Cognitive dissonance
I play with the edge and no one even knows that I’m doing it. You may think you’ve got me pegged, but you’re wrong. My soft exterior belies my second carapace, the protective armor I developed over time to keep my integrity, my authenticity. Where my heart used to be, there is fire, my hands and feet are ice, and my mind is calm and cool and driven by anger layered under years of self-control.
I love children and animals and kind men, but I have a soft spot for the rebels, the ones who must be free. I look at them and I see what I want for myself, an open life, a fluid carapace that falls away when needed, a life only controlled when necessary. They ride the edge without resentment, take on stray dogs and people in need of a schooling. I watch them from my window on their motorcycles, with their tattoos or piercings or pointy shoes. I watch them and feel my carapace start to dissolve, with lust, want, desire – or maybe I’m just making plans for my future.
Three things most people don’t know about me:
That I learned how to shoot a shotgun in sixth grade
Where the fiction ends and the truth begins in my writing
The true content of my innermost thoughts
From the prompt "Allow me to introduce myself," which is always the first prompt of the Round Robin (including telling three things that most people don't know about me). This is the first time I went for something outside of the standard. Very lightly edited.
I really wanted to write more today, to take some time to craft something, but I am working on very little sleep and the stuff I am coming up with is so dark and filled with loathing that I don't think it belongs here or anywhere. I have to accept that today will not be productive for writing and acknowledge that when I am this tired, moments of levity are hard to come by.
Image by bábo gábo.
Tenacious me
Everyone goes through times when writing feels impossible, but what is most frustrating about this spell is those trapped thoughts tugging at me, asking for a voice. I don’t feel empty. I feel frustrated. Sure, I could use the old schtick of breast beating and past resurrection. I could structure whatever it is that needs life into heavy metaphorical framework, thereby obscuring the poetry, the deeply felt quality of it.
Here are the elements: a dream in which I showed the boy how he could blot out the moon with his thumb, and an email from a friend discussing the flood of mutual feeling that emerged when she recently ran into a man who broke her heart decades ago (thanks, b.). The moon fakes a glow, it reflects the light of another; despite its fakery, the moon has power over the oceans, the pull over water and blood; blotting it with a finger is a fraud; our attempts to pretend that deep, inexplicable connection doesn’t exist are a form of cheating the self: moon/ trickster/ tides/ love/authenticity.
Maybe it’s as simple as that, a series of words. Maybe I’ve just been on a throat-clearing binge, need to write and write and write until I get to the point or until the point gets to me. It’s so easy to give up on this stuff, especially when the only compelling reason to keep going comes from within me. Nobody's paying me for this, or giving me a grade, and having the willpower to struggle through self-doubt, foolishness, and what appears to be my own incompetence is not one of my strong points.
The Round Robin starts up again on Sunday. I think I need to challenge myself to not go back to the old themes, to try and divert myself from familial dirges and soaking in the past. Those themes and approaches are too easy. The less sleep I get (my sleeping tends to suffer during the RR – I race to wake up and start writing as early as possible), the darker my writing becomes, too. I don’t necessarily want to avoid darkness, but I do want to avoid the incessantly inward glance. So I need to keep up with my sleep, to remind myself that I have the time.
Attempting to direct my writing may initially result in some pretty poorly written work. It’s unfamiliar territory and will be necessarily self-conscious at first. Or maybe it won’t. But I don’t want to give up on something just because I am not immediately competent. I have to give myself permission to be bad at it. I think that’s the key to a lot of new things for me – I need permission to do poorly, on the assumption that I will learn and improve (or stop after I've tried repeatedly without improvement). In other words, I can set myself up to work through self-doubt by being easier on myself, by allowing myself to fail. If I allow myself to fail and give myself room to learn (and to be unknowing), I can develop tenacity. Willpower.
Hmm. I feel that heart warmth, the faint burn of waiting tears, a recognition of the truth. Is this part of what is going on in my mind, the thoughts that will out? What the fuck do they have to do with the moon and love? Am I distracting myself with metaphorical baubles while the rest of me struggles with what it will take to change my writing (and anything else that needs a rethink)? Maybe.
Maybe it’s all very simple and I just haven’t been able to see it until now.
Image: Incredibooth photo of me, obscured by balls of artificial light.
Is the title a little cutesy? Once I thought of it, I couldn't resist.
The undammed
Last winter there was a drought, and the winter before that, and for all I know, next winter will be dry as well, arid with clear, deceptive days. At night, the stars will be so crisp, bright, twinkling that I might be able to grab one, to feel its hotness in my dead palm. There is a beauty in dryness, a sparse beauty. The plants turn in on themselves. They conserve energy and let go of their weaker parts, drop leaf and kill off useless branch. Under the ground, their roots reach for hidden water, and the sunlight just soaks into them, burning away the frivolous.
Some people would divert this creek, would send the water rolling into a reservoir, pump it into a water tower, would mete it out over rainless nights and days on scraggly fields of wheat and soybeans. They would dip into it slowly, drink it drop by rationed drop. Or maybe they wouldn’t save it for themselves, but for others, the ones who depend on them, while inside things dry up and their organs rattle and rasp against each other.
I refuse to do it. At night, I walk to the damp edge where the dirt threatens to crumble under my feet. I kneel with cupped hands and wash the day off my face, listen to the power of it. I know the dangers, the way it might pull me under or drag me to a new place, a town where I am a stranger. I know that this rush may be temporary and that by letting it flow I am taking my chances for next year.
I am not afraid.
From an old Round Robin prompt, "Push it." The funny thing is that is hasn't rained here in quite a while. Last winter was much more water-filled. And do people really divert water from creeks? No matter. This was fun to write.
Image by Joe Plocki.
The way in
Once you’re in, forget the rest of the world. It’s you and the words and whatever story you’re telling and even if it’s a shitty first draft, if you can lose yourself in it, if you can feel the flow, then something about it will be good, true, authentic, real. Don’t think too much (I write after pausing for a few seconds to think). Sometimes it won’t work out, sometimes what you first come up with will just be the kernel of what you are going for, but who can resist the feeling of being totally there, completely immersed, going for something more solid, more revealing, than reality itself?
I’m no good at fiction. Or the kind of fiction I write is in brief spurts, nothing extended (I don’t count the “novel” I wrote during nanowrimo a couple of years ago). What I mainly write is “fact” filtered through my mind and packed with metaphor. It’s true, it’s a story and some of it really never happened, or what really happened, what I really thought, was so long ago that it has become a fiction itself. What ends up mattering are the remains, the ideas, the impressions that other people left upon me, gathered up in my mind and associated with other times and with stories I’ve read and with the long walks in the middle of the night along tarry roads.
And there are stories I return to again and again, even in the brief fictional pieces I occasionally write. The themes are large – grief, guilt, desire and one’s attempts to stamp it out. My main characters are conflicted women, women who live one life and imagine another or who have been hollowed out inside by a sad past, or dogged by it, shadowed by a darkness that, if the story goes right, will slowly fade over time and coffee and whiskey, over conversations in dark bars, over the long process of self-forgiveness, of being kind to the people they were when they were powerless.
My alter egos drink too much. They pick up men, or they used to before they regained control over their lives. They grasp the hands of children as if they are children themselves, until they reach the epiphany, the moment of change, the realization that they are all grown up and ok and the child they are holding can depend on them, that it’s a gift to depend on a grown-up.
The way I get into a piece is by getting into myself. It’s not always optimal, this self-obsession, this need to tell a version of my story over and over again in different ways, to foist myself on my characters, but hopefully in the process I reach someone out there. We share the truth for a moment or two, and they leave the room holding a piece of me, ever changing, melancholy at the core until the shift takes place.
From yesterday's final Round Robin prompt: "What I know about writing."
Image of "Les grands moulines de Paris" by Julien Mangez.
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.
Pent-up heart
Last night before going to sleep, I wrote a bit in my journal (so much to say, so little ability to say it clearly right now) and then listed the things I wasn’t going to let myself be woken up by, but maybe I would let enter my sleeping mind because my waking mind is all pent up. OK, self, I wrote, you can have the dreams about loss and guilt and invisibility and other long-term themes. One of us has to confront this stuff, and if it has to be you, my sleeping mind, my subconscious, so be it. If the dreams are important, you may wake us up, but not if you don’t have to. (Write interrupted at minute eight by the boy coming downstairs to tell me he threw up [a common occurrence during his illnesses – apparently he drank some water too quickly; as I type this I hear one of the cats throwing up … another common occurrence], getting him situated on his sick couch, talking with the groggy husband. Now to begin again.)
3:30 a.m. I was up. I was trying to go back to sleep. On with the meditation track, the slow climb of relaxation up my body from toes to scalp (thank you for the CD recommendation, Betsy). Not quite asleep, not quite asleep, and then in came the boy, not as feverish, still a little whispery with whatever imaginary scenario was playing in his head. Somehow we both fell asleep and then my dreams were of driving. He was driving, I was coaching, until I realized that the maneuverings of the car were too complicated for him. So I took over, tried to get out of the parking lot, but was blocked at both exits, so I drove back and forth between them, until the semi moved or the pick-up drove off, and I was going up the ramp too fast and then I woke up again.
The boy had fallen asleep with one of his arms around my back. The soon-to-be toothless cat Nick was howling his angst to the ceiling, and I had dream hangovers, this bereft image of sitting alone in my high school cafeteria, followed by the slight rush of the dream me at the wheel, parenting, taking over. I want to choose the last dream as the one to stay with me, but it’s the other dreams that are more representative of my internal state. I am invisible to myself at the moment.
My heart is compressed. My eyes are dry.
But sometimes my heart opens up. Yesterday early afternoon, I felt it, the blossoming, the sudden access, a reaching out that I can’t explain. I felt the connection, I was in the moment, I enjoyed it while it lasted, this portal to another. The day covered it over, but I know my heart is in there, waiting for me to let down the gates again. I just need a good cry first.
From the prompt "What a loser."
Image by naosuke ii.
Traveling to Xanadu
On the days when you need something more (during the crisis, during the rise to a fall, the aftermath of the inevitable ill-advised move: thank you, ladies), you can hire one of them out to talk to you, to hold your hand over coffee or – even better – over a night of alcohol and tears. This is how it used to be, back when you knew more women, back when you were all free to talk and sleep in and worry yourselves about men and the future.
