully to another while maintaining our necessary separateness. I want love to have clear skies. I want something that doesn't exist, something movie-style, love carved into stone, yet as comforting and soothing as a beloved old chair, something you can sink into when you need to rest. Except I don't sink into anything, not easily at any rate.
Nothing is simple, nor should it be. Deep love doesn't come cheaply or without complications, each person with their past and history, with their expectations and their own life path. That's ok. It's ok. It's what makes it interesting. It's what makes it worth it. And when the journey is over, you look back at the entire trip, the narrative, the phases, making sure to honor the difficulties and to pay homage to love that persisted in the face of human frailty.
Image by Henry Gray.
The present of presence
It may not surprise regular readers to hear that I have problems with family and connection, that it’s easier for me to remain self-sufficient than to ask for help even from those closest to me, and that even though I have a small family of my own, it has been difficult for me to be present with them. This is something that has come up in various therapy work, how to feel like I am a part of things, how not to stay separate, how groupings of three are threatening, especially for those who have generally been excluded in such groupings (child, parent, parent; child, parent, parent’s love interest).
And you know what? It’s gotten better. Not perfect, but better. There is a thread of connection between us. I’m less absent (again, not perfect, but so much better) when we’re together. I didn’t want to run away from home on my birthday, though I thought about it a lot the week before. We have had times when all three of us could sit quietly in a room, comfortable in our separateness, connected, too, without fraught, silent history hanging over our heads. This was the first year that my husband and I coordinated on the boy’s Christmas and also worked out a Christmas Eve misunderstanding without me exploding (tough, especially when the house is full of people and I am tense with the requirements of it all).
I worry about my parenting and the worry gets in the way of figuring out what is good for me. Sometimes I imagine going up in a poof of smoke, the midnight disappearance, the running off to another town, just to be free of the potential pain that connection brings – the threat of loss (it is inevitable, no matter what), the future break between child and parents, the wrenching ache of death and abandonment. I’ve created a life of total submission to child and home, which only makes the stakes higher and the center of my life more fragile, which ramps up the anxiety, the feeling that the walls in my small room are closing in on me.
I’m figuring it out. I focus on the future, on the grad school path, while keeping an open mind. No matter the path to external happiness, to contentment, to self-sufficiency, I will not lose the connection. I will be present.
So this is Christmas … a holiday I don’t totally care for, one that takes over, all macho with its Christian origins and its focus on consumerism. Today I focus on the rest of it, the boy, the greenery, the lights, the feeling of gratefulness for my wavering yet strengthening ability to be here, and for my friends, those of you I’ve known for years and those of you with whom I’ve developed a friendship across the mysterious Internet ether. I am so lucky to know you.
I am grateful for family, too, for the spark of connection, the elusive silver thread. It's not a trap. No matter how things change and shift for me – how I make them change and shift – the connection will be there, the history, the shared, ineffable love.
Merry Holidays!
Image of the boy playing at the park yesterday.
Obviously, I was able to carve out an hour or two for writing -- it's one of the benefits of waking up at 4:30 in the morning!
Desire's filament
Desire requires distance, the gap, two separate beings looking to conquer, to discover. The smaller the gap, the more desire is likely to be choked out by the soft supple hands of familiarity, blundering in their closeness, not knowing their strength, the damage they can do when they wrap themselves around desire’s surprisingly slender neck.
Keep him at arm’s length until you can’t stand it anymore. Flirt across subway cars, in cubicles with rectangular desks and masses of electronics between the two of you, letting the images develop in your mind. Get too close on elevators, at parties, and then let the distance roll out, a filament of connection, of want, of the never-extinguished, until you meet as embodied souls, or souls embodied, electric and tangible.
Try to extinguish it. Try your best. Savor the marks left behind, the way your scents intermingle, as you sit on the subway, hair tousled, shirt askew. You are going away, going away, you dash from the scene, revel in your singularity, the apartment, the old couch, the plants that have followed you since college. The familiar. A place to sink back and sleep and ponder him, across town, ensconced in his separate life. Deliciously unknown. Maybe unknowable.
You don’t know whether it will happen again. You’re not sure what you think of the whole business. You run your hands through your still-tousled hair and flashes of the moment of two bodies meeting run through your mind.
The conflagration begins. The dance starts, the filament unscrolls and lengthens. You want to tug on it, to wake him from his sleep with thoughts of you, with want, of the immortality of the chase.
Everything comes to an end. Desire burns out. Death extinguishes life. Savor the moments when desire rises up. Let it remind you that you are still here, with a strong heart and impatient lips.
A new take on the prompt "My mouth." I've been feeling a need to write lately, but haven't wanted to go where my mind goes naturally (does anyone really need to read about how to sit with loneliness? or, really, do I need to focus on sitting with loneliness when the act of writing about it makes it more like "obsessing about loneliness" or "wallowing in loneliness"?). Hence the return to old prompts.
I had a practically uninterrupted night of sleep last night for the first time in months, though I woke up at 4:59 a.m. in the middle of a dream about statues coming to life and the fight against evil.
Image by Vivian Chen.
Playing with the edge
Or maybe your version of simplicity is the quick flip of lovers, the chase of the rush, the projection of qualities and values, the disappointment and regular rethink.
In my experience, love is not simple. Affection is not a given. There are complicated paths that fork through heavy jungle. There are walks in the dark, in the thick fog, and you are holding the hand of someone, it is warm, tangible, and you are comforted just knowing they are there, next to you in the great unknown.
If given the chance, I would become addicted to complication, to the murkier, ambiguous path, circuitous, up and down mountain passes, discovering the other, their depths and peaks, and the mundane would be replaced with discovery, surprise. This isn’t about constant excitement. It’s about challenge, about being prodded out of myself.
When I was younger, straight from a childhood of too much (instability, fighting, excitement) and not enough (attention, stability, unconditional love), I wanted a life on solid ground, an unmoving life on a plain where each summer the wheat would emerge, go from green to brown, and be mown over again, where the winters were cold and predictable and the springs fresh with expected growth. I’d come from a land of earthquakes, over-fertilized with drama. I wanted seismic stability and English gardens.
The life I have is straight and plumb. It’s paths of gravel crisscrossing fields of daisies and sunflowers. It’s maple groves where the trees and I confer from bare-boned winter to the conflagration of leaves in autumn. It’s apple orchards with flashes of pink blossoms that lead to the sacrifice of fruit for cider and pies. In short, it’s sweet and predictable with occasional bursts of seasonal color.
The things we cover over have a way of emerging over time, of showing themselves. Beyond the gravel path there lies an old-growth forest. At dusk the foxes yip and play along the border between the two worlds, chasing rabbits and mice.They kill because it is in their nature. I’ve taken to hanging out at the edge of that forest on nights when the moon hangs low. The clash interests me, I like to watch the chase, though I turn my head at the moment when tooth meets fur, right before the death shake.
That forest is alive with animal sounds, trilling birds in the early morning hours, the crunch of leaves as the white-tailed deer emerge from hidden groves arched over with briars. The foxes, the deer, the owls whose hoots break the midnight silence, they all rely on the play between forest and clearing, on what is covered over and what is exposed. They need it wild and cultivated.
The (overextended) metaphor has gone beyond love. We expect too much of it, too much of the people we choose, to make up for the rest of our lives, to cover our wounds over with kisses and absolute acceptance and knowledge of our motives and needs, to be what we need when we need it, even if what we need is out of their purview. If I want to explore the forest at night, to hold a flashlight against the thick growth with a trembling hand, it is up to me to do it. I don't need to do it alone. But I do need to decide on a path.
From the November 30th prompt "An addiction," cleaned up and expanded.
Image by Nick Kenrick (ZedZap).
Collecting the shards
The next step is my trip to the driftwood-studded beach along a circuitous path through an unexpected bamboo grove, by the sassafras trees, past the collapsed cupola (Take a streetcar to the water’s edge is how the poem begins, though I no longer remember if it was my mother or Kevin who wrote it). I collect the pieces of my broken rock, from shard to fragments almost small enough to be dust, and bring them back to the top of the cliff. I form them into a mosaic, a physical representation of my hidden heart, adorn it with shells and flowers and other stones, harder ones that wouldn’t break even if I flung them with all my strength against concrete from the back stoop. I collect cool rounded chunks of quartz and make a large circle around my rocky heart and cover the heart over with small sticks and dead grasses and cover those over with the thick fallen branches of the sweetgums that edge the clearing at the lip of the cliff.
One match will set the flames running. When the blaze extinguishes itself the flowers and grasses leave no evidence of their existence and the branches have undergone the transfiguration from wood to charcoal. My heart, blackened, still warm, is intact. I take the fragments and put them into a thick cotton drawstring bag that I fling into the river.
My heart is broken stone, warmed over once with passion, covered with water and then mud and silt. I like to think of it at the bottom of the river, waiting for dredging, for the men from the Coast Guard with their special tools. Someday someone will find a piece of my heart, will take a blackened stone from a beach or pick it out of a landfill. They will take it home and put it on their mantelpiece or place it in a collection in a box, and what is left of my heart will be grateful to be briefly warmed by the hands of another.
*****
The experiment I’ve been trying lately is to fill my heart with love and to let the love flow. I direct it across rooms. I direct it across town. I let it fly over the flats and the Rockies and the Mississippi to reach its target. I open up the connection and I swear to the God I don’t really believe in that this works, that the objects of my affection, my love targets, they feel my presence. We share in, revel in, the love.
Yesterday after writing about my friend N and his wife for the Round Robin, I heard from her. A few days before that, I concluded that my son's teacher was probably pregnant only hours before she announced the fact. I sometimes know I’m going to see someone in an unexpected place moments before I actually do. These are small things, some of them probably tied to my tendency to observe closely and think about people and their inner minds and motivations, but I also think there is something unexplainable about it.