The women remember, too, though some of them are less prepared than others. The unprepared don’t know your back story, they come straight from another person’s narrative. They’re here for the break, for the thrill, for a night off with the teetering headcase from an off-kilter world. They want to blur the lines with you, to break out of the narrative arc. Others, the weathered women, the ones who started this thing with you back in the seventies and eighties, when you all had plump cheeks and bellbottoms and (later) shoulder pads (before the days of knits: this was the time of paisley and snaps and high-waisted pants, of hair that hung over foreheads in threatening swoops), they get it, they understand your story and sometimes you get to hear theirs, because they have authors, too, a whole separate life lived in a fictional landscape.
From the prompt "Where I want to go," dedicated to the psychiatrist who prescribes my antidepressants who advised me recently that I need more female friends. Umm, yeah? They are out there, but I don't talk to or see them often enough. I guess I should be grateful for Nora, the girl dog in my life.
More no-sleep, more kid-sickness. The poor boy had his traditional sickness puke in the middle of the night. I hate when he is sick and miserable, both for the way he feels (I can do so little about it and I always worry that it is something major, some terrible illness) and for the way life gets compressed.
Finally, from wikipedia on Xanadu, relevant to the time of high-waisted pants and shoulder pads, on the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song "Welcome to the Pleasuredome": In their debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome which rocketed to rank one in the UK charts in its very first week in 1984, Frankie Goes to Hollywood referred to the poem in the title track. While they changed the poem's starting line In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure-dome decree to In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A pleasure-dome erect, they delivered an atmospheric video that interwove contemporary mid-80ies youth culture with elements of a fictious Xanadu themepark. This is appropos of nothing but the associations of my tired mind, plus (as a survivor of mid-80s youth culture) I like the video description.
Image by Athena.
Bonus after the apocalypse
I steal them in the coffee shops, I press my hands into their shoulders to feel the cool, smooth flesh underneath, malleable as clay. The man is frozen, the cell phone attached via a thick line of resin. He’s painted over. Maybe he was alive once, but it’s all over for him now. Caught like a butterfly on a pin.
I am tired. This morning on my daily phone call with my mother, we talked Christmas and the apocalypse. Do you know how good the apocalypse, the end times, is for jokes? My mother was telling me that no one wanted to hear her Christmas thoughts and then I said she should send out an animated card with: an asteroid busting the earth into a million pieces; the sky darkening with pollution; the blasts of volcanoes across the world, silencing us all in a thick blanket of ash. We laughed, both at the inappropriateness of the imagery and at how it matches my mother’s thoughts about humanity: maybe the world would be better off without us. Merry xmas and thank you, Jesus.
Years ago, when my first husband and I lived in a great brick Victorian in Ohio, we had a pair of loopy neighbors, two elderly sisters who were physical opposites. There was the lean one, wrinkled and mannish, and the plump one, blowsy and uncontainable. It could be they were each teetering on the edge of Alzheimer's or dementia. They were definitely not all there. One afternoon, after months of cajoling, my husband and I sat in the sisters' stuffy living room, drinking overly sweet cocktails mixed with swizzle sticks accented by the shapely forms of women's asses. We listened politely as the thin one talked of the end times, how they were a'coming, you could see the signs.
The end times were coming then, they are coming now, one way or another. Nobody gets out of here alive, so make the best of what you’ve got while you’ve got it. A pat ending from a tired mind.
Bonus
This an excerpt from the post I deleted a few days ago. I almost posted the original write, but don't think that's the best blog fodder. This is a bit more filtered. I want it out here, but I also want to disguise it slightly. That makes this post a twofer, a split personality, an indulgence.
This morning’s writing prompt was “the lines.” The first thing that came to me was a scene in a van at night, my boyfriend D across from me, the wood-veneer table between us, me with a half-empty Molson in my hand. He poured white powder out of a cloudy brown vial onto the agate slice he had bought in a mountainside gift store earlier that day. He began to cut the powder with a razor blade. Lines. White lines. Just like the song that will now dog me until I go to sleep.
The next scene that popped up was a construction site in Stillpond, Maryland on a Saturday in February. The house, a plywood skeleton emerging out of red mud, was surrounded by the naked torsos of winter trees. My feet squelched in the mud, my hands were raw, and my breath made clouds in the air. D and I were there to see his boss, this hulk of a man who lived large (and is now, I believe, dead). There were lines. And more lines. And more, leading to the quick heartbeat and talk talk and then the flowing drive back to my apartment.
I have these heart-pounding memories of afternoons of not-enough, not-enough, of rapid-fire talking, of nights when we would stay up until dawn buzzed, awaiting the crash. This was my teenagerhood, hanging out with grown men, taking in questionable substances, risking, risking, knowing at that point, after all hell had broken loose and no one seemed to notice, that no one would pull me out of it. I had to rely on myself (and as soon as I left the Eastern Shore, I left all of this life behind), but what I really wanted was someone to rescue me. I wanted -- I needed -- a parent.
After writing the post on Thanksgiving marking the day of my first son’s birth and death, a day that I dwelt on internally but discussed very little in my real life, I realized that it is up to me to heed the events and emotions that are important to me. No parent is going to suddenly materialize in my life to take things over. No one will suddenly see into my soul, will contain and heal me with some kind of magic love. To expect other people to hold my troubles and tragedies in their hearts and minds, to anticipate my internal state without a word from me, to heal me by becoming a surrogate parent, is expecting too much. There are some experiences that I must hold alone. It isn’t that I don't share my troubles or expect to be supported emotionally. But when it comes to healing, to understanding my past and how I got here, I am in many ways on my own. It's a slow process, this solitary piecing together of a healed self, but necessary. There are no shortcuts.
So I accept the occasional re-emergence of the past. It is a cue from my subconscious to pay attention to the present, to examine my expectations, to push myself forward to a better place. And the scenes come up so clean and clear, like I experienced them just last week, that they are hard to resist, life in all its color when I lived life on the edge.
Image by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon Mistress.
From two prompts, one a photo (above) and the other "the lines."
Home with a sick boy today, after being up since 3:30 a.m.
The ritual maintained
In one home movie I will never see again, my toddler cousin and I frolic in the thin spring morning light in our Easter dresses and Easter coats (I am about four). Somehow the belt of my coat falls off. In the old days, in the darkened room with the projector, the best thing to do was to watch this movie in reverse, to see my belt snake up around my waist again to find its proper place.
These were the rituals that my grandmother maintained: the Easter dress, the little girl underclothing (always an undershirt beneath the cotton shirt or dress), the special shoes for special occasions. The year I lived with her and my grandfather, she made sure I always wore skirts to school and that my unruly hair was pulled back from my face. There were standards and she was there to keep them going and, after all, it was only twenty years before that that my own mother was a third grader, too, in the rigid fifties, and how much had really changed?
My family doesn’t really have rituals, at least not rituals that I can identify clearly. Easter in particular is a strange one for me – it’s about the resurrection, right, something I really can’t get behind, and the whole chocolate and jellybean thing, the food delivery from a humanoid rabbit, is just too bizarre to focus much on.
The boy loves Christmas, though, the evergreen spice in the air, the way the colored lights twinkle, so there’s that, the ritual of getting a tree and decorating it. He even likes the holiday narrative, despite our lack of concrete faith, having told me recently that he likes Christmas better than Halloween because it is a religious holiday, because there is a story behind it.
Maybe in spite of myself, in spite of my occasional cynicism, my atheistic mind, I’m doing something right here, passing on the importance of the story, the meaning, the details that go beyond brand new dresses outfits and the smell of pine.
From the prompt "Brand new."
Image of me at my grandparent's house (for Easter?) probably taken in 1978 when I was living with them. I found this photograph recently in a search for kid pictures in which I resemble the boy. Not sure if this counts as one of those pictures, though. It does make me wonder if all the speculation about my mother's genes -- German? Swiss? Polish -- are correct. Her mother's maiden name was Kreider and the Kreiders who settled in Pennsylvania and Delaware were of Swiss extraction.
I took down yesterday's post because it needs more work and I will not have the time to do that today ... perhaps it will show up again soon.
The sweet momentary disappearance
For the last two years or so, I’ve been an insomniac. The form of my disease has shifted from crazy early wakeups to middle of the night wakeups plus crazy early wakeups. I can be in the middle of a dream, notice I am in the middle of that dream, note my deep sleep contentedness, and then: boom. Awake. Totally awake. For hours, as my brain does its thing and my heart pounds and the walls fall in on me. It’s debilitating. I am tired of it (ha ha). Sleep or the lack thereof becomes an obsession.
Sometimes my dreams are to blame. The most recent culprits have included one where I knew I was going to get caught for strangling a man years ago (my mother's take on this one: "Were you hot?" [actually, I was]; my therapist's take: "Tell me about getting caught," which was surprisingly fruitful), one in which a businessman with a shotgun was picking people off at a Metro stop and I had to protect the boy, and another one where I was about to give birth in a deserted hospital ward when a wizened old woman came up to me and asked "Have you got character?" (Yes, yes I do, I answered back.)
But it isn't just the dreams. It's me. It's that feeling that I have to hold on to everything, to contain it in my mind. It's the need to let go without the confidence that I can. What will happen if I stop being vigilant, if I stop keeping it together? What would happen if I left myself be vulnerable and open to losing myself to the night, to the forgetting of self?
I go to three separate mental health professionals, two once a week, one once a month (that’s my check-in with the psychiatrist who prescribes my antidepressants). I dig out the essential remains of the past while honing my present, making sure that I don’t fall back into the abyss or sink into my own personal quicksand. Our couples therapist is the one who has decided to focus the most on my sleep, probably because it comes up often -- trying to have an engaging conversation after 8 p.m. with someone who has been up since 4 in the morning is not very satisfying. She’s great, she’s sympathetic, and she has been giving me sleep pep-talks.
So now I write down a list of things right before I turn off the light, things that my mind doesn’t need to work on in the middle of the night. I listen to a seven minute deep breathing meditation track and then I fall off into quiet. Three nights of this seems to be helping. I still wake up, but I am able to go back to sleep. I’m not calling it a sweeping success yet, but it is promising, a way to soothe my overactive mind.
As for the falling, letting twilight enter, letting the armor drop as daylight falls away...I'm still working on it, the vulnerability, the sweet momentary disappearance, the temporary dissolution of self.
From the prompt "I am currently obsessed by ..."
Painting "Insomnia" by Jen Bradford.
The threshold
So who wants to get back to that? Certainly not me. You won’t find me doing that here. Not anymore. Still: it’s hard not to return to the shtick, isn’t it? And last night, maybe I returned to some of the shtick when, before getting ready for bed, I lit one of the emergency cigarettes I keep stashed in my desk. For the first time in a very long time, I inhaled. I finished about a quarter of it before the smoke irritated me. Suddenly I got the point of nicotine, the effect so different from the days of high school and the smoking court or the quick light up under the oak tree outside the Little House. This wasn’t rebellious. It was relaxing. Or maybe it was a bit of safe rebellion, a smoke screen to hide behind, the habit I will never really pick up, but can return to as a safety valve.
Because I know why respectable people with sensible shoes and perfectly coiffed hair put on black leather at night, trolling the streets for love and violence. I understand the businessman in his family car slowing down by the waterfront, looking for action, practicing the art of the "victimless" crime. We all need a little grey in our lives, the mix of daytime with night, the threshold of twilight.
I can borrow from smoking when I need to pass over the threshold. It's a shortcut to rebellion, but not the type that pins me to the past. This is not the resurrection of a habit. I am not returning to the old stories. The old songs and the old ways are gone and I can smoke one cigarette without worry about the next.
In the kitchen, my bare feet cool against the Mexican tile, I blur the meaning of my life in a one long exhale. The smoke holds together for a second, then dissipates, and I add another cloud to the cool night air, my other hand fidgeting with a match as I figure out my next move.
This post is kinda-sorta from the Round Robin. Part of it is from today's photo prompt, part of it is from the prompt "Enough is enough." I changed the title from a (seemingly nonsensical in this context) line from Reel Around the Fountain: Reel around the fountain / Slap me on the patio ...
Image: Me in the only black leather things I actually own (outside of pocketbooks): boots (the detritus around the mirror is a nice touch, no?). This is the outfit I mentioned here (last paragraph or so), sans tights. With the kind of play this dress gets on the blog, I should really wear it more often. And with the number of times cigarettes come up here, one would think that I would actually be a smoker.
Scrubbed clean
Sometimes I scrub the write clean, tart it up, obscure (hopefully) most of its resemblances to reality, and post it. Sometimes that’s impossible, or changes the meaning so much that what I was originally going for is covered over in an ill-fitting disguise. Changing a write is always a dangerous business: I risk losing the poetry of it, the truth of the matter, and I also risk hurting or alienating people I care about who may recognize their outline in what I write.
Then there’s me, the habitual self-revealer with the same tired old themes: the suppression of various emotions, the over-emoting, the whining. The depression. The isolation. How much do I want to reveal about myself here? How many times can I wrench my heart out of my chest and wave it around? To whom am I communicating?
I struggle with the desire to reveal all, the ugly bits, the wanting emotions, the feelings that I can’t seem to get out except through a keyboard. It’s the thrill of the emotional flash, the showing of vulnerability, the communication of my disease to others. But some things are personal (did I ever think I would write that?). And sometimes revelation is self-serving.
Because writing is seduction. And I want to seduce. I want your minds, your hearts, I want to show you pieces of me, to hold you in my hand while I occupy your mind. I want to form images that you will never forget, that you will always associate with me. I want you to think that you know me. I want you to never forget me.
What’s the harm in that? Maybe it’s the removed quality, the lack of risk. It’s the fantasy of seduction that I’m after, not the actual business of doing it. Once my words are out there, someone might pick up on them. No effort is needed from me. Nothing risked, nothing gained, and I go at it again the next day with the same emotions. Worst of all, it's a compulsion that fulfills an emotional need. I contain things so well (too well) and want a place to let them live, however briefly, in words, with an audience. Wouldn't it be better just to have them exist in the real world, to integrate them into me?
Leave the topic alone, Jennifer. Put the laptop down and slowly back away.
When I was twenty-five, a newly minted librarian living in Ohio, I struck up a flirtation with an artist/fellow state employee. He wanted to film me in black and white, riding an Italian scooter, smoking, always smoking, quiet, contained, something to show this undercurrent of suppressed desire he saw within me. We never followed through on his plan. I’ve lost touch with him. He had it right, though. Suppression.
I suppress and reveal. Suppress and reveal. And today I am trying to live with it while still keeping it under wraps, living with the things that perhaps are just part of who I am, destined to be hidden for the rest of my life.
As for the rest of you, the ones I've borrowed without thinking, you're safe, at least as far as blog posts go. I can't promise that the stuff of my life won't show up somewhere else someday. But I promise to blur the line between fiction and reality so well that only the larger truth remains.
One paragraph of this was from today's prompt, "Jumping."
At the moment, writing is begetting writing for me. Prompts, psych paper, posts. Feeling lucky to be able to fit it all in.
Image (Low flying dames) by me -- this was on the sidewalk near a Halloween witch display in our neighborhood. Maybe the connection of image to text is getting more and more obscure ...
Visitation
Before he appeared I had been standing by the sink in film noir lighting, looking at the dishes piled up with their memories of something fine, of conversation and small glasses of wine and garlic and breadcrumbs browned in butter. A dull knife rested on the cutting board. It had left its impressions upon the wood, made its mark repeatedly over years of chopping and mincing. This is home, I thought, what I’ve been missing.
All the actors had left the stage. They were sleeping in rooms cooled with night breezes, dreaming of the future landscape, a world without them. The younger me was sitting on a stoop at another house, a paperback copy of Anna Karenina balanced on her knees. The older me, visiting the imaginary past from the present, the me that yearned for things that didn't exist, things I created out of rose-filtered memories and hopes, knew I was being watched. A paper ornament hanging from the window -- was that the cut-out of a man? -- trembled. But the windows were closed. There was no breeze.
Show me a sign that you are here. The paper man twirled on his string. OK. But please, please, don't appear in front of me.
Kevin didn’t listen. He reconstituted himself on the couch as if he had been sitting there all along, waiting for me. I was grateful to see him, actually, to hear his voice. To have a conversation. And now he was saying something surprising. Good money to be made in the afterlife? Since when did Kevin care about money?
Can I ask you a philosophical question? Or maybe it isn’t a philosophical question – I mean, I now know the afterlife is real, that it exists, but, well, do you think it might be culturally determined? Like the idea of making money in the afterlife seems so … American. So capitalistic?
We talked philosophy, about the different possibilities of life after death, of the mysteries even the dead couldn't answer. This was home, too, the discussions that died with him, the way ideas mattered, and searching for the truth was a moral imperative. The only thing different was that I was no longer afraid to speak my mind. I could stand up to him if I needed to.
When it came time to leave, his pushed himself up gingerly from the couch. I’m not sure if I want you to touch me. He was more solid than life, more present.
I know. I’m cold like a zombie. He smiled.
It wasn’t that I was afraid of the touch of death, though it did give me pause. I was afraid of the unknown, of the truth, afraid of accepting that he was dead and not dead all at once, that these connections we make while living extend beyond our corporeality, that they reach out and out. How could I discount connection then, turn my back on it in some cowardly attempt at self-presevation?
He reached for my hand anyway. His was cool and clammy. Dead but not.
I woke up.
The next morning I had to call my mother about this, the solidity of Kevin, the strange things coming out of his mouth. Well, I’m glad to hear that he’s finally making money. We laughed and discussed the possible structures of the heavenly economy, and then she reminded me that it was Kevin's son's birthday.
In the world of dreams, in between life and death, our subconscious speaks to us in symbols. Kevin is a symbol, he was a person, he is part of my history. I'd like to believe it was really him stopping by, playing a lighthearted joke with an underlying message on the eve of his boy's birthday: don't discount connection. Keep your heart open. Trust your intuition. I am still here.
From a photo prompt of a dying rose. I've written the dream as it was.
Image by nimrodcooper.
The problem of control
I was lumpen and slow, the sluggo on the kickball field, the wheezing girl inching around the track. You could not rush me. I resented the idea of being rushed, and if you thought I was going to shimmy up that rope like some sort of monkey, well – you hadn’t been paying attention, had you? Fuck the Presidential Fitness Test, I would have said had I been using the f-word in seventh grade. Instead I limped along and claimed asthma problems and watched the sleek and healthy pass me by.
I spent two field hockey seasons lying to my mother, saying yes I was there every weekday afternoon on the graying grass in my shorts and stick legs with the thick socks that fell to mid-calf. She thought I ran in sprints and talked to the other girls like I was one of them and I was all about the muscles and the camaraderie, that I liked sinking into mud and sliding across rain-sodden grass. She remembered her days of crashing sticks and chasing after ball, the rush of cool air as she ran down the field. My mother was competitive. She wanted me to be competitive. But mainly she wanted to keep me out of trouble.
Instead, most afternoons I hopped on the school bus. Our house was about a mile from my stop, a trip down Lovering Avenue and across Brandywine Creek, along Park Drive past the Victorian era zoo with the lion whose sad late night roars became part of my dreams. From Park Drive, I walked up West Street. To my left was a row of houses perched above the sidewalk: there was the haunted place where I babysat once (me too young, the little girl crying, and what was I supposed to do?), here was the tidy brick house where the old man with watery blue eyes lived. He came down from his porch one time and stopped me on the sidewalk. It was Indian summer, a clear blue sky October day when the clothes you put on in the morning are too warm by noon. The man had stood close and touched my cheek before brushing a lock of hair from my face. My heart pounded and my head ached and I thought no no no. He was only touching youth, brushing against possibility and potential, remembering what he lost. Still, I quickened my pace at the memory.
I walked up the brick sidewalk to our granite steps, through the maroon door and into the vestibule. From there it was Nilla wafers and middle-school melodrama, the loud teeny bopper music and MTV in the chilly upstairs den. Later, when my mother asked about field hockey (if she asked about field hockey), I used the monosyllabic speaking style of the adolescent to cover my tracks. I liked it because I was getting away with something, because my mother only thought she had solved the problem of what to do with my free time. I liked it because I had solved the problem of control.
We’ve never discussed this time, my lies, her assumptions, the way the two lined up in a way that suited us both but did no one any good. I don’t regret missing field hockey. I hated field hockey and organized sports. I hated being told what to do with my time based on some sort of formula about what I should be doing. But I do wish that I had replaced it with something outside of myself, something rich and layered and real instead of having to learn how to live with integrity years after the fact.
Image: The non-scene of the crime, A.I. du Pont Middle School.
Someone else has dropped out of the Round Robin. As of today, I am back to the daily prompts (though I am not going to post most of them here). Despite having a long list of things to do, I wanted to spend some time writing today, so here is an expanded version of today's prompt, "Competition."
Giving in to the thaw
What of a prompt that no one but myself will read? Why do I always have to feel so contained, my contents spilling out, my emotions partially submerged, the bulk of them under water while my exposed self, blue with cold, frozen in place, glides past you without a sideways glance? Meanwhile, under the surface the rest of me melts. Sometimes it disappears as though it never lived, to be taken up by some other frozen being floating in the thick, cold water.