Back to the love, to the flow. There have been some days when I’ve been hit with a feeling so tangible, so thick and rich and luscious, that I know love is being directed my way (I use love in a larger sense here, not necessarily romantic, not necessarily entirely specific). Or I want to know it. I want to hold on to the feeling, to reassure myself that I am not deluded, that I am not letting my hopeful mind make things up. I have to accept that my “knowledge” may just be hope and to not hold on to tightly to the things that may or may not be.
When you don’t feel the need to grasp for love, when you can give it without an agenda, freed from the past and expectations and the little pains you have suffered at the hands of others, it flows more freely. This is part of my experiment, to feel compassion for everyone, including myself, to open up my heart, to let myself be vulnerable knowing that I am not risking my own destruction. When this works, it is beautiful, amazing, freeing and intoxicating (even when it is working apparently only in my own head – self-delusion can be a healing thing!).
So I hold your hand in my mind. I tell you that we are both, that we are all of us, good, once fragile, strong, connected. I toss away the doubts and direct the feeling, the warmth. I feel the ambiguity of what is and what might not be, and close my eyes, letting the love flow.
From Thursday's prompt "This is my strategy" and today's prompt "Psychic." They seemed to fit together.
Image (edited slightly by me) by IObO.
Damage control
This isn’t a rhetorical question. Over the last month, something inside me shifted. I moved to the right of damaged, can feel my iron core, my strength, expanding to reach its full potential. It’s an almost normal feeling. Like maybe I don’t actually have any holes to fill. I don’t need to tug on anyone’s sleeve for attention, don’t need to prove my worthiness. I am worthy.
Experienced in pain? Yes. Been through some difficult times? Yes. Kicked around by fate, bruised and left to cope alone? No longer. I don’t want to discount the effects of my childhood, but I no longer need to soothe that part of myself. This has been part of a long process of writing things that were necessarily fraught, revealing what I felt to be my ugliness, my secrets, to anyone who would read them.
Therapy has helped, too, and grounding myself in the present. I’ve realized that I don’t need to replay my childhood to make it right, that human beings are resilient and capable of change up until the very end. But one of the biggest revelations was that I created some of my darkened reality by clinging to long-ago events and by living off of fantasy in my daily life. I thought that in order to heal I had to have someone to heal me and that every rejection, real or otherwise, was a kick to the soul. I thought that the change was a mysterious substance that only the initiated could access or that I could only access by convincing the unavailable to redeem me with their love.
I don’t want to discount the love of other people, their support and friendship. My husband has stuck with me when others might not. Without his kindness, patience, and love, this process would have taken much longer. My friends, both real-world and virtual, have also been there when I needed them, empathetic and kind and necessary. (I am grateful that you are in my life.)
Normality. Everything is so everyday. My sleep is slowly improving. The dog walks are generally without tears unless they are about the heartaching beauty of life, its fleetingness. I have been a calm parent, a fount of reasonableness in the face of the boy’s occasional irrational fits, boundaries firmly in place. I am reading and studying and seeing the world around me. I am cooking food again and really tasting it. My focus is no longer on inner pain or on perceived slights, though, of course, I still have a lot of work to do.
It’s good. It’s strange. The only thing that concerns me is my withdrawal from social interaction. The only people I talk to are my family. After dropping off in Facebook participation, I’ve dropped out of Facebook (temporarily, most likely).* I have no desire to meet anyone for drinks or coffee or lunch. I barely email my friends. Maybe this is the chrysalis stage. I could need time to just be, to let the wheels continue to turn until I reach my destination.
There's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home. And home is here, within me.
*FB friends -- you can email me at writingtosurvive(at)gmail.com. I dropped out without announcement and would like to "talk" to you (and I am thinking of you, Anne, in particular! xoxo).
Image of a cloudy blue Berkeley sky by me.
Edited on 10/12 to take care of an awkward mixed metaphor (how can wheels keep on turning until I get to the other shore?).
Life is just a fantasy
It was for wish fulfillment, the opportunity to recreate reality in a rosier hue.
Who can resist a life of fantasy, the ability to live in one's head? Unfortunately, it’s my head. The stories I come up with, the reworked scenes from the past, the present-day complaints, are all about me. My brain is no fiction factory. It’s a self-obsessed dreamworks with me as the witty, darkly sensitive main character.
I am slowing down my obsessive mind, discouraging it from wanting things it can’t have or from believing that want equals need equals reality, that desire and obsession have predictive qualities, that old hurts need to be palpitated until the sting fades. Still, the desire to fantasize reappears on occasion and I have to tamp down the story that forms. This morning, my mind lingered over a gesture. The gesture could have been two weeks ago, it could have been years ago. Maybe I still know the person, maybe we parted ways. We certainly aren’t confidants, but my mind holds this gesture, this last touch, tenderly.
It was a friendly, light punch to the arm, almost lingering, the warmth of what wasn’t. We were slightly out of context, separated by a foot or two, and there was the reach and recede. His aura, his energy, was palpable, a force field of comfort and heat, something to sink into. I was receptive, though it no longer mattered.
This was a moment to slow down and savor. To interpret endlessly. It was about possibility and hope, about what could have been. I could write paragraphs about it, sensual things on unfulfilled hunger and hidden intent. But I’ve gone on enough about it, have captured it. Away it goes, stored up for the really lonely times.
We kissed in the dark on the hood of a car. We fumbled against the wall. Your now-or-never lunge across the couch sealed the deal. All these memories, these ruminations and relivings, are part of a comforting fantasy that nothing ever really ends, that I am connected to everyone I’ve ever loved forever, that what happened between us gives me continued possession. I even entertain the notion that we could recouple, like those older people whose weddings are sometimes in the New York Times, the old flames who love anew, entire happy lives behind them and more happiness waiting.
On my new march towards realism, towards a life not lost in fantasy (still, the heat of the gesture lingers; I don't want it to go away), I remind myself how wrong most of these people were for me. Non-thinkers. Homophobes. A Republican? A hunter? A stoner? Our politics clashed. Our ways of being in the world did not match up. Long-term love was never an option.
Give it up, fantasy maker, I told my mind. Live in the now. Remember? Kid, husband, house, animals? Your good, lucky life?
It seems to be working. For the most part.
For those who now have the Aldo Nova song going through your head, I apologize. And offer this link.
Image by Biscotte.
Mission statement
I make lists of things I don’t want to regret, bottle up emotions to savor when I am alone. I am almost always alone. I engrave those I once loved into my core, I take what was essential between us and store it up for old age or loneliness, for the times when reality does not suffice. I try to take on the perspective of the other.
Bravery is doing something even when it frightens you. On Wednesday morning, I drove around and around a parking lot with an instructor. I drove with confidence. I turned right and right and right and then left and left and left. We ventured out and I drove from one parking lot to another. The instructor and I talked about the career she left behind, about kids and elderly drivers, as I maneuvered the car.
Was I scared? Kind of. But what really scares me is getting out into traffic and doing it again and again even while I am scared. Slowly, that’s the way to go. I need to use just enough imagination to feign confidence (versus imagining the worst of it, me paralyzed at the wheel, the panic, the crush of metal, the destruction). I need to gather my courage for the real test. I need to see myself in the distant moment, project into the future, the all-grown-up me at the wheel. The confident me speaking up in class. The capable me creating a whole new life despite my fears.
So that’s my mission. Not to forget. To hold those I once knew tenderly in memory. To see things from another's point of view. To be brave.
If I told you that’s why I am here, out of some sort of personal journey (the lousy childhood, the adult revelations, the beauty of fucked up me), would that get me in? Do I tell you a different version of the story, me the daughter of a plucky single mom, the lean years of no car and no money, the thinning of familial relationships, the thickening of barriers? Oh, yes, I survived it all intact, I was cunning and hidden and then had to undo the structure, take down the heavy blinds, unleash my needy heart.
How do I spin this past into getting-into-graduate school gold? Sure, from the outside I look like a well-off middle-aged white lady, not a care in the world, but can I tell you about the lonely trembling in empty rooms, the beratings at long-cleared dinner tables, the time it has taken me to feel almost at home in my skin?
The past wearies me. We’ve danced together long enough, though the facts stand. And I still stand before them. We will always be connected, though the connection may be frayed. If I have to conjure it up to explain why I am here, I will, but that isn’t the whole of me or of my reasons for applying.
I want to take what I know through experience and struggle to help other people. I want to help children, the most helpless of all, trapped and marked by adult circumstances. I can’t separate myself from the emotion this brings up in me because I can’t separate myself from my emotions. I will use my experience and this deep reservoir of feeling to assist others. I used to think my childhood and my emotions were handicaps, that I had to separate myself from them in order to live properly in the world. But now I see that they are essential, that they give me strength when I allow them to exist without indulging their more florid characteristics. I can harness them for good and tame them when they threaten to take over my perception.
So that’s my mission. Not to forget. To hold those I once knew tenderly in memory. To see things from another's point of view. To be brave. To help those who are helpless. To not let my past and emotions overwhelm me, but to accept them. Experience provides knowledge, emotion supplies fire and tears. Sometimes both are necessary, the past plus the upwelling of love and anger within.
The love object
It’s brutal, this game. I’ve dressed as if we are at war, at odds, and who is to say we aren’t?
My heels click click on the steps. The drink leaves a muddied circle on the concrete. I press the glass against my cheek before taking a sip.