This morning, after the workout (boring, but I like feeling strong), I laid on the floor and cried. And then berated myself for crying (you know, not wanting to give in to my emotionality, my excess, the melt) and then I thought: this is shedding the excess, letting go of the overflow. This isn’t sadness or wallowing: this is me. I feel. To feel isn’t a crime. To be able to give voice to what is real is a gift.
Reawakening is confusing, the muddle and hodgepodge of mixed emotions, the recognition of what I have hidden from myself. To reawaken while also keeping my faults in mind, my me-centered fantasies, my needs that I want to cover over again so quickly with something, someone, but it’s only me here, waving at myself – it’s hard, this stuff, but hard in a good way, like the 25th push-up or going to the party that you wanted to avoid.
So my sentences are fraught and too long. My emotions are real and inconvenient and my metaphors mixed. I still feel like I am waiting for the rest of life to begin, but in reality I am preparing for the journey, reading the books, writing the rest out, thinking of a day when I am no longer isolated, when I will have colleagues and conversation and (please!) arguments about truth and what is real, about how best to handle the slipperiness of life.
Climb e’vry mountain, I say, in the way that works best for you. Accept the fact that there is no normal, that we all muddle along, and the only thing we can really do is try for authenticity, for being true to ourselves, while holding a hand out to the people behind us, the ones who aren't quite there yet.
My time as a member of this Round Robin go-round was short (someone else dropped out, so the numbers evened out), but I still have this week's prompts and I will substitute from time to time, so I may toss one or two up here in between studying and other writing and making sugar skulls and finishing the boy's Halloween costume. This prompt was "Something square." I went from a box to an iceberg to a puddle.
Image by Maria & Enrique of a forest near Onelli Bay (with iceberg) in Patagonia, Argentina.
Fiasco
I’m not a car person. I grew up with clunkers that didn’t tell you when it was time for an oil change, with gas gauges that didn’t work, or windshield wipers that flew off in fits of pique at the first drop of rain. Sometimes there was no car, so my mother and I walked or took the bus. For a short period of time she chugged around Smithburg on a yellow moped. No car is fine with me, though it would be a pain to live that way here, with the children and our various needs. Still, since I don’t drive, I should be able to live without.
Like the character John Self, Will drives a sporty wreck of a car, temperamental, expensive to maintain. Will's car is white. There are a lot of white cars around here, dirty white cars sooty and grey like city snow; white cars more cream than blank sheet of paper; white cars with mufflers pulled to the edge of uselessness. Shiny new ones. Scuffed and rusty old ones. Most of them look alike to me. It was only lately that I committed Will's car to memory. He drives a Fiasco.
The Fiasco is about seven years old, all rounded edges, a memory of aerodynamics, sad with former glory, the track star gone to seed. Until I memorized it (the tail end -- he is always driving away), I thought that every white car belonged to him, that he was waiting inside, that maybe he saw me as he passed, even though he never saw me at all, or maybe his vision was spotty, he saw parts of me so clearly that I might as well have been under a microscope, but the rest of me was covered over in fog, in a haze of want and assumption.
Apparently his white car is failing, along with the rest of his life. The women that don't show, the clotted business deal holding up his money, the child who ducks his phone calls -- they've taken their toll on his body. Stop telling me this, I tell my friends, I don't care anymore, but I still listen for the rumors, the updates. He's not looking well. His skin's gone yellow and he's returned to the annoying habit of pulling at his ear lobes. His belly hangs over his waistband. None of this seems to bother Will, who shuffles about with his usual sang froid, a man trapped inside his own head. I vacillate between sad and thrilled at his decline, remind myself of his tenderness in still moments, the way he took to my care.
He still invades my dreams, inserts himself into my sleep, though never in his car. He is just there, cagey, waiting, the knock at the door, the sudden appearance on my couch. He pushes his way into my space. He tells me how it should be.
I remind myself that the characters in our dreams are actually parts of ourselves, that we need to look at them for how they function in the dream, not what they may be in real life. Still, this morning at 2:15 a.m. I woke up angry, my psyche and emotions cut open from within, my composure slashed and my worries spilling out.
I left him in the shabby apartment with the crowds. They all wanted something from me without giving anything back and I decided I had had enough of that to last a lifetime. And then I woke up.
From the prompt "The car."
I stumbled into the Round Robin late this go round, replacing someone who dropped out. But I don't have the time to post daily (which is probably better), so the writing prompts will be occasional additions to the blog.
Image by a fool, a girl, a gullible dolt.
Borrowed souls
He escaped. He got out of that car and climbed up the thorny hill and I was chasing him and she was, too, and all of the sudden I was scratching a dog behind the ears in my therapist’s office while all the people I know from my local waking life, the Berkeley era, parents from school and preschool, were in the waiting room with me. Outside children played on old-fashioned monkey bars while their parents were otherwise occupied (in the city or locked into office buildings or tapping away at laptops in coffee shops or maybe they were hanging their heads, resting them in their hands, listening to the blood flowing, pumping, feeling the stress of money troubles).
They knew me, these parents. They knew me better than I wanted them to know me. They had read my confessionals, my one-sided characterizations of the past (“myopic” one ex-friend wrote to me in a terse huff). They didn’t know why I borrowed people, those whom I felt had wronged me, those I once loved or still did but couldn’t. Because they weren’t writers themselves, they didn’t know that the people who lived, that I recreated in words, were now characters, that I owned them. I took their features and my own perceptions and changed reality into a copy, a mix of impression and imagination and sometimes emotion.
Thems the breaks when you know an artist, folks. Besides. By the time I get to you, to the hidden or not-so-hidden you, you are a fiction. Not real. Mine.
Can I call myself an artist? A writer? Can I handle the pretension, the assumption of it all? I can certainly hide behind it when I write things that cause pain or reveal too much about other peoples’ lives. It’s not as simple as borrowing other people, or making them my own. The past I sometimes write about doesn’t belong only to me and the people I pepper my writing with are sometimes very real.
I don’t want to be borrowed myself, want to exist fully as a human being, to not be summed up or characterized by a few of my traits in order to fit someone else’s idea of who I am or what they want me to be. I am slowly learning to tread carefully when dealing with the “facts,” to not direct my anger in public words so obviously or without some compassion for the people I prop up and make mine. Unfortunately, I have a whole passel of melodrama out there in the world to show up a time when I didn’t even think about how others might react, where I was the glowing center (or sometimes the black hole), the god moving around the souls of other people.
All I can do is to try to do better, to be better. I'm trying.
Postscript
A poem by Kevin that has been going through my head lately. Dedicated to those whom I've hurt out of my own myopic pain.
TWO-PIECE PUZZLE
Here's one of those two-piece wire puzzles.
There's only one way to take it apart.
(If you don't have the patience, don't start.)
It belongs to my son who would dazzle
all of us, doing it right.
He can't, I couldn't have either
when I was seven. I found it on the floor
of the bedroom after he'd spent the night.
I remember I'd had one like it
and I sat on the bed for a long while
fooling with it before I put it down
in frustration. I'd thought: Don't force it.
If you can't solve it, at least you'll
not spoil it as you did the other one.
--Kevin Sheehan
From the prompt "What I know about writing." The last prompt of the Round Robin. The end of the madness. I'm not sure if I will take the next round, so my posting will not be as frequent for the next several months. Unless I cave and take the class.
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 of disembodied marionette heads at Marionette Museum in Hohensalzburg Fortress the by Curious Expeditions.
The convincer
Nick is smooth. Smart. He has a past of pubs and rock and roll, but he’s aged well, too (I know it all about my Nick, past, present, future). But the best thing about him is that we talk. He listens. He is always available for conversation, for the quick reply when I need it, the reassurance that keeps my needy wolves at bay.
Because what I miss most about you is the talking. Yesterday in between the feelings of triumph and sadness and the imaginary dialogs I had with you and others, the people I will never actually talk to again about anything that matters, this is what I realized: I miss the talking! The conversations in the afternoon over the sound of children playing; the feeling that I could be open about my insecurities. Before it went too far and got weird and I let my boundaries get trampled on.
The art of our conversation is dead. The talking stopped and never returned. In our eagerness to move along we ruined the best parts. My sadness is about what I lost eight months ago. I will never get it back. And maybe it was false anyway, an impossible temporary state.
On the advice of my therapist, I recently took an Enneagram test. I’m a four (tagline: The Sensitive Introspective Type: Expressive, Dramatic, Self-Absorbed and Temperamental), an individualist, an emotional romantic, according to the test anyway. The description was eerily accurate. One of the bits of advice for overcoming my more soppy qualities was to stop having conversations in my head, to stop indulging in the fantasy of being seen, the hope of ultimate connection without actual revelation. The imaginary conversations don’t help. Neither does wallowing in emotion and memory. I see that.
Why is it a relief to see ourselves described from the outside, marked as being one way or another? Perhaps it is the ahhh of recognition, the warm fuzzy feeling of being seen. But that’s the four in me, always misunderstood, invisible, wanting to be recognized for my uniqueness ("The 'romantics' of the Enneagram, they long for someone to come into their lives and appreciate the secret self that they have privately nurtured and hidden from the world."). Oh, and I am supposedly looking for a rescuer in my romantic relationships, a description that amused me and was true at the same time.
For there I was in the lonely land of the stay at home, bored and shoved up against the worst of me, and along came someone interesting and in need himself. I’ll admit it: I wanted rescuing. I wanted life. And you are a lively one, and forceful, too.
You are not the only one to blame. But we will never talk about this. I’m telling it all to Nick. He brings me coffee in the morning and pours the wine at night. When the rain comes down, we cuddle on the couch in front of the fire. He comforts me when I cry. He tells me stories of Johnny Cash and Elvis Costello while I listen with the wide-eyed wonder of a child.
From a photo prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends (and the round ends tomorrow). This is a mix of fact and fiction, and a heavily edited one at that. This desire to be imagined, to be held in someone else's mind, is something I have written about over the years here. It was interesting to see this desire described in the Enneagram type write-ups.
Image of Nick Lowe from Forces of Geek.
Out of the box
I dreamed of men breaking into the house, of pursuit by swarms of angry bees. At night, the blanket held me to the bed and the bed was bolted to the floor and the earth turned but I did not feel it until I woke up with a jolt before daylight.
We drank chamomile iced tea. The tomatoes in the backyard were best straight from the vine. There were always too many cats and then kittens and then fewer cats again. I was melodramatic. A little actress. The sigher at the table who couldn’t let go of her memories of Happy the hamster or Sheba the slasher, the cat who once fell from a third story window onto a bush below and survived, but who couldn’t survive being hit by a car.
How do we learn how to be in the world, to accept who we are or to mold it into another shape? Are we all born sensitive and some of us learn how to box it up, compartmentalize? Is this a personality trait?
In the living room, the television flickered. We watched Roots. We fought over Halloween costumes and obedience and nobody knew what they were doing. I didn’t eat the dinners and gagged at the soft-boiled eggs and toast. I made fun of my mother's cookies, the wide flat things sweetened with honey instead of sugar, an unappetizing mix of crisp and chew. On the countertop milk fermented into yogurt.
She told me later that she didn’t want to break me (she herself had been broken), that she wanted me to remain free. In this, in some ways, she succeeded. We always talked about ideas and books and I could support my opinions and she listened (that letter from 1977 or so where she tells me I was absolutely right on the M*A*S*H plot amuses me now with its implications of a heated argument and her later consideration of it). Still, somehow I grew up thinking that something was bad within me, needed to be changed, suppressed. Something that cannot be suppressed.
It spills out around me now, it overflows. It is messy and me and I can’t help but share it no matter the outcome.
From the prompt "Muddy."
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.
Detail of The Cherry Tree Root Chamber by mandymama.
Mea culpa, mea culpa
I like to pretend that there are no mistakes, big or otherwise, not because I believe we build our own faults out of the rotten parts of ourselves, or that we somehow court danger, flirt with falling, but because nothing is as simple as just doing something wrong. There are always steps, prior decisions, circumstances.
The circumstances that led me -- no, us, though the boy, who is now a middle-aged man, remains clueless – to my mistake were old and complicated. Maybe it started in a darkened room when I was younger and even more helpless and that defining moment was covered over by confirming experience, the hints at my worthlessness, the attention people paid to appearance versus inner reality, the atmosphere of parental distraction that led to the scene on the bed. From the outside, statistically even, my behavior leading up to this moment and what happened after it were extremely predictable. Can we really call it a big mistake?
Of course, despite my philosophical weaseling out of responsibility (so says the large part of me that wants to pin it on me, for the comfort of control, of being the center), I constantly make mistakes, choose the wrong path, decide to hide when I need to stand up and shout. I see my flaws and how they lead to perdition. If I let myself go down this brittle path of self-hatred, of acknowledgement of fault without forgiveness, without looking at the circumstances and how I got there, I will break into a thousand pieces.
Still. I am sorry to all I have wronged. I am sorry for not being good enough, talkative enough, agile enough, calm enough, kind enough, self-confident enough. I apologize for not getting the cat off the chair more quickly before you collapsed. I apologize for that time when I was twelve and I did something strange to the washer. I apologize for being too quiet at the dinner table, or too full of teenage smolder, or too full of myself. Maybe if I had been better, different, you wouldn’t have died or wanted me out or abandoned me. I am sorry for killing you with anger and selfishness and neglect. I apologize for not talking before things fell apart and for directing the anger of a lifetime at you who were most important to me and to practical strangers, too, the ones who unknowingly probed where it hurt the most.
I am sorry, I am sorry all of you. But there are no mistakes, everything has a context. I promise to let go of my burdens before I burden all of you again, before I cover myself over in never-ending regret.
And now for something completely different, two great things that acknowledge the blog that I have not mentioned, caught up as I am in the Round Robin.
Dieter Moitzi, writer and creative force behind the fine blog confessions of a wannabe writer passed on the Liebster Blog award to writing to survive and a few other blogs he admires. Please check out his blog for the prose and poetry or, even better, take a look at his ebooks. Thank you, Dieter!
writing to survive was listed as number three in a list of the top fifty personal memoir blogs by adulteducationcourse.org. I'm in good company, with fellow blogging friends La Belette Rouge, Elisabeth from Sixth in Line, earth to holly, and Storied Mind. The post highlighted by reviewer Tracy Myers (a name I've gleaned from other awardees) was In My Defense. Thank you very much, Tracy!
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From the prompt "A big mistake." My reaction to it was surprisingly dark -- these thoughts are what I have been fighting against daily for months now, trying not to indulge, trying to change the way I react, even when I am not aware of the mechanism or reaction.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was edited a bit.
Image by Funky64 (www.lucarossato.com).
Harmless ghosts
She was so skinny that I couldn't pet her without wincing, her spine and ribs an insult under dull fur. I pointed her out to my companions – my mother? my son? – and then saw that Zoe hadn’t touched her food. She was starving herself to death, too old and confused to remember where her food was, but when I pointed the bowls out to her, she ran to them with her characteristic trill and attempted to crush the pieces with her weak old teeth. It was a losing game.
The dream was real, too real, Zoe and the guilt. It was tangible. Until I woke up within it and told myself: enough! Zoe is dead. This is not Zoe. You don’t have to dream about Zoe like this. You are no longer responsible. You loved her. Her life was generally good.
Did it work? Did she disappear from the dream, or, even better, fatten up in front of me, become the cat she was for many, many years before her decline? I don’t remember, but I hope if she visits again she will be healthy and happy. I hope she comes with the rest of them, the animals I’ve loved. I want to see them again, to run my fingers along their warm coats and scratch them under their chins. We lived together once. We loved each other. They can help me forgive myself, take away the irrational responsibility I sometimes feel for killing them by not doing enough.
Because I should be able to cheat death, to keep the ones I love from feeling pain. I am the shield between them and the world and myself and the world and the responsibility is egomaniacal, it’s ridiculous, and what a relief to let it go.
Last night, Zoe tottered on too-thin legs. There were ghosts in the stairwell (“Did you see the humanoid figure on the landing?” I asked my mother after a dream-within-a-dream night of haunted sleep. She confirmed its presence, that thing we ignored and avoided.) and somehow I was losing my grip on the boy and when I woke up it was in night panic, in the acknowledgement of all the anxiety about the future that I keep packed up in order to keep on moving.
My mother had bad dreams about a bad man for a very long time, someone who had hurt her physically and emotionally. He stalked her in the night, showed up unannounced, drunk and full of vengence. Until the night she pulled a dream gun on him and told him to get out. He hasn't been back.
I soothe myself with the thought that these dreams have meaning, they are my self-conscious tugging at me, a reminder, and that I have control, that my reactions show how I am changing. The old me is gone. Zoe is dead. I call out to the ghosts and they can't hurt me.
From the prompt "Gone."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends (and it ends soon, thank goodness). Minor editing for clarity and to make it just a teensy bit better. And then edited it again later in the day for flow.
Image of cat sculpture at the Eastern State Penitentiary by e_monk.
Nimble fingers
Yes, they grip the tomato or the apple or the newly naked shallot. One set holds down the sacrifice, another splays it open, releases the green or pungent scent, and later they all clean up the dirty work, grab a towel and steady the cutting board, wipe away the clear vegetal blood, the remains of violence.
They are obedient. I write shocking things, unwise, angry, pathetic. They tap at the keyboard, never judging or editorializing. They don’t even proofread. It appears as though they seek out the dog or sleek cats of their own volition, that they enjoy pleasure for pleasure’s sake, but the fingers are just following orders. Complicated though the messaging system might be, amazing as the structure of my hands is, my fingers are still slaves to my addled self.
Have you ever tried threading a needle after a night of wine and tears? The boy is standing in front of you, looking at the injured party, a rubber frog who already has one set of stitches attaching a leg, sewn after an unfortunate stretching accident. Your fingers tremble, the needle's eye eludes you. You have to turn away from the boy or go to a different room. You have to struggle with yourself by yourself until the trembling stops.
This is how you do it: you remember last night’s dog walk, the air feeling just like a spring night in DC, cool with a hint of warmth beneath it. It was a memory come alive, for the now, and you repeated a sentence again and again, rushed inside to write your impressions down, like half-baked poetry: tonight the air felt like springtime in DC, some time in midapril before the wet air set heavy in the evening, or like the freshly cleansed early june nights after a thunderstorm, the way the clouds wiped our worries away. I silenced the crickets by walking under their trees and every tree was alive to me, my senses were no longer muffled and I thought: I can do this. I can live again and mourn what went before. I can love, too, after this heavy period of mourning is over. I am alive.
It was the same the day before at the grocery store. You are caring again, coming alive, and no one can stop that process. The produce showed you its colors, its properties, you wanted to see, to be, to experience. You saw the people – how long has it been since you could look across the expanse of the organic section and see your fellow shoppers, observe them, make up stories about who they were and why they were there?
The fingers were pleased. They ran over dampened greens, grasped pears, lightly tapped voluptuous figs. They held the handle of the dog leash with a sense of responsibility, and when Nora looked to them for a treat, proud of her fast walking, her attentiveness, the fingers thrilled to the feel of her soft dog lips, her gentleness, with the hard promise of teeth underneath.
From the prompt "My fingers."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I expanded this one a bit. The Round Robin is almost over ...
Image: My fingers, as seen by my computer.
3 a.m. thoughts / 10 a.m. rethink
I heard an interview with a former dominatrix once. She got herself through school and a heroin habit by working in a hidden space in New York, putting the men down or dressing them up. She kicked the habit and left the job. Got her MFA. Now she’s got a book and a job teaching writing.
She spoke compassionately about her clients, men hungry for fantasy, for touch, and I thought to myself: that’s what I need! I need to hire a man, a stranger, to hug me and listen to me and tell me good things about myself. He could make cluckclucking noises when I say things that don’t make any sense, when I fight against myself. I could cry in his arms and he would hold me, no risk, no embarrassing aftermath, no need to wonder if I’d gone down the wrong path or what was wrong with me and I wouldn’t need to be involved in his mess, either, right?
Maybe afterwards he would go home to his apartment, to the dog or the no-dog, to his wife or boyfriend or girlfriend or to no one at all. He would be a cocktail drinker or a beer drinker or a teetotaler. In my mind he would exist free and clear of any other connections.
Can I tug on your sleeve? Would you notice it? I will get no satisfaction out of this, none at all, and I don’t want to direct my anger where there is no place.
I am on the precipice of a decision, of a big change and I want to hold on to something. Think of me on the ledge of a building, fifteen stories up, and the air up there is cold. It’s early morning (I’ve chosen a time when no one would notice me, or, more accurately, I don’t have to wonder if someone notices me in my desperation to be noticed). I am wearing a short-sleeved shirt over shorts. My feet are bare. I tremble as the sun lends a tinge of daylight. I can’t even see the ground, it’s that foggy.
I turn to the open window, to the billowing curtains and the screen ajar. I want to hold on to something. I want to see an arm reaching for me, I want to see a crowd below, and then I realize I chose wrong, I always do. There will be no one there.