Your car pulls up without a sound. I hear your skateboard hit the sidewalk in a sudden stop. I could tell your step and whistle anywhere. You are clean and fresh. You are musky with a day’s work. Your hair is curly. It is dark. No. Gray and straight. You have no hair. Your white shirt is still crisp at the cuffs. Your t-shirt is deep red, the color of passion. We kiss until I have to take a breath. I greet you with a stinging slap. You push me back. I see you and can’t stop crying. You never arrive.
(In the black and white movie, the woman waits all afternoon. She stubs cigarette after cigarette out on the steps as the shadows lengthen. She refills her drink until the mint runs out and her thoughts run together. No one is coming home. The house is an apartment, the skirt is borrowed. Her legs are nicked, her hair unwashed. A decoy without a mark, a lie within the fantasy.
He was tall with strong ankles. Small with thin wrists. His eyes were hazel. Brown. Blue. Brown again. She didn’t know how to characterize his eyes. His gestures swept the room. They swept her off her feet. He followed her for weeks until she finally turned around and said “So.” They had been friends since grade school. He had a British accent. His family was from Puerto Rico and he trilled his r's to make her laugh. He told lies that were more delicious than the truth. He prided himself on his directness. He led her down too many paths, all of them wrong.)
I created you in my mind, all of you, fantasies that I still return to. I conjure us up, how we would be now (the simple life in a small town, the one with fights that underwrite the passion, the lap of luxury, the comfort of small things, the sudden pull of little old me into the big wide world). But surely you did the same? I was the bad girl, the good girl, the available girl, the damsel in distress, the buddy, the relief pitcher. We create the love object in the hopes that it will stay unsullied, that our image is clear and shining and true. We are wrong.
I don’t know how to think of it anymore. Love. It exists and I have to give it credit, the eternal optimism, the quick attachment of the heart, the lack of logic, the call and response of bodies. But it does me no good. So I stop feeding it, I let it languish in a room with the shades drawn, knowing that resurrection in another time and place is possible.
My poor foolish heart.
Image: Me playing dress-up.
For those keeping track -- I have a driving lesson tomorrow morning. Gulp.
Desire's silhouette
Other people watched, too, like that guy in C-town who befriended my roommate and me, said he spied on us, that he used to take binoculars and set himself at a window in the house across the street, could see our nubile forms through the loose weave of the curtains. He told us about watching girls in the daylight, too, girls lying out by the pool in their string bikinis or one pieces with plunging necklines. He loved the beauty of young flesh, the fantasy of his hands on it.
This was being wanted. In the first case, the want was amorphous. Did D come in search of sex, for a bit of warmth, to see his face reflected in my eyes, all adoration, my sense of self shaped by his choice to be there? I tell myself now, practically thirty years later (oh aging, oh early introduction to sex) that he liked something about me beyond the thrust. We certainly moved past those early days, got deep enough for me to break his heart.
In the case of the peeping Tom, my value came from being a desirable object. Yes, it was creepy that he sat in the crepuscular fading of day to watch us undress or walk around naked or pick our noses or whatever he could witness through greened tree limbs and curtains and evening glow. But I had been taught that to be desirable to men, to be pretty and thin and – above all – yielding was not only proper but the way to see myself, the thing that men wanted to grasp, to kiss, to fuck. It was validation, a measurement of worth.
Darkness allows the stare through bedroom curtains, the ramping up of desire, desire of something, the warmth of another human being, the opening of legs and a mouth panting for acceptance, for the entry. We all want to be desired, we keep our baser needs in the dark, too, the shame of the unfulfilled self. The key is to get a sense of self from within, to accept the desire by others as an extra, the bit of honey in the coffee, the icing on the brownie, that soupçon of want that we separate from our self worth.
From the prompt "Black." This is something I wrote before 6:00 a.m. and returned to after getting home from a therapy appointment, the type of appointment that left an ache in my chest and a sense that the day has been bifurcated into distinct moods: before the appointment and after the appointment. It's a good ache, or a kind of good ache, but, damn, I wish it would go away now. It's affecting my ability to think. It's affecting my ability to be effective. It's affecting me.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This is a 12-minute prompt with a bit of editing,
Image by Smedenborn.
Beyond the flip side
Some may be lucky (or un-) enough to die quickly (the major coronary, the proverbial bus or truck, the burst aorta), but for most of us, death is slow and sneaky. There are warning signs, there is the long waiting, the room full of loved ones and stale, sickened breath or empty except for the one on his way out. (Don’t feel sad for the person dying alone. That is how it works for everyone, even those in a roomful of love. Support is good, but at the very end, the gathering is more for those left behind, staving off loneliness. Or so I tell myself when I imagine my own death, my letting go in a sparsely furnished room.)
And what about life? My son has finally showed an interest in learning where he came from, the result of some questions about the difference between male and female bodies, and of our reading of the book It’s So Amazing. His birthday is coming up and last night he asked me "How did I start?" We talked about sex (glossed over for the most part, though he knows the mechanics), the meeting of sperm and egg, the cell division, the way he grew inside me and how we anticipated his arrival. It is so amazing. And a long process. That bundle of cells, the zygote future boy that we didn’t even know existed, is life of a sort, but not quite.
When does death become death and life bloom into its full being? I’ve been at one deathbed knowingly and at a deathchair in ignorance. I’ve watched someone’s body wind down until the final moment, but before then, before the fundamental change, the person in front of us, the himness of him, was already gone. His body was stuck in the waiting room of death for a long sad day and then it was over, yes, the switch was flipped, but the process had been going on for days, months.
Death and life overlap, what was supposed to be the beginning can be the end (the miscarriage, the stillbirth, the end of quickening and the heavy knowledge that you contain death).
And what about the death of love, the way something within us goes flat, but not all at once? It happens after years of holding the love underwater, of neglecting it while it plays in traffic. If you get to it early enough, you might be able to resuscitate it. Its death is a process, like all the rest, like the falling, the immersing, the way two people briefly become one.
From the prompt "In the space of one minute ..."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. I could delve much deeper into this one if I wanted to.
Image by redwood 1.
Tain't no big thing
What is so appealing about going back to the beginning, before the assumptions build up and our patterns form, patterns of avoidance, of self-protection? One could argue he was part of the forming of that system, and he certainly didn’t treat me properly for the first two years, yet I look back on him with sweetness. Maybe it was because, at the end, he really loved me, and we were young enough to be optimistic, to think that life was only going to get better and better.
As I mess with my brain chemistry, with the way my neurons fire, I’ve been thinking again about love, the way it works, its chemical properties. My nonromantic self sees it as a combination of how the love object fits one’s past (in ways we may not detect) combined with a surge of neurotransmitters. Right now it’s hard for me to think of love as anything but a series of neural equations that extend until the chemicals start to peter out and it becomes a different kind of love. Familial. Or it disappears altogether.
In my dream, I told D that I loved him. He was noncommittal. We shared someone else’s bed in a strange house in the Netherlands. The room was in a basement, anonymous white walls, anonymous sheets, no windows. When the real occupant came back with his girlfriend, we had to leave. I struggled with my stuff, the bag of spilled earrings, the clothes on the floor, while D just up and left.
Love. Past + chemicals = delusion. Is this the optimistic future I had hoped for? Is this outlook just a case of another set of faulty neurons, of a brain bathed in sadness, stuck in a pattern of blah and don’t get used to it and how could we really know anyone anyway? I return to D because of the simplicity, his, ours, for the memories of wind-whipped hair in a too-fast car. I return because of the excitement, the fights, the stupid ones about the color of a boat or the cleanliness of the bathtub, the deeper ones that always ended in something closer, closer, not further away.
I don’t want to become more cynical as I get older and yet that’s what is happening. Maybe I’m on the precipice of a choice: a return to optimism and connection or the perpetual wading through the shallows of fear-based avoidance.
I’m scared. That’s it. It’s plain and simple and deep and all I want to do is look at its depths from a distance, but here I am approaching, one foot in front of the other, ready to run, run. My calves twitch. My heart betrays me. The fear is glassy and it reflects my expression and here I am, a foot extended ….
From the prompt "The first time we met."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by drusilla Lainee.
Forget me not
The muddy bottom of the Bohemia glittered with Budweiser bottles, the emerald necks of Molson 12-ouncers submerged jewels peeking out of the muck. Above, his daysailer, an stretched oval of white, bobbed in the wake of a speedboat. We were joined like in porno below the jib. From the marina a pair of binoculars focused on us, the watcher's eyes trained on the fools in the boat who believed in the false privacy of an almost-empty river.
"I don't know if I love him anymore," I thought afterwards, pulling a beer from the pack, letting him adjust the sail so the wind could drag us back home. We were browned and bleached by sun, by Saturday afternoons on the water. A starburst of new freckles marked his right shoulder blade. I counted them, added them up. Every trip started with a struggle, first with the boat as we pulled it from its grassy hiding place, next with him as we moved the daysailer onto the rollers and slipped it into the brown water. I could do nothing right.
If glass is made of out of sand, is the substrate holding the liquid in place, then we were returning the bottles to their rightful place, sending them home. The bottles became worm homes, mud collectors. They carried the memory of what they once were, of being small enough to sift through his fingers. The shards on asphalt, loose mosaics on the edge of driveways, scattered into cornfields, were part of the process, too, the breakdown, the slow return of glass to rock to sand again.
"I don't know if love him anymore." The thought followed us up the street to his parent's house. Inside, it smelled like him: spicy with a hint of sawdust, like soap, like freshly-dried paint. His mother, a rangy woman, gangly and tanned, was cutting the grass. We walked downstairs to his room and I collapsed into him, breathing him in, his family, the threatening safety, the years of sameness that would await. From the window, his mother's feet did their dance with the mower, the tip-toe push and back-up, her calves rippling with each move. He wrapped his arms around me as if I was a child.