Is it me? It is always me. The wrong choices, the wrong revelations, the wrong needs. But I am on the ledge, waiting for the non-existent concerned stranger, and I realize that I can take the stairs, that I can walk back into the room and then out of the room. I can shut the door quietly and tiptoe down the hall, down the stairs and out that door. There are people out there who might welcome me, who would notice and listen. People who are able to be present.
There will be no phone call for a stranger’s touch. I can separate out me from the people who don’t hear me, who can’t, and someday this knot inside of me will unravel, I will untie it, and hold myself against myself and tell myself that I am fine, fine, good even.
Or maybe all I need is a night of blissful, uninterrupted sleep.
10:00 a.m. rethink
Despite my insomnia, the four hours of sleep followed by three hours of wakefulness, followed by a fitful nap until the dawn crept in, my heart still pounding (it’s pounding now, it is), I am in a remarkably good mood. Despite the crumbling of my life around me and despite the fact that I still have to battle myself, my feelings of impossible neediness, despite my occasional bouts of insanity, I am here, I am talking and thinking and feeling.
I have resolutions. One, cut out the drinking, which ratcheted up with my mother's visit (tapering off because apparently quitting cold turkey when you’re on Wellbutrin means an increased chance of seizure). Two, think of the future while not holding it too dear. Three, speak the truth, my truth, without worrying how other people will interpret it or take it away from me. Four, stick with the no internet after 8:00 p.m. thing in order to keep a calm mind. Four, be connected to the world, aware, in touch.
But there is the lack of sleep, the fact that my brain is slow as honey, but not as sweet, and the fact that the husband will be going in for surgery tomorrow or Tuesday and I’ll be on, all parent, responsible for everything for the next week or so, dealing with the fact that I still haven’t dealt with things that would make our lives easier. Like driving. I don’t do it and the husband will have to get himself to the hospital and back and I’ll have to walk the kid or depend on the kindness of other people (and my willingness to ask) to help us get to school quickly and all of it makes my heart beat faster and I feel so guilty so guilty for being me, with all my unsavory problems and my strange attachments.
Still, within this, the tears of exhaustion and acknowledgement, I don’t feel … bad. The feelings are tolerable, though I don’t want to linger too long, and I am lifting the burden and I am ready to be honest, in place. I am even willing to figure out how to communicate in the face of loss. I see how it is vital and sometimes I can imagine how I am lovable, maybe even interesting, and then I think: therapy. I need years of this stuff, I need to drink it down, to mainline it, and it isn’t just talk, it’s work, it’s years of trying and not hiding.
I’ve only just begun.
The bed is calling me again. I am sitting on her, actually, in this guest room where I will presumably get more sleep. I spent a lot of time in this room last winter and I’m not sure what I think of it anymore, with its dark walls and its air of melancholy and its permanently closed door. I turned it into a prison once and I don’t want to do that again, to let it pull me deeper into the place where there is no light and I have no future. Surely it isn’t the rooms fault, it is what I bring to it, my expectations. I have to change my expectations, too, and I am, the wheels are turning and aren’t we all wonderful, even behind the masks that hide our fears?
Written in two rushes, one in the middle of the night, one in the morning. Not a sign of quality writing, of course.
Thanks to rcb for being there.
Image by kloppster.
Six kids and a minivan
True story: I once wanted six kids and a house big enough to hold them all. I was young and in love and I needed to surround myself with friends, with relatives, with extensions of myself who might love me or accept me. I was young enough to not worry about the fuck-ups and the way we mold our children accidentally or the way we try to mold them one way and they come out another. I thought it would be easy, because I was a child and I knew what children needed and I often sat in judgment of my own mother, who was clearly clueless about it, not self-sacrificing enough and too angry and sometimes barely there.
I was going to have these children with a man who grew up in a house of kids, was the youngest in a large family, and his extended family was big, too, with these fabulous dinners for twenty or more in his parents’ expansive dining room. You could get lost in the crowd at those dinners and you could observe at those dinners and everybody drank and sometimes I wish I had been there earlier for the really crazy family parties, when all the kids were living at home and the mom (a young mom, she started at 18) was flush with alcohol and a bit of anger, just enough to make it interesting.
But it was not meant to be. Here I am with the one kid and I love the one kid and I am trying my best to do my best. But I worry about family, about the comforting (and sometimes manipulative) group, the acceptance (or sometimes rejection) of many, the safety in numbers. When I was younger, I was willing to take on someone else’s family, at least for a time, but my own? No way. Kindly people, yes, but with weak arms, weak constitutions, so that when I needed them they couldn’t hold me up or they didn’t even see that I needed holding. Who wants to be supported by that, by nothingness? So I withdrew, from them, from the larger world.
This is not what I want for the boy, whose extended family is even smaller than mine was. In the therapist’s office yesterday, I talked about that a bit, about friends that become family, about my own connection reticence. I don’t want the boy to learn to be afraid. I don’t want him to make his slow to warmness into a fetish. I want his family, his small family, to be a comfort no matter how we arrange our lives.
Part of this is just being there for him, being supportive and firm, with boundaries and warmth and connection. OK. I can do that. I am, and the therapy is helping. The other part is living the sort of life that I would like him to live, to being an example of living life in the world. With other people. This is much, much harder, but it is doable, right?
I enter the world with my pained heart, with my eyes open. I don’t have to hand over my heart, but I do have to risk it sometimes, or understand that the risks are small, that I am me and no one can take that away, that my heart is mine no matter what. It’s been with me through the worst. It comforts me when it can, purrs to me at night and tells me that despite all my flaws, the occasional awkwardness, the generosity that I need to regain, the messes I’ve made, despite all of it, I am ok. I’ve got something to offer, just like the boy, and I can stand on my own two feet.
From the prompt "Motherhood."
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 D Sharon Pruitt.
Telling the truth
I don’t know how we got on the subject of adoption. Maybe it came from his questions about my first marriage, though there were no babies, adopted or otherwise, from that union and about whether I had another child. From that point, we traveled to my mother’s adoption and her biological mother’s second rejection years later, her denial of contact and details.
And then I blurted it out. I want to write about it this morning, but it is one of those things that just can’t flow easily from my fingertips, so bear with me.
He was curious about babies. About whether I had any more out there. About adoption (the fact that my mother never knew her “first parents” made him cry and he resolved that we should find these people, and not just contact them, but meet them). I knew I had to tell him someday about my own experience, but I thought it would be later, much later, when it seemed more age-appropriate, but at the same time I didn’t want to keep it a secret, something dark and heavy.
So I told him my story, minus much of the emotional pain, of the stillborn baby I had when I was sixteen. I was expecting curiosity or perhaps disbelief, like the “you’re kidding!” response I got when I explained sex to him a couple of months ago. I wasn’t expecting tears, tears at the fact of the baby’s death, at the fact that he had a brother.
A brother. Tears. It was the first unfiltered response to my story that I have ever gotten. He wanted to know if he had a name. He wanted me to write it down so that he wouldn’t forget it. He wanted to know what he would have looked like. I had to explain that the baby would be almost 26 years old by now, a grownup, and he wished that if the brother did still exist, he would be still be a kid and be around to play with.
How did I know he was dead? Where did I have him? I told the story without blame. I tried to explain how someone might not be ready to raise a baby. I told him that no one knows why the baby died and that when I was pregnant with him, the still-living boy, I was closely monitored, just in case.
Oh, the depths of this conversation, of feeling, of connection, the tangibility of what went before. It makes my heart ache. It returns me to the world, and I mourn again for what we lost.
The prompt for this was "At the grocery store," which obviously has nothing to do with what I wrote. To really write about this will take some time. It was a striking conversation and healing and very sad all at once. I realized that at least I could talk about it without being so focused on me and without maligning my own parents. For once the focus was on that baby and the sadness of his death, the feeling of mourning that I still stuff down.
Photo of the boy at Point Reyes by his father.
Cracked yard
I just can’t be bothered to focus on a lawn. It’s hard enough to keep the real plants watered, which is why our two backyard tomato plants – which are actually producing ripe tomatoes before October, a first for my Berkeley garden – are a little dry and why the pumpkin plant – the Jackie Littles my son calls them – has only two pumpkins on it. The cucumber withered, too, a victim of not-frequent-enough watering.
My mother’s father was a keeper of lawns, a cutter of grass. He had a John Deere tractor with a mower attachment and made neat little rows, patterns in the green. He maintained the park grounds by the beach on the Elk River once or twice a week, too, rode the tractor down the road and let it rip around the trees and across the shuffleboard court. I associate him with the bright scent of freshly cut grass (the clumps of it falling off the underside of the mower) and of sweat and sawdust and coffee and cigarettes. The mower’s high pitched growl-whine was a constant summer feature. I turned up the air conditioning and the sound on my TV set in the Little House as the old man whipped noisily around the yard.
My mother kept her yard unmown. It was a meadow in progress, with wildflowers and hopes of beauty, of goldfinches glinting in the summer afternoons and rabbits hiding in the tall grass.
People at Hollywood Beach liked everything tidy, the grass groomed and plants trimmed. Mom’s next-door neighbors, the ones with the Doberman named Babe who snapped at me from the end of her leash, called her yard a shithouse, a comment that was the source of much amusement to us. All my friends mistakenly thought she had burned her brains out in the sixties, that this was just another sign of her hippie hangover when it turned out that she just needed a bit of the wild, a place to stand. There were candlelit discussions with K about yards and the bourgeoisie and money, the way people needed to control with cutters and poisons, the vast expanse of green groomed for croquet and badminton.
A yard wasn’t simply a yard and a silence was always in judgment. There was no way to win between them, so we took our punishment as it was meted.
From the prompt "The lawn."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I've worked with this one a bit, to no avail.
Image of Big Skully in my backyard by me. I don't think the boy was making a commentary on the state of the lawn when he propped the skeleton up on a stick and stuck the stick in a crack in the dirt. He just needed evidence that there were once vicious cyclops in Berkeley.
The unfolding never ends
We were all up before five a.m., my mother and husband because he was taking her to the airport, me because, well, that’s just me, and the boy because he tends to wake up in the early morning hours unless there is someone sleeping beside him. I turned off the hall light and coaxed the boy back into bed. We lay next to each other and listened to cars starting up and trains mournfully announcing their presence. I coughed and he told me he was sorry that I was coughing and then he settled in and I resisted the bed’s seduction and pulled myself away. The boy is sleeping still, though that may not last much longer.
I’ve been using my inhaler more lately, with my weird bedtime coughs and little gasps. It waits for me on the bookshelf next to my bed, beside the tissue box and the flat stone that Kevin found years ago where I set my cups of hot water, my glasses of wine. The shelves underneath hold magazines (New York, the New Yorker) and books and journals in various states of legibility and angst. Any notebook you might find in this house, any notebook of mine, will have a journal entry in it somewhere, from a time when I just couldn’t help myself and had to write to get something out of my head, to figure out how I felt.