I can hold on to a moment for as long as my memory holds out. I can warm myself with love, the love object, the glow of his attention. I can take the walk after dark cozied up to my man, telling my secrets, letting the tears flow in the dark. But I can't make the moment last forever. Eventually, the road beckons and I become a cliché of non-commitment: If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me? Because I will remember everything about you.
Instead, I remember landscape: the crumbling decrepitness of fallow cornfields in the moonlight, the languidness of July air after midnight, the crackle of dead leaves on the oak as the new growth forced them out.
That evening, I found a baby rabbit by the birdbath, tiny enough to be practically newborn. My grandfather had cleared out the undergrowth at the birdbath's concrete base and left it homeless. I tended to it with an eye dropper and sugar water, made a nest in a shoebox. I let the creature sleep next to me, cuddled up against me for warmth. When I woke up, it was dead, crushed by my weight.
Motherless animals don't stand a chance.
He stopped by late the next night. I recorded it like a photograph, like a movie: a knock on the door, my head pressing into his chest, the thin fabric of his sleeveless t-shirt soft against my cheek. I switched the television off. Every night was what if, the romance of not knowing, the worry of the no show. He redeemed me again and I forgot my worries about love for the moment, for the sweet moment when he hovered above me.
Image: Small rabbit, Summer 1985.
I've taken license with space and time in this post, compressed events from a couple of summers together.
Wish engine
I want to give you the details, want to tell you about the quality of light, how it changed from charcoal to puce to mist, how the blinds were slanted against it but still couldn’t keep the light out, how I was there, in my wish thinking be careful what you wish for, feeling the truth of it.
The fulfilled wish is a dangerous thing, the fantasy come to half-life. We don’t think it through when we will a wish to happen. Some vital detail goes missing. We want the man, but we don’t want his baggage. We want the move, but we don’t want the loneliness. We want the career change, but we don’t want the burned fingers and scarred knuckles, the knees blown by years of crouching, the feet calloused and ruined by the end, us with no money, youth gone, eaten up, more cynical than ever.
I’m tired of writing enigmatic posts that leave the reader in the hallway of the narrative, blocked by confusing metaphor and half-truth. I want to give you the details, like a confession, like a message. Gossip straight from the source.
You will have to settle for enigma.
It was like a hotel room, but not. It was like a connection, but not. It was simultaneously comfortable and strained. But what a moment it would have made on the stage, the scattered stuff, the awkwardness, my internal monologue, the stilted dialog, the interpretations on both sides. My story about the fulfilled wish is as full of lacunae as its aftermath, the conversation where the weight of the unspoken thickened the air. Walloped by my own silence, I had to leave, wanted to breathe freely again, wanted the purity of my thoughts in isolation.
They are still here, the thoughts. Unspoken. Unwritten. Sometimes I pace and talk to the cats, gesture with my hands as I make my points. I want to be heard. But I can't get the words out unless I am alone.
Years ago, after I asked my father for support for a fifth year of college and got back an extremely nasty letter, I cut off all contact with him.* We made up six months later, sat alone together under the shade of a sycamore in a Delaware park. I tried to talk. I tried to tell him everything, about why I was so angry. But I couldn't. I would not let him destroy me, would not put myself in a position of vulnerability. I would not be two or five or sixteen years old again and the likelihood that he would be able to really hear me anyway was low.
The engine of the wish, its motivation, is a desire to be vulnerable, to be in a position of openness, where I can show my heart and speak my mind without feeling like my very being is threatened. It's a wish of closeness, of an aching desire to be in the moment with someone who is able to be there with me. It's about love and acceptance and clear vision. I make the wish again and again, I persist in situations where persistence is futile, trying to remake the past, to redeem myself by winning over the blind, the frightened, the selfish or incapable. I try and fail and am simultaneously thwarted and safe, my scarred being untouched.
This is a compelling process, one of redemption through magical acceptance, one of healing through the alchemy of love. I remake the past again and again, trying to get it right. The wishes beckon, they call to me to escape, to try again until I am saved. They tell me they will come true if I behave correctly, if I mold my behavior and ignore my emotions. Instead, I must ignore the wishes. I refuse to live a half-life, to jam my being into the corner for the sake of malformed acceptance.
I'm getting beyond the wish. Though the trajectory of my journey is still unclear, I am optimistic. Not so much about wish fulfillment, but about the possibility of closeness. It won't come by magic or by being a good girl. It will come by opening my heart cautiously, without malice, by separating the pain of before with the reality of now.
*"Support" for some living expenses. I was graduating at the end of that year. I cut off contact because of the nastiness of his letter, which I've kept. It's still nasty after all these years.
Image by Martin Neuhof, though I don't agree. My heart is as vulnerable as an armored butterfly wing. If I'm going to imagine a positive type of vulnerability, I would say that I would like my heart to be as vulnerable as an old growth forest: living, adaptable, teeming with life. Because our metaphors shape how we see ourselves and the world. Still, I liked the photo.
The kiss
This is where we did it:
In the back of my stepfather's car after the Sadie Hawkins dance freshman year of high school, my friends beside us, my mom at the wheel. It was my first real kiss with tongue, all for a relationship that lasted about three hours, most of them spent dancing slow, me in my Gunne Sax dress (burgundy, form-fitting with lace trim), you so short that you could rest your head against my chin.
Down at the beach, the moonlight playing off the Elk River, Led Zeppelin floating out of a car, the yellow street light making us into silhouettes as we walked away from the parking lot. We were arm in arm up the road, clung to the shoulder as a car passed. It was all anticipation, the best part, the tingle before everything tips, your lips against mine, me leaning my head back, back. A year later we kissed as I sat on the hood of your car, sweet, entangled, a moment I recorded forever in my mind: this is going on right now this is going on right now this is going on right now. I measure time against it even now, the way we can hold on to sweetness after it sours, can erase the bad for the simplicity of two bodies.
In musty movie theater seats, the armrests pressing into our chests, popcorn scattered on the floor, our shoes tacky against the remains of spilled soda. It was the second time we had not watched Ghostbusters. Your hands here and there, mine struggling against them. We were just this side of shameless. Our friends turned their heads. Later, you were sad. You told me you loved me. I see you now, see how much a part of the Eastern Shore you were, you are, like another life, the reality I could have lived, the ribbon of road that bisects cornfields and woods.
After dinner at the Iron Gate, you a gentleman, the long wanting kiss at the door. You waited deliberately to go further, three dates of gradually ratcheted passion, so by the time we got beyond extreme make out sessions, we were in love. I still dream about you, J, despite our almost total incompatibility on most levels.
In my apartment or on the street? Our first kiss is lost, all of them are, but I remember how we met "cute" -- me drunk (alone) on some horrible watery beer, making the walk after midnight through a thin-wind Illinois night, carefully stepping over the ice patches in the sidewalk. I struggled with the refrigerator doors at the 7-11, not noticing that the beer cases were locked because it was too late to buy. There was a witticism, likely yours, since I could barely talk. Did you know I was drunk? Were you drunk? Somehow I gave you my number. We made plans. We went out. Eventually we kissed. You spent the night a time or two. Made me a couple of Pixies tapes. We wrote letters to each other over break. You even picked me up at the airport. But then I met someone else.
After your marriage was over. Before: we held hands in your car and you told me you were poison. Later you said you hated the melodrama of that line, but it fit the situation, you at the end of a marriage, the unfinished business that made us impossible. We didn't kiss then, though I had dreams about it. We waited five months for the air to clear and then, in the fresh-scrubbed beauty of April, it happened. Arrangements for divorce. The kiss. The Squeeze tapes you lent me beforehand, me wandering around Champaign with my Walkman on, happy to be alive, to be chosen. Stolen lilacs, gallons of beer, the celebration of love and food.
In a bar in a different city, both of us drunk, you chain-smoking American Spirits. After closing time, we danced. You spun me around by the waist before losing your grip. I ragdolled to the floor, laughing as I got up, leaning back to find your lips. I'd seen you before at that bar, the nightly drunk, the troubled man, and knew that after I stumbled out the door, I'd never see you again.
After a day of laughter, back at my place, you lunging across the couch. A couple of weeks before, you told me you were "interested," but I was too confused and sad about my marriage ending to know what to think. Then, kisses on the couch, kisses upstairs, you falling asleep fully clothed on the bed, my first exposure to your nap talent ("Did I fall asleep?" you asked at 2 a.m. groggy and happy.) The beginning of something larger than I expected.
This is where we didn't do it:
On the Metro, you visiting from out of town, me living apart from my husband but still married, still a good girl.
Over my cubicle at the library, me blushing in your presence, you talking out your fears over turning thirty, how you wanted to make a film of me smoking and riding a scooter, wanted to capture the suppressed me, the relief of exhale. You were going to call it "Smoke."
During the Friday night dinner or maybe during a class, all of the other women batting their eyes, lucky to be in the presence of the young, cute, talented chef.
This is where we shouldn't have done it:
At the door. In the car. On the couch. On the bed. Against the wall. At the bar.
Anywhere mistakes can be made.
Image by gmayster01.
I was going to write something about my latent (or not so latent) pull towards self-destruction, or really I was going to write about self-destruction, the urge to be bad, in a fictional or evocative post, but a conversation with a Facebook friend about how I categorize my FB friends pushed me in this direction.
In case you are wondering: I have actually kissed 4.5% of my Facebook friends, have wanted to kiss 6% of them, and wish I hadn't kissed 1.5% of them.
Worth it at any price?
The above email came from my husband before he was my husband, when my last name was Ingersoll-Casey (there, now you know) when our relationship was about four months old, a few weeks before my divorce became final. July 1998. I remember the circumstances that led up to it well: a joint business trip to Santa Monica, some scheduling conflicts with getting together, my solo dinner at Locanda del Lago where I flirted with the Italian American waiter, an aspiring actor from Brooklyn. It was the usual -- for me, anyway -- early relationship feelings of uneasiness and worry.
The astrologer I went to a couple of months ago mentioned that I test the people that I'm involved with. "Expensive, but worth it," was the phrase she used to describe me. I'll take her word on it, that I'm worth it. It's true, now that I look back at the early days of our relationship and see in this email and another that I printed out back then, where my husband is talking about visits with various cancer doctors for his mother . . . I think back to my petulance, my demands: expensive. Time-consuming. Maybe overwhelming at first. Not good at holding back, at least not in the beginning, no matter if a parent has cancer or if you're also working on a dissertation or working through other personal stuff. "Look at me," I shout. "Notice me! Aren't I worth it?"
And yet he loves me still.
I've been thinking about what to write for Elizabeth Harper's fabulous Write About Love Project, going through my small box of love mementos looking for inspiration. The box has letters from D (love letters and very sad post-breakup ones), directions to my former crush's house written in his hand, an inconsequential note left at my E Street apartment by the philosophy student who broke my heart, a postcard from Estonia from Peter, a joke Christmas card from J signed with someone else's name, and various cards from my husband. It's a mix of ephemera and deep love and silliness. Maybe it's inspiration.
At any rate, I'm working on my piece, Elizabeth, though it still may take me a while to get there.
What I've been up to: finishing up my class, working on writing about love, still doing prompts, working on the new blog in dribs and drabs. And, last night anyway, not sleeping.
Bringing on the heartache
The scene in the therapist’s office this morning, a walk through damp breezes with the threat of rain behind sunshine, another chance to get soaked, and there I am with this motherly thoughtful woman. It was our third meeting and right away I launched into it.I can’t tell you about that here. That’s private stuff, things you are not yet privy to, things that need airing out in other areas of my life before I go there with you. Gentle Reader.
There are some things I can tell you, about threat and invisibility, about boxes and strategies and avoidance. Let’s say you feel invisible to the ones who love you. Let’s say this is a very familiar feeling, the invisibility. Combine it with another deep feeling, of being unlovable. OK. You feel unlovable. You also – lucky you – feel invisible. Maybe it’s safer to stay in a place where no one sees you, where you are invisible, because then you don’t need to deal with the push/pull of self-hatred and worry.
You’re there already, though, and trying so hard to stay in the moment. Your therapist tells you to be with your feelings, in the moment, too, and you keep on working at it, to let the feeling be without escaping (not that you always succeed on this one). The ache in your heart that you’ve been carrying around for so long? It extends low, deep, and high. Your torso is pain. You feel the pain and it doesn’t destroy you. In fact, you feel more alive because of it.
And not. See how I distance myself from all of this but using the term “you”? Do you think I’m scared? Yes. Do I have reason to be? Of course.
Outside the sun is being pushed out by wind and clouds again. The moment in the sunshine, the moment of clarity, is covering itself over. When the clouds come, I’m even less rational. How does my body feel? My chest aches. My throat hurts. My head is tight and dry. I am in the moment and I want to know when the moment will end.
I took on a man once, took him on because I wanted to, though I didn’t know what I wanted. I took him on and he me, and then he left. And I wanted to know: was it me? Or my situation? It's me, it's always me. That's the old story, anyway, one that I fight even as I let it exist. And the ache, it gets even deeper, if you can imagine it, straight into my heart. It amazes me, this feeling, how symbolic and true it is all at once. Heartache. What’s the physiology of it?
How are we centered both in our chests and in our heads?
From a totally unrelated prompt: No plastic surgery. I wrote about what I wanted to write about. Also barely edited. I'm beginning to like these spur-of-the-moment insta-blog posts.
Image by GrungeTextures.
False starts
him
In my intermittent dating life, I don't remember many "first" dates.
My first boyfriend D and I stumbled into each other in the dark, went from acquaintance to midnight visitor in a matter of days. We didn't go on a date until we'd known each other for a couple of years. My ex-husband and I were classmates. One month we were flirting at library school happy hours, two months later we were lamenting the love that could not be (because he was married, albeit very unhappily and long-distance), four months after that, his marriage counseling failed and divorce arrangements made, we were practically living together. There were a couple of now-nameless people in between, contrived experiences over candlelight. The meal out with the graduate assistant of my politics class, who later complained that I never paid for anything (it was the summer of poverty, when I wasn't even able to pay the rent on time). Hamburgers with the freshly-minted architect in Georgetown on Halloween, a night that ended with an awkward unwanted kiss as I exited the cab. Nothing came of them, no drama, no further relationship.
Even my husband and I just kind of fell into step. I met him at work, out in the library atrium where we kept the magazines. I remember thinking he was sweet, cute in his green shirt, and funny, especially because in our first conversation he made some amusing remark that I was just about to make (something that is a daily occurrence between us now). We worked together. I helped him with dissertation research. We became friends. And when my first marriage fell apart, shortly after I made the decision to pursue divorce, we became a couple. Was that dinner at Lebanese Taverna, a just-friends get-together, our first date, all that talking over gamey lebneh and unctuous stuffed eggplant? How about that cold, rainy March Saturday in Ocean City, Maryland, where everything made us laugh, from the wind-whipped, half-dead palm trees to the corny motel names, the night that ended with dinner in Annapolis and our first kiss? We just became, morphed from one thing to another, naturally.
But then there was J, my second long-term boyfriend, my first "first date."
I was 19 years old and a recent college dropout. J, 24, was a teller at my bank, cute with his blue eyes and unruly blonde hair. We had run into each other two weeks earlier when I was leaving the local bar. “I know you’re leaving with this guy,” he said as the room swirled around us, “but could I call you sometime?” I wrote down my number on a napkin and we briefly made small talk before I walked out into the heady March night air. My age was “discouraging” but he called anyway and we made arrangements for dinner.
So there we sat at the Black Gate, one of two good restaurants in our small Eastern Shore town, the same one where my roommate Martha had just gotten me a waitressing job. The lights were low. Romantic. Thankfully, Rebecca, our waitress, didn't card me when J ordered a bottle of white wine. We sat in silence as she wielded the corkscrew and poured a taste. This is how our slightly awkward evening started, lubricated by wine and romantic interest and the fact that people with crushes forgive awkwardness for the sake of proximity. Our sad three-year journey began with oaky white wine and, for me, the cheapest thing on the menu. Stuffed boneless chicken breast. Of the rest, I remember nothing.
I had dropped out of college only a couple of months earlier, just decided to quit halfway through the second semester sophomore year, a decision I made immediately after I turned in a philosophy paper declaring that I could no longer believe in god. I spent several weeks sleeping in and fielding phone calls from my panicked mother before Martha got me the job. We quickly fell into a late-night lifestyle, hanging out at the bar, staying up until 3 a.m. with our tequila and our gin and tonics, sometimes with drugs that would keep us awake until dawn. We befriended Joan, a college senior who was also waitressing at the Black Gate and didn’t mind downing a drink or two with us.
Joan, who would soon be dating J’s brother, had given me background on Rebecca and J before our date: Two years earlier, when J returned home from college, he was a manager at another restaurant where Rebecca was a waitress. Their work relationship quickly became an affair. (Picture illicit sex after hours on cool veneer tabletops, quickies against the rippled metal door of the walk-in freezer.) They were almost exposed when Rebecca came home late one night and had to explain the rug burns on her knees (picture two pairs of knees chafing on tired restaurant carpeting or pressing into threadbare wall-to-wall at J's house, the Sugar Shack). She came up with a story to appease her husband, and although plenty of other people in the small town knew what was up, he remained in the dark.
Knowing my date and our married-mother-of-two waitress had slept together, at least once in a position that resulted in rug-burned knees, added an odd element to an already stressful situation. Still, it brought a little depth to J, who up until this point had just been that cute friendly guy at the bank. Joan, who was working the night of the date, reported later that Rebecca was nervous, too, that her hands had been shaking as she pulled the cork out of the bottle, but I was too shaky myself to notice. I never found out what J thought of the situation.
One date led to another. The spring of 1989 was kisses and new love, drinks at the bar (Dirty Irishmen, Black Russians, Dark and Stormies), a drunken loverly haze sweetened by the scent of tulips and magnolias and the religion of sex. But as summer came, things went south. I took advantage of Martha, who was carrying us financially, and we had a falling out. She moved out early and slept with my barely-ex-boyfriend, D, whom I had also treated badly. When J was out of town on a family trip, I was unfaithful. By August, when I left for college in Washington, DC, Martha and I weren’t speaking and J and I were trying to repair things.
It was the booze, it was me, it was the fact that I was barely out of a lousy adolescence, that I was 19 and then 20 and then 21 and a mess. It was so long ago that sometimes I can’t believe that was me. I was grappling with myself, stuck, fulfilling my internal monologue that I was a bad person. It's a monologue I still battle against, try to remove of its resonating power. I battle it with good behavior, with the reminder that just because bad things happened to me doesn't mean I am a bad person, that I am good and as such will make the right decisions.
And I'm grateful to have avoided more first dates.
Related posts: I remember the heavy air and the smell of gin, Beware of Estonians bearing basil *recipe not included*, Love letter
Image by Lottery Monkey.
As speechless as this dripping heart-shaped stone
This morning's 3:50 a.m. wake-up involved a man -- not necessarily my man though we we clearly together in some way, were an almost-item -- who lived in a house attached to a library. He disappeared one afternoon with a pack of friends while I sat in on a lecture in the conference room and listened to library talk. When the lecture was over and the sky dark, the man still hadn't returned. I went upstairs to his room. I wandered the house, walked past piles of laundry. I paced. I waited for him as panic rattled my chest. Abandoned.