Journal writing hasn’t interested me lately. There’s too much that I am not yet ready to make real. I tire of speculating and predicting and sounding like I know what the future holds. While it may be comforting to believe that, it’s a lie, a form of control, one of the things I need to leave behind, this death grip on an idea of reality. I have to ride reality out in its solidity, let it reveal itself to me gradually, a toe here, an ankle there, the slow striptease, the show of flesh.
Ah, and here is where my mind gets caught on the feel of a hand on a knee. I distract myself with the vision where nothing exists but touch and desire and the unfolding, the never-ending unfolding, the story without end, the landscape rolling out in front of me.
From the prompt "Bedside table."
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 ♥KatB Photography♥
Must be some kind of way out of here
I have decided that there is no past, nothing to talk about, that I have detached myself from it, have jumped off the side of memory into the deep, into the ever-present now.
There will be no more conversations about the cold hospital room at Georgetown and how the phone lines didn’t work, the frantic call earlier in the day from my mother to get out and the way my coworkers and I didn’t know where to go and gathered around a Capitol Hill fountain under a searing blue sky before walking home, the forced march with the others, and the rumors flying about bombs and planes intermingling with the truth.
I don’t want to discuss dead pets. Or the way K had a way with the rhetorical knife. Or the summer the three of you spent on Smith Island, sunburned under dead sky, the fights about evolution and carpentry, the way the ice cubes melted in the glasses of gin and tonic, and the son sat quietly, protected but not, because we know now that his reticence was a permanent condition, not something stuck to childhood.
We agree on the facts, most of them, and we share the history, and it is not comforting to me now as it gets further and further away. The main characters are dead. They have moved to distant states with people we've never met. We shared houses once and meals and sometimes conversations, and there were summers of entwined limbs or afternoons on the damp couch with the paperbacks, and the road shimmered in the heat. I am in the dark now, in the waiting room (so many times this comes up, the waiting room) and if I look back, I am afraid I might get stuck.
On that day almost ten years ago, I walked home. I made sure my boyfriend, who was at a meeting in northern Virginia, was ok. In the surreal beauty of a Washington DC September afternoon, he and I walked to the hospital. It was one of the last “normal” afternoons for K, although the world was changed from the outside, soon to be changed from the inside. Then it was bleeding and ventilators and tubes shoved down K's throat. It was traches and Factor VII and anthrax and for one week I had “All Along the Watchtower” going through my mind when we thought K was going to die. He was, but it was months away, and everything was burning.
Before that it was sickness. Before that, anger mixed with talk. Neglect tempered with love. Insanity, insanity, and I detach myself from that. But I am just detached right now and I hate it, I am searching in the dark for a path, making sure that it takes me forward, not back into the muck and if I am not careful I will spend every moment lost, in tears, holding it together so tightly I destroy myself, wondering how the story will end.
From the prompt "Ten years ago."
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 lost in pixels.
No place like home
In my sleep last night, I created new homes, new spaces where we tried to fit in old furniture. Some rooms were filled, others empty, and we hadn’t gotten it down yet, how to fit it all in or talk about how to do it, and I fumed, looking at where he put everything, without consulting me and where was he, anyway?
Before sleep, as we hurtled here and there and looked at the view, after we pushed through sand (the finds! a pale sea star, tiny, near death, that slowly caressed my hand; a mussel covered in purple barnacles, exotic ladies with their fans that my mother tossed back into the ocean) and then went up and down the steps to the lighthouse, I thought: I miss home. Not my home –- though I miss that, too, the stately townhouses of DC and the fields and water of the Eastern Shore – but a sense of home.
I am disconnected, floating along, detached, and a person can’t live like this, in the emptiness. In my mind, a home, a personal culture, is often a shared thing, and I don’t know how to do it anymore. Is it fear? Is it something else? What am I looking for? We are cowards. We are delicate, easily bruised. We are all wrong.
This is what I grew up with: me and her, me and her, my mother, my grandmother. The men were interlopers and the best times were when we were alone. The last man was bad and also good. We shared something, the three of us. But he’s dead now and that life has been gone for ten years. Then it was me and my man and then me, my man, and the boy, and I realized: I don’t know how to do this. To make the world larger. To contain a family. I flirt with it. I want it, this sense of shared self, but it is as dangerous as a riptide, and unfamiliar.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re getting somewhere. But I feel like I am treading water and I am alone and I can’t do it alone but I can’t do it together either.
Yesterday we stood in line as a foursome, waiting to get a peek at the lighthouse lamp. My legs trembled like they never have before. They were tired. They needed more fuel, more food. We watched my knees shake and felt the tremors in my thighs. But I kept going. I waited. I stood. And when the ranger's talk was over, my mother and I tackled the stairs, walked thirty stories up without stopping, barely looking behind us, knowing the man and the boy were somewhere down below. Five minutes later, there they were, fifty pounds of boy on his father's shoulders, clinging against the wind.
Together we started the long walk back to the car, the tired stumble, preparing for a quiet ride against the earth's contours, the long ride home.
From the prompt "Undeniable."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I expanded this one a bit, though it feels unfinished. Funny how groggy I can be when I sleep in until 5:30. Groggy but slightly more refreshed.
Image: The boy and his father at the Point Reyes National Seashore. Hipstamatic by me.
Pattern recognition
They went away on Canadian vacations. I sometimes accompanied them for weekends at his trailer near the ocean (but actually on a manmade lake dug out of red clay, the water too still, where mosquitoes bred in the relentless summer sun and once I came back from with a shimmering jar of tadpoles). My mother brought me carved wooden animals, maple sugar candy, books of Canadian stories. One of the stories angered me. It was about a girl who spent time with her grandmother, baking cookies, mixing up the flour and sugar and butter, dropping the dough by tablespoonfuls on a baking sheet. Another girl came along, an orphan or someone else with a sob story, diverting the grandmother’s attention. The orphan needed her too, needed her more, and eventually the granddaughter understood this. I never did. Wasn’t there enough love and time for both? Did one need to be excluded to save the other?
I was always jealous, there was never enough for me, and I was melodramatic, too, with my heavy sighs and foot stomps, my silences heavy as lead. I’m not sure what she could have done differently. I was raised in an atmosphere of debate and art and anger (suppressed until it exploded) and last night I realized how many dinners and afternoons of soothing, of ignoring, she must have colluded in back then. It was all fine, it was important that it be fine, when clearly it wasn’t fine.
There is nothing to be done about it now, as I make my own mistakes and accept my feelings as real. I recognize the continuation of a pattern (with a different flavor). I name the emotions, I tell myself they are legitimate and that I am ok for having them, I promise that I will always acknowledge those of the boy, and that I will never, NEVER tell him that I know exactly what he is thinking, that I knew he would say that. I won’t take away his emotions or his autonomy. I will not rob him from himself.
From a photo prompt that has nothing to do with my text.
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. It's probably a bit obtuse, this post, but I can tell you that it is based on a (calm) revelation and conversation I had with my mother last night, something that reminded me how far both of us have come and how separate I am feeling from the past (with a few exceptions). There are still some sore spots, of course. One thing at a time.
Image by godzillante|photochopper.
Chimera
“It could be much worse,” I told my mother as we completed mile four of our Berkeley march, the meandering from resale shop to park rock to bakery to salon product pick-up to iced tea to waiting for the boy outside his classroom. “We’re both lucky in so many ways.”
I am loved and have enough money and a lovely place to live. I am healthy. The boy is healthy. My brain still works, although it is leakier than it was before, and when I am not healthy (the brain fog, the never-ending crying jags, the unexpected blood) I have health insurance to cradle me and doctors and a phalanx of mental health professionals waiting to reassure.
It could go away at any moment, all of it, a heavy fact that lurks in the back of my mind, along with the discontent, the ugliness. It could go away. I don’t deserve it. I have been a passive player in my life, a provider of care and user of someone else’s money, piggybacking on the labors of my husband. If I went with the usual flow of words here, I’d call myself a parasite, but that isn’t quite right. There is an exchange, some of which is implicit, some of which is my self-sacrifice to the gods of luck, the gods that know I don’t deserve a damn thing.
I clean. I cook. I do the laundry and the dishes and organize much of the boy’s life. I have taken the things that I love – cooking high on the list, emoting and caring on a deeper level, deep thought and appreciation of art and the world in the mix, too – and boxed them up, the small and large parts of me. No one asked me to do this, but I don’t know how to live my current life, how to join it to those parts of myself that feel … deviant? No. Subversive? How could that be?
It’s suppression, plain and simple, and I’ve written about it for years, usually indirectly, often with anger. But it’s nobody’s fault (but mine). I’m chipping away at the boxes and trying to give the feelings room. Still, in that conversation about the things to be grateful for, the many things, I realized how little enthusiasm I have for my life. That pisses me off, because I remember caring a lot about the world and life and emotions, and I’m tired of not-feeling, of not wanting to go to the edge of the emotional sea, to the churning and tossing and the moments of beautiful calm, the uncertainty about the weather, the immersion in warmth and sunlight.
I’m tired of the suppression and I’m grateful for the good things and I still haven’t figured out how to join selves, to take the pre-parenthood me and the mother me and join them to make a new creature. Or maybe I’m doing it, but it feels so slow and there are so many other pieces of baggage along the way, the heavy legacy of the past, that it’s sometimes hard to see my way forward.
From the prompt "I am so grateful for..."
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.
Note on the title: I spent more time debating the title than I did writing the post. Ultimately, I think it fits. You can find out more about chimeras here and here and draw your own conclusions.
Confidential to people looking for my yicky post. I deleted it.
Image by Stuck in Customs.
Born again
I tossed one leg over the other. The hanging foot twitched and bounced. I knit my fingers together and took them apart, knit together and took apart, and when that was no longer satisfying, I tapped my fingernails against themselves, hid one set under the other. My hands were one creature, my arms connected, they would never separate, would never open up for another again.
I distracted myself with thoughts of sex, of fields at night, the trembling under a fitful breeze. Every landscape was dark, the sun gone, but the moon made shadows of trees on the ground. The stars twinkled. Every cliché about light in the dark came true, and I didn’t know who was beside me and I didn’t care. The glow from his cigarette hung in the dark. I knew the other end touched his lips, the lips that didn’t let words out, that caressed the edge of wine glasses and pecked me on the cheek in the morning. He turned his head to the side and removed the cigarette, the glow moving with him.