Or the less fraught dream where the library was an annex to a childhood friend’s house. In a room off the kitchen, her father sat surrounded by cats. He stroked an orange tabby. A calico tossed at his feet. The friend and I, in the full bloom of middle age, walked past him. She had her library books in a satchel tossed over her shoulder. I wanted to ask her about her mother, who has been dead for a decade now, but instead we talked of the mundane, of childhood paths through the woods and decades-old David Bowie videos. The library annex was dark and stark and full of people and I remembered how much I missed the smell of books, the hum of computers, the clearing of throats.
Or the good dream, the feeling of being at home in my grandfather's house. It was a thrilling realization: this was my place. The Little House had been razed and rebuilt. It was now a public building, three stories tall with a thin aluminum skin and walls of glass. Part of the roof was turf and on the middle level an art gallery reception room jumped with people. I watched my mother climb the metal steps to her top floor apartment and reminded myself to tell my husband how the Little House was gone forever, how comfortable I felt in the main house.
Hopeful dreams – feeling at home, watching a place of pain transformed – are chased off by those that make my heart ache: that evening spent looking for this nebulous acquaintance, the worry of the wait, my worthless abandoned heart.
In preparation for an assignment for a class I'm taking in creative nonfiction, I was looking up interview questions, ways to think about asking strangers about their lives. On one site devoted to interviewing elderly relatives was the question: Have you ever had your heart broken? It was such a ridiculous question that it made me laugh (derisively, I admit, a short bitter laugh). Who hasn’t had their heart broken? How can you be alive and not have had your heart broken? I pity people who die never having had a broken heart. They've missed out on a key human experience.
My heart has been broken twice, both times long ago. J was the first to break it, followed by the philosophy student in a quick one-two punch. After that, I wised up, though not enough to avoid a bruising a few years ago. Since I am a married woman, future heart breakage is presumably unlikely. Yet I find myself guarding my heart anyway, protecting it, thinking that if I ever were alone again, I would hide it away forever, knowing even now it huddles deep inside my chest, thankful for its cage of bone and muscle, still hurting and unsure.
This is what a dream of abandonment brings to life again, though I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately anyway and writing about it in various roundabout ways. It’s tiring to hold back one’s heart, to keep it protected. And what am I missing because of it? Only the world, love, life. Family.
I need a guide to help me set it free, to pull it loose from bad memories.
Image by Melina.
My new therapist search began today. I'm also looking for a psychic, which tells you where my head is at the moment. Floating off my body. I keep on editing this post, too, which makes me wonder if it's really finished.
A note on the title: While I was writing this, one of Kevin's poems was going through my head. It's short, so I will type it here. It seems that having Kevin write a poem for you or a poem mentioning you was generally bad news.
POEM FOR MY WIFE
Above the sleepy river
branches touch and whisper.
Earth is telling of a dying.
Let me touch your woolen sleeve
and tell you what I've lost.
Beneath the iced-tea water
my skin looks like persimmon.
"Here. I am as speechless
as this dripping heart-shaped stone."
Night vision
That night I couldn’t sleep, stirred up by a dream I forgot upon waking. From the bathroom came the litter box scratchings of Amber, her sad trill as she leapt down the hall. The cool air, the light of the moon, you barely stirring next to me, profile muted. The melancholy night noises. I tossed off the covers, wrapped myself in your flannel robe, and stared out the window. The full moon hung over the city, so juicy it looked ready to burst. It threw its light over the houses and parked cars and if I squinted your neighborhood almost looked beautiful.
Somewhere out there a man was going through a dumpster, clinking bottles into a cart like he was making overenthusiastic toasts at a party. It was eerie and familiar at the same time, the rattling of wheels, his mutterings, the explosion of each can as he crushed it, the crash of glass. A pair of women clicked on the sidewalk below, one lecturing the other, voice slightly slurred. "If he doesn't love you, what's he worth? Tell him to go to hell." You whispered my name.
Everything became clear to me, the way our relationship would deteriorate, not this year or the next, but when we were in too deep, how the things I love about you now, your hesitation, your unruly curls, your off use of slang, would be the first things to push me away. You would have your issues with me, too, the way I trampled conversations, left my clothes where I shed them, my increasing tendency to extend the cocktail hour past midnight.
In the now, you reached for me. I tossed off the robe and returned to your warmth. I let the lust last a little while longer, enough to get me through the night. In the morning the clarity of night vision would be mortared over by sunshine.
The photo, by Jane Underwood, was the prompt.
Scar stories
Early on, when the skin is fresh and tight and we are still hopeful in matters of love, we offer our scar stories. Enamored, we sit too close and trace each other's skin with our fingertips, tell of the night of the emergency appendectomy, the fall chin-first onto a step, the fist through glass. Later, as things get more intimate, the emotional scars get the attention. The stories grow more complicated: the nasty drunk of a father, the high school bully, the silence around the dinner table. It's a great show of vulnerability before the gates come down and love gets old. We find reasons not to trust. Our eyes dart to the side, to the ceiling, before they close in exasperation. The scar stories become faint irritations, reminders of our past.
My ex-husband had a scar I never saw. I knew the story of the kitten who gave him cat scratch fever, which led to the surgical removal of a lymph node on the underside of Mr. X's chin. As soon as the incision healed, he grew a beard to cover the scar. He was bearded when we met and was still in full beard the last time I saw him in person. The scar was his to hide. His third wife (I was no. 2) convinced him to shave it off, to show his scar to the world. I see him now in Facebook photographs with his infant in his arms, looking confident, clean-shaven, and happy.
Me? I have a short dark mark by my right eye, some jagged lines under that eyebrow. Car accident sophomore year of high school. The uneven triangle on the underside of my left middle finger came when I opened a package of smoked gouda with a dull knife on a car trip home to Ohio from Maryland. There’s a mark on my right calf from an old boyfriend’s too-sharp toenail. I don’t have to look to find it. I feel it there, remember the minor moment, the former intimacy.
As we age, the scars get more serious, the minor ones knit over with experience. These become our scar stories: The near-fatal car accident survived. The place where a breast used to be, where they excised the lump, removed the shrapnel. My grandfather was in his fifties when he was burned in an industrial accident. I never knew him without scars, his skin melted and fused, ears damaged by flames. He was always the cranky near-deaf man missing one foot, with knotty pine skin and thick fingers. No one cared or knew whether he had stepped on a piece of glass when he was ten or what that mark on his knee was all about.
When surgeons removed my mother's boyfriend Kevin's spleen, they left a thick track down the length of his abdomen, the ghostly shapes of surgical staples like railroad ties. Eight years later, after the tracheostomy, Kevin had a scar marking the experience on his neck, a scar that was reopened twice and didn't heal before he died. His frequent emergency intubations scarred his epiglottis, which meant that he couldn't swallow food properly. The food would go into his lungs, which was a pneumonia risk. He "ate" via a stomach tube for the last five months of his life. But the worst scars predated his illness. They were from his boyhood, from the beatings and the cruel words, the experiences that marked him from the beginning as the family scapegoat. Those scars affected the way he interacted with the world.
Physical scars are experience written on the body. It's the emotional scars that are more sly. They form when we aren't looking, maybe before we can even talk. They are pre-rational. These experiences change the way our brains are wired, help determine how we react before we are even aware of our reaction. And sometimes talking about them disturbs the memories, makes us focus on their creation in unsettling ways.
After about a month of appointments and increasing anxiety on my part, I dropped my therapist. Maybe it was a matter of therapeutic fit. But maybe I was stirring things up that were best left alone, tweaking scars because I thought I should, over a backdrop of bland therapeutic platitudes. Some emotional scars need space, to be apprehended on their terms in a way that acknowledges their integrity. After all, these scars mark our strength, our history. We survived. They served a purpose, protected us from total ruin, from being hurt again.
Sometimes, when I'm feeling impossibly scarred, I remind myself how far I've come since starting this blog. Telling my stories in my own time works. Maybe the best approach is to deal with the scars as they surface and to let them be until they do.
From a photo prompt very much like this image by dougfelt.
Love letter
Dear DT,
Remember October 1998, when we went on the Gettysburg bike tour? I was brave and pretended that I liked cycling. You were kind and understanding when my bravery only lasted a few hours. The B&B innkeepers, a pushy woman and her Rick Moranis lookalike husband, were hard to take. That first night we went back to our room and laughed until we cried about the day, me struggling on a bike, the story of the lookalike tootling on a kazoo in a coffee shop as being the innkeepers' aha! moment, the awkwardness of it all. How we ever got into the Song of the Humpback Whale (smack smack smack the ocean is my s m o r g a s b o r d click click s m o r g a s b o r d) I don't remember, but I do remember feeling connected and happy. We had been dating for about five months and it was still new. One of the men in the group asked if we were married and another said "They like each other too much." Not a happy view of marriage, but proximity and responsibility do wear one down.
I still like you a lot. And I love you.
In those early months, I would sometimes stay at your place and then take the Metro back before work to my house in Takoma Park so that I could change. It was a rush, being in love, feeling exhausted from our late night conversations. Everything glowed. Everything was funny. Remember Smoothy Chops? Schnozola?
How about the mornings in my Dupont Circle apartment, the neighbor with the motorbike, our morning warm-up wake-up call? The motorbike rumbled and growled until finally it took off with a high-pitched buzz. "He's riding his bee to work," I said one morning. We laughed so hard that our stomach muscles ached.
Things weren't always easy. I was going through a divorce. Your mother was dying of cancer. My apartment flooded out when an upstairs neighbor's hot water heater died. You came over in the middle of the night to bail me and the cats out, took me away from that water-logged place. I never went back. It wasn't the best way of moving in with you. The cats and I were like friendly squatters at your place, loved, but not exactly welcome.
Eventually we worked it out, but in the meantime we united against a common irritation, your neighbor, C. C's house was in a constant state of renovation and repair, of work done and then torn out and done all over again. He dealt with his neuroses, about completion, about home, in public and it was painful to watch. C dug a 20 foot trench between your place and his, intending to build a brick wall. The trench was open for months. It filled with rain. The sides crumbled. It was a hazard. An eyesore. After much discussion, we set up plastic cowboys, Indians, and army men in attack mode in the trench, a mild form of revenge, laughing as we pictured him finding them.
Remember Hobo the cat? The tomato plants? The long weekend in London for my thirtieth birthday?
Sometimes I mourn the fact that discovery is behind us, that what was new will never be again. Routines and responsibility for a child change the nature of a relationship. We have a common goal -- raising a healthy kid -- but in the meantime we've settled ourselves into comfortable routines. Sometimes those routines chafe. They get me down and I wonder: is this it?
Then I remind myself of the sweetness of our early days and of our continuing story. I miss the lingering mornings, the time when all we had to focus on was the two of us. We have a good life together, the kid is great, but there is something to be said for a slow Sunday morning, no reason to get out of bed, for coffee and the paper and laughter. We'll get those days back, I promise. It will be something to look forward to.
Love,
Jenna
Image by -JosephB-.
From a photo prompt, edited 10/30.
Breaking the chain
In the midst of our trip to New Jersey to visit my father and stepmother (the long flights, the Christmas presents, the one-sided conversations), I realized that I was no longer angry with them. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, a kind of lightness or a shifting of a burden. Of course, this new feeling didn’t save me from the usual visit hangover, a subtle thwack to my equilibrium. My emotions always need time to settle after these visits, though I've gotten better at recognizing that over the years.
It is possible to let go of anger without shedding sadness and guilt and that's where I am today, a little sad and perpetually guilty, replaying conversations from the trip and wondering what to make of them, how to fit them into my new vantage. My stepmother told a story of a breakfast in Bryn Mawr when I was nine or so, a scene at the diner with gleaming chrome and murals of 1940s college scenes on the walls. Apparently I had cut into my waffle with too much force and my plate flew onto the floor. As it shattered, so I did I, started to cry while they tried to comfort me. I didn't remember a thing about it, but I do remember being constantly on edge during my visits with my father, on alert, my guard up. It took very little to shake up my practiced calm.
So what can you do? For the first nine years of my life, my father wasn’t always reliable. He was intermittently present (despite some rosy memories on my stepmother’s part; she’s an optimist and my father’s protector and she wasn't around then anyway). His child support payments were regular, his love was constant, though often from a distance. Everything else shifted around. And then, in adolescence, he failed me. They failed me. How can you tell someone that they can’t make up for the first nine years? Or that maybe they aren’t as safe as they think they are?
You don’t. So I won’t. All I can do is approach them warily, be mindful of the gaps in our experiences, acknowledge their efforts and their love, see how blind the compassionate can be and hope to keep my own sight.
But the guilt, the uncontainable guilt. It's about not being good enough, ever, then and now, and it carries over in ways that can be paralyzing. Once again I'm left with the idea that I still have a lot of work to do before I forgive myself. How do you let go of the feeling of being wrong-hearted from birth?
I have no idea how to go about it. I am open to ideas, though. Suggestions are welcome.
Image: My father, mother, and me, Easter 1971. I know that by writing this, putting it out there on the Internet, I take risks. So they might read it. If it would make a difference in what we talk about, wonderful. If not, well, at least they are reading. And I'm sure they have their own ideas about the past. Perhaps I've got it all wrong. Perhaps.
As for the song, it's going through my mind and feels appropriate in some way.
Pictures of Atlantis
This is a record of young love and wobbly stability. There's Mr. X in male cheesecake pose, lying in front of the newly-planted impatiens in the backyard of our first Columbus apartment. Here's Loudon the sheltie-dog, a ball of fluff, on his first day home. Sidney and Zoe appear as young kittens, playful, flexible, and sleek. In one set of pictures, Mr. X and I pose separately, each of us holding a champagne glass and wearing the dark-lensed glasses that came with my grandmother's 50s-era sunlamp. We look like goons, but that was the point. And then there are the shots of our wedding, that great party we gave, where his relatives filled the space and made it joyous while mine were reserved and inward, quiet in their happiness. These photos are relics of another time, part of my life but outside of it, too.
As time went on, Mr. X and I took fewer pictures. Fifteen months after we were married, we both got jobs in Washington, DC and life got much more stressful. Mr. X clashed terribly with his incompetent boss. Our living situation wasn't comfortable. The basement tenant in the house we rented, a man named Dewey Wayne (I've since forgotten his last name), had an intense personality. Dewey Wayne had sold his house in Raleigh and put all his money into a move to DC, which included paying a year's rent in advance. He had a habit of leaving his front door open while he took his dog on walks, which was his business, except that his place was connected to ours by a door that we couldn't lock and our neighborhood wasn't a good place to leave doors open. The washer and dryer for the building were in his apartment and he freaked out (rightfully) once or twice when we walked in on him, unannounced, to do our laundry.
Then there were the rats. The backyard, a rectangle of bare dirt dotted with ratholes, held a thriving rodent commune. We had a parking space out by the trash cans and the rats began to use our car as storage space, something we discovered on our way to the grocery store one weekend. As Mr. X pulled out onto 15th Street, the engine began to smoke. Over the course of our ten-minute ride, the car slowly filled with the odor of roasted, rotten meat. We rolled all the windows down and covered our noses with tissues to filter out the smell. When we pulled into the parking lot, Mr. X popped open the hood: two smoldering pork rib bones had adhered to the carburetor. The car stank for weeks. Later a rat actually chewed its way into Dewey Wayne's apartment ("I came in and there he was on top of the refrigerator, munching on a bagel. Like Mighty Mouse," he told us).
Mr. X and I finally fled the rental after five months and bought a house in Takoma Park, Maryland. The night before the house inspection, our car was stolen from our street, though it was recovered somewhat unscathed a week later. In the meantime, Mr. X's job had gone from horrible to intolerable. His old position in Columbus was still open and they were happy to take him back. On the weekend of our second anniversary, only eight months after we had arrived in DC, he returned to Ohio. There were solid reasons for him to leave that had nothing to do with our marriage, but it was the beginning of the end, or at least I can mark the final slide with this event. We were doomed from the beginning.
Mr. X is remarried now. He and his wife have a child on the way. We haven't spoken in a couple of years, though we are Facebook friends. And while the past is always present for me in some way, I don't think much about that time when I was young and in love and it was all fresh and new, when I was with someone who was my loyal protector, when I was learning to be an adult without drama. I wasn't good at living without drama and still courted it with alcohol and arguments, with cruel remarks and coldness, but there was an underlying sweetness to the relationship. Mr. X helped pull me out of my childhood, was the first person to hold out his hand.
The only evidence I have of that time is some paperwork and photographs. We had no children and the last living pet we shared is fading fast. There are no friends in common with which to reminisce, to verify that it all happened. But I'm still not sure what to do with the artifacts, the pictures that show the world that we created for a brief moment, now submerged in memory.
Image: Champagne on our first anniversary, Columbus, November 1996. I still have the glasses and -- strangely, but coincidentally -- my son just fished them out of a toy box this morning and put them on, even though he hadn't worn them for months.
Shoot him 'fore he run now
J. had a freezer full of goose breasts riddled with shot. His family owned property on Broad Creek with a duck blind right against the water, where the menfolk, clad in camouflage, would sit on brisk fall mornings, guns poised. He showed me the blind that first summer, took my hand and led me through a tunnel of cornstalks gone brown. We sat close on the austere bench, hidden behind grass that had become hoarse with whispering over the years. I am sure he kissed me in that humid July air because we did a lot of that then, sweet lingering kisses in between fights and sarcasm.
He’d told me that a former tenant of the Sugar Shack, the house he and his brother were renting from their grandmother on the far side of the property, had keeled over one afternoon in the back bedroom, dead from a heart attack. By the time they found the body, the man’s faithful dog had chewed off half of his face. It probably started with wake-up licks that progressed to nips and then frantic biting. But J. was often full of shit, and I’m not sure if he was just trying to scare me. If so, it worked. I’d spend the night there holding it, too nervous to walk the ten feet to the bathroom, picturing the gory scene, the spiritual remains of this lonely person floating over the room.
One muddy November night, when lingering kisses had turned into the fire of post-fight sex, I realized I was on the edge. J. and I had gone from chemical intensity to a kind of in-between thing that wasn’t satisfying but was just enough to keep me hooked. We’d spent the evening at the bar, drinking and picking at each other. By the time we shoveled into the Sugar Shack driveway, my brain was crackling. We had a fight about something ridiculous or something deep-seated and heavy, it doesn't really matter, and at some point I grabbed a shotgun from the gun cabinet.
As I write this, I can’t believe that I did such a thing, so dramatic, so serious. Could I be making this up? No. I was drunk and sad and teetering on the edge of the abyss, so I grabbed one of his (unloaded) shotguns and pointed at my face. Maybe we struggled. All I can remember is me stumbling in the shabby living room of the Sugar Shack where it was cold and damp. J. was lit from behind so that his face was cragged in shadow. I was hysterical with pent-up emotion, struggling to keep hold of this unwieldy gun. Eventually J. took it away and returned it to the cabinet. We went to sleep. I woke up the next morning barely able to move, felt around for his sleeping form and remembered that he was probably hunkered down in the duck blind with his cousins.