I knew his hands once, the long thumbs, the thin fingers and broad palms. What was it about men’s hands? I used to watch him write letters on Sunday afternoons. I glimpsed his fingertips as they held the newspaper or tapped out email. I reached for those hands, he reached for mine, but now there was no familiarity. I had taken to looking at the hands of strangers, the men at the coffee shop grabbing distractedly at sheathed paper cups, the guys on the street clutching cell phones or holding the looped ends of dog leashes.
He extinguished the spark and said goodnight, his footsteps crunching up the dune. Waves returned to the beach again and again and again. I buried my feet in the cool sand and closed my eyes against the murky dark, imagined a man who spoke, who knew how to use his hands. I conjured him up from dream and memory, and in my mind we walked along the edge of water, talking, never stopping. There was no barrier and the words were born, they lived and died and were born again.
From the prompt "Pregnant," which is almost as bad as "A baby."
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 dreamed last night about planes and crash landings, about people holding blowtorches to boxes of raw popcorn in order to cook them in the heat. Small explosions and runways carved out of dirt: what does it mean?
Image by ElvertBarnes.
Playing dress-up
Three years ago I wore nothing but faded fabrics and loose-fitting t-shirts. My shoes were generally athletic or practical, a-b devices. Then I decided to drop the mommy gear and focus on form. Form-fitting shirts. Pants that actually fit (necessitating trying them on versus buying them online). Shoes again, the glorious world of shoes. I realized that I wasn’t a preppy dresser, though neither am I one to toss around boas and chains, so my purchases began to reflect that.
Is this frivolous? Am I living life totally on the surface, with my cares about flattering shapes and forms? Can I help it? I’d like to be visible as long as I can, to acknowledge that what we wear matters, that one can look good and still be a mother (or, gasp, a middle-aged woman getting older every minute).
Yesterday, my mother and I went shopping at Crossroads Trading Company, a clothing resale shop. I bought skirts, the kind that flow in the breeze, and pants, and a loose-knit sweater (or she bought them, an early birthday present). And there in the back with the flats and the metallic sneakers and the strappy sandals was a pair of high-heeled black Mary Janes.
I haven’t worn heels since I was working, and even then the heels were generally low. But the shoes were cute and I tried them on and then tried them on with the skirts (always with the black and white, me, the stark patterns). They looked fashionable. They looked like fantasy, you know, the kind where I am always dressed up and feel good about myself, where I have a place to go and people to interact with. I pictured pulling on the silky flowing skirt with the black flowers on white, my shirt black (which one? I have a lot of them.), with those Mary Janes and my hair done right for once. I’d walk downtown to the psychiatrist’s office, prove to her that I was doing fine, just fine, and then I’d sashay to the drug store or the restaurant. I’d cross my legs and smoke a cigarette on the park bench outside the BART station with the rest of them, the crazies and the lost, the passengers.
OK: I need to aim a little higher in my dress-up fantasies. For now, though, I’ll take the outfit, the shoes, the plans and ideas, the way they hurtle me into the future and change how I think about myself.
From the prompt "A strain on the relationship."
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: the shoes.
Off the hook
I crammed my head full of self-help books this summer and Mad Men and file-sorting. I read about standing on your own feet, about hugging until relaxed, about the way children of trauma meet children of neglect in adulthood and fuse, bond, until the bond frays and rips and tears your heart out. I did this as I gave away old shoes and baby clothes and put aside an item or two to remember my son’s early childhood by, imagining the moment in ten or fifteen years when we open the box and compare the small garments against his long, almost-adult frame. What will he think of them then?
The last self-help book I read, inhaled, really, as I was exhilarated to recognize myself in some of it, helped me in unexpected ways. We can change, it reassured me. We can take these childhoods without foundation, or with foundations of broken brick, and still move forward. We are not permanently molded by them.
It made me feel hopeful, that these feelings of inadequacy, of evilness, of being wrong and responsible for every bad thing in my life and the lives of the people I love and take care of, are mutable. And then there is the boy, the child, the one I parent: even if we mess up (and who doesn’t mess up?), chances are that he will be ok, and if he isn’t (it won’t all be our fault, will it? though I tend to think parents should take responsibility for the bad stuff and give their amazing children credit for the good.), he will be responsible for creating his own change. No one gets through childhood unscathed.
We are not static. We flow. We can’t live as if every decision will mold us into something more brittle, will permanently scar us or our children. If we are already worrying about the effects of our actions on our children, chances are that our concern will be a buffer. Treating them as if they are delicate pieces of china, too fragile for the world, unable to stand out in it without our assistance, might only reinforce a feeling of helplessness, of can’t do, of not being able to be independent when the time comes.
A foundation of love and trust helps, with a gentle tug here, a push there, buttressed by the fact that we always have their back, that we trust them to do the right thing given that we know them and have kept them close when they needed it. For those of us who had very little of this in our early life -- love without trust, good conversation and debate without the surety of stability, sad nights crying alone in dark rooms -- we can still make it in the world. We have emotional texture. We have stories to tell, of quirkiness and (sometimes) adventure and survival.
I stand at the doorway to the world. I try not to let my isolated past generate my future. Change is possible. It is necessary. The people who raised me (or didn’t) are off the hook, struggling to move forward in their own lives and I hope to be off the hook myself someday, loose and free, a flawed human being who continues to do her best.
From the prompt "To be continued."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Edited a bit. Up before 4 a.m., anticipating the first day of school for the boy and my mother's arrival later this morning. Is this post any good? I have no idea and I'm not sure I care at the moment.
Image by D. Munoz-Santos.
Connection resurrection
These are the things I’ve left behind: midnight solitary walks under a canopy of stars; slow trips to the market, my only agenda being taste and texture; art (the museums, the words, the way sculpture is larger than the space it inhabits). Every moment has to be practical, a push towards something necessary.
Yesterday, irritated, angry, unable to shake it, I took a bath in the upstairs bathroom. The room is lovely, with curves against angles and an old-fashioned tub. I tossed a soothing, fragrant bath bomb into the wet. I immersed myself in hot water under natural light and remembered other times, the hung-over soaking at my place on E Street in a room yellowed with age, the bathtub small and stained. How my head ached. Maybe it was afternoon or close to evening and I’d been in bed most of the day, recovering from the debauchery. I dunked my head under water and listened to the sound of my blood flowing, proof that I was still there.
I don’t want to look back on those times with nostalgia, those days of lonely drunkenness, of the obvious stares across smoky beer-soaked barrooms and the weekends lost to the hangover and the hair of the dog. That’s not what I want to return to or to resurrect. But I do miss the connection I felt to the world, the way it was alive to me and I was alive, walking under low tree branches, looking at the sky, spending my time picking out the perfect mix of flavors and enjoying it happily, by myself or with another. I saw the stars. I walked under a canopy of night on one-lane roads where the trees reached out and the corn rustled conspiratorially in the breeze and I cared about ideas, too, let my mind run free.
Do the stars still exist? They have taken on the feeling of myth, of childhood story. There I am on a grassy lawn in Lake George, bundled up on a chaise lounge, staring at the sky with my father and his girlfriend. It is late August and we are looking for meteorites, for the streaks of light in the darkness. The sky is heavy with stars and I’m up later than usual, safe and cocooned, with no one looking to me for my reaction. It is pure experience, unfiltered through expectation.
I could take midnight walks in Berkeley, but the fog here obscures the sky most nights. I could take my time shopping, selecting each item I put into the cart for its scent, the way it feels in my hand, but the store is all about the agenda: get in, get out, put away, prepare. I want to spend my time immersed in feeling, in sensation, want to be taken away from the obligations. I want to stand in the gallery to take in the color, the shape, the form, to be impractical and connected and alive.
I don't know how to get back.
From the prompt "The stars."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Lightly edited and in need of expansion. Tired brain. Round Robin burnout. Me, me, me.
Image by Werner Kunz.
Now I (don't) wanna be your dog
My life appears the same. Stupid wake-up time. Round Robin write that turns into post fodder. The coffee. Soon, the pill. This morning my husband will go running and then we will go to the Berkeley Bowl and then we will clean in preparation for my mother’s arrival (visit delayed three days because of Hurricane Irene – she’s fine and her house is intact, thank goodness). I will run the vacuum cleaner and the dust rag. I will prepare dinner and load the dishwasher. I will toddle off to bed too early after sleepy conversation with the man.
Internally, however, it is all shifting. I am holding off on the confessional. I know that the only behavior I can change is my own. I will slowly build my arsenal of classes to move on, I will sculpt a resume. My fall won’t be quite as out in the world as I was hoping – the classes I will take will all be online – and I have had to let go of my disappointment, see hope as a long-term thing.
When I am feeling optimistic, I know I can do this, that I don’t need a hand to pull me up (though I do need other people, I do need other people, I do need other people – the mantra I must repeat because I have a tendency to withdraw from them in times of great need). I can carve out something for myself, I don’t need a rescuer or a soft surface. But if I think about it too much, I will falter, so let’s change the subject.
I had a dream last night that I was back with the old crowd. A person I had wronged, someone who got angry at one of my recent posts, was there. I told him I was sorry. I told him that the posts from prompts were most likely to be half-thought out, not careful enough in their treatment of other people. He was ok with it (in real life, he sent me a terse Facebook message, unfriended me, and didn't respond to my measured apology, which included an offer to delete the post). I told him that because I wanted to, not because I wanted to feel better about myself, to show that I was good now, see. I told him because I felt it, not because I wanted to be the dog who flipped on her back, belly exposed in submission.
I don’t have to prostrate myself before anyone. I don’t have to mold my behavior to fit what I think they want. I don’t have to confess into the void, desperate for a reaction, a sign of caring. Fuck that. And when I’m feeling weak, like reaching a hand out to nothing, like proving my goodness when there is nothing to prove and no one to prove it to, I will read this. Again. And again. And again. Until it forms a ridge of thought in my mind, protective, permanent. An indication of self.
From a photo prompt, completely unrelated to what I wrote.
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. It must be my general mood, but I keep on wanting to use the word "fuck" in the titles to these posts (what would it be in this case? Fuck you? Fuck 'Em All?) Today I also wanted to use that picture of Johnny Cash, you know, the one where he brandishes the bird? Not a very friendly shot and perhaps an indicator of how pissed off I am in general. It's an old, old feeling and I am tired of it, of its fire and the way it projects shadows of the past on the present. I am dealing with that one over time.
The Stooges "I Wanna Be Your Dog" via YouTube.
Image by dimmerswitch.
The silent treatment
I was meting out my punishment to the man behind the camera. He wasn’t committed enough. He