I’m sure he chalked the night up to my overgrown sense of drama, another mark against me to go with my unfaithfulness and love of alcohol. Thank god I've tossed aside those crutches for the most part, though I miss the drama sometimes. Drama sparks up the night, shines a little light into the abyss. Without it, you have only darkness, have to bravely perch on the edge until the abyss slowly creeps away. And that's where I seem to be right now for reasons that are unclear to me, dirging it out until the fog lifts.
"Shoot him 'fore he run now," is a lyric to the song "Shotgun," originally by Jr. Walker and the All Stars. Click here for a danceable, levity-producing version from the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown. It features some of the original Motown sessions musicians and the late Gerald Levert as singer.
Image from the Washington College magazine.
Alarmed by the seduction
The daffodils were just starting to droop, to turn brown along the edges, when J, my second serious boyfriend, the one who still shows up in cruel attempts at seduction in my dreams, for whom no pseudonym works, asked me out. That first April date kicked off a sweet season of mixed drinks with cute but somewhat foreboding names – Dirty Irishmen, Black Russians, Dark and Stormies – as well as watery draft beer. Sex took on a religious quality, became a sacrament. The chemistry kept us limping along as summer eroded into fall and the relationship thinned at the edges.
Impatiens on the front steps.
Then there was Mr. X, my future ex-husband, another April romance. After his estranged wife finally agreed to a divorce, we leapt into commitment. Mr. X brought me a bouquet of stolen lilacs, fragrant and in full bloom, along with a homemade tape of the band Squeeze. We ate thick chunks of asparagus over al dente pasta, moved on in summer to goat cheese, basil, and sundried tomatoes on seeded bread from Strawberry Fields. Those first six months were a bacchanalia of Berghoff bock and bacon, of homemade hollandaise, of chorizo burritos as big as our heads. Because he was not yet divorced, we tried to hide our relationship, played footsie under the table at the weekly library school happy hour. It only added to the excitement, to the feeling of being so lucky and in love. Chosen.
Mr. X is to blame for my love of gardening. After we moved to Ohio, he introduced me to seedlings and compost, to the pleasures of growing our own food. Our second spring together we planted a garden in the shared backyard of our downtown Columbus duplex. I couldn’t get enough of it, kept on putting flowers in here and there, wanted to grow eight different kinds of tomatoes. Unfortunately, our shaky relationship didn't survive past the fourth spring. After we moved to DC and his new job turned out to be untenable, he returned to Ohio State. He left six months after we moved, coincidentally on the weekend of our second anniversary, though it was not intended to be a separation. Distance brought perspective. One cold March day, I decided on divorce.
With that April came ... love. I'd been friends with D (now Mr. Writing to Survive), a coworker, for months, but suddenly our relationship shifted. It was a mixed-up, uncertain time. I was suspended between two lives. Mr. X and I had to come to an agreement over the house, divvy up our possessions, and fight over the dog and cats. D's mother, thousands of miles away in Southern California, was dying of cancer. My own mother, having left Kevin temporarily, was living with me.
But D and I were deep in the process of discovery, our minds tousled with passion. There were memorable evenings, late night dinners at Lebanese Taverna, sitting by the Lincoln Memorial in the pale pink of sunset watching the cherry trees turn into blurs of white, nights spent just hanging out talking, developing our shared sense of surreal humor. My mother liked him, too, and would smile when he told her "Goodbye, Mrs. Casey!" upon leaving the house. He was like the polite high school boyfriend I never had. One wind-whipped day, the weather damp and cold, D and I drove to Ocean City. We couldn't stop laughing, in part at ourselves for taking a beach trip on a day that was a holdover from winter.
It was the spring we started building the foundation for our lives. It was also a spring without a garden, when I let the lawn dry out and the dirt harden. Without water, the young azalea bushes that bordered the house died. I could barely cook a potato, let alone take care of plants.
Basil plants.
Spring returns, and with it the renewal of lust, the desire to stroke new greenery, run my fingers through the dirt. It is the beginning of love all over again, to join with my husband and make things anew.
It takes over everything, this garden lust, takes over my brain and my time, pushing everything else out. My writing has gone to seed and I haven't been visiting my blogging friends, choosing instead to sink my hands into the soil, to fill up pots with new seedlings, to transplant root-bound herbs. At my last count, we had over thirty pots filled with vegetables, herbs, and flowers. One plant remains, a sugar pumpkin that will go by the back fence, will eventually wrap its tendrils around a trellis, and that's that.
It is about time that I resisted temptation, maintained fidelity to the plants already in my life. I must avert my eyes from seductive seedlings.
Gary Flanagan's Chihuahua
Next post: what I did on my winter blogcation.
And by the way, I have nothing against chihuahuas.
chihuahua skull image from Skulls Unlimited.
Take John and Elise. John was in love with her, but clueless about the ways of women. Not as taciturn as his father, a slab of a man, thick and slow, who tended to talk only after having a few, John had learned little of relationships or communication. He tried, though, bought Elise a toaster oven. He researched and did price comparisons and found one that would fit over the counter. He matched it to her appliances, black and sleek, made sure Elise could cook those frozen tater tots that she loved so much in it.
“Happy Valentine’s Day!”
Elise was expecting flowers, maybe even a dozen red roses or some sort of singing Valentine. She wanted the cliché, craved it after seven arid manless years. There was so much expectation that when she unwrapped the box (how many roses could be in such a huge box? And so heavy?) she burst into tears. What in the hell was this? John, bless his naïve heart, thought she was crying with joy, until Elise ran out of the living room, opened her kitchen window and flung the toaster oven, still in its box, out into the warm California air.
Start with a question. Focus on intent. For John, love. For Elise, unmet expectation, a dry spell Hallmarked to death, broken by this practical, this unromantic man. But intent no longer mattered to Gary Flanagan, whose chihuahua was crushed under a toaster oven flung from a third story window. As soon as Elise heard Taquito’s truncated yelp and Gary’s shouts, she knew something bad had happened. She looked at John, still in shock himself at the strange turn the afternoon had taken, through the kitchen doorway and held a finger up to her lips, her bloodshot eyes widening in warning.
And then, she didn’t know why, she felt a surge of lust. Elise marched over to the couch and starting ripping John’s clothes off, pinned him against the flowery cushions. Caution be damned, they consummated their two-week relationship right then and there without saying a word.
In the confusion of expedited passion, her underwear went missing. Afterwards, John went on a hunt, made a big show of it, checked behind the huge ficus in the corner, rifled through the china cabinet, lifted Elise's hair and brushed the nape of her neck with his chapped lips. “Nope. No underwear there, either. Guess you’re just going to have to go commando,” he told her and she laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world. Like it was the first time she heard that one.
Elise picked up a takeout menu from the coffee table. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Chinese?” she asked, waggling a flyer from Mr. Chen’s Vegan Delites. “Chinese!” John responded with a jocular wink as he tossed her bra across the room, just missing the trash can.
Below, on Broome Street, a crowd had gathered. Tacquito’s hind quarters were barely visible under the box and a trickle of blood from his mouth had formed a dark comma on the sidewalk. Laura Falcon from Apartment 16 had heard the impact. She had poked her head out of her window and called the police right away. After putting down the phone, she went out to comfort the victim, that sweet and single Gary Flanagan from the sixth floor, handed him a huge mug of coffee and some chocolate chip cookies. Together they waited, stared up at the bank of windows, row after row of shiny glass with ominous gaps, windows cranked out to catch the breeze. Curtains flapped, blinds shuddered. Potted plants teetering on windowsills had taken on a dangerous quality. "Rows of terrabombs," thought Gary, newly enlightened about the pitfalls of gravity.
There were too many possibilities. “Not a peep from up there. Not a peep.” Gary kept repeating, and Laura would give him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. To Gary it felt creepy, like she was enjoying this chance to make herself useful. Indispensible. After the police took a report, took little Taquito away, she invited Gary into her apartment. He refused. Fred, the condo building's maintenance man, sprayed down the sidewalk as Gary watched, still holding on to the chihuahua's six-foot black leather leash. The comma of blood turned into a rusty cloud and slowly dissipated, washed into the gutter. Gary went back to his one-bedroom, determined to get totally drunk.
John and Elise have never told John, Jr. about the night he was conceived. They’ve grown quite comfortable with each other’s foibles over the last twelve years. He’s better about flowers, and she understands that you show your love in the best way you can. Sometimes she wonders what would have happened if John had brought flowers. How long it would have taken them to get beyond their assumptions? They couldn't stop talking that night, about the past, about how childhood confusion solidifies into adult surety. Elise is glad he gave her the toaster oven. She wouldn't change what she did that afternoon, wouldn't even alter it even by one second. Without the toss, the truncated yelp, the immediate intimacy of being partners in a crime of happenstance, she and John would never have gotten this far. There would be no John, Jr. It was fate, all around.
The day after the toaster oven incident, John left Gary Flanagan an anonymous apology note stuffed with twenties. The police said it was no use dusting for prints, and it was true, John had worn gloves just in case. Couldn't they have at least tried? Was Taquito's life worth so little? Gary has another dog now, a minuscule mutt from the SPCA who trembles in cold weather, whose barks sound like an infant with whooping cough. Nowadays, he tends to leave the building by the back door, shuffles Pepin past the dumpster and parked cars. He avoids the scene of the crime.
The harvest
Now we’re clutched close, lost in a kiss, tender lip to darting tongue. His calloused carpenter’s hands stroke my hair, wrap me tighter. I think over and over: “This is what is happening right now, this is what is happening right now.”
Then, a fast drive through shuddering cornfields, car windows open, my hair whipping around in a pre-knot frenzy. The stalks are taller than I am, still green, with the threat of decay around the edges.
One morning, the fields will be brown. The next week, empty.
I won’t be seventeen forever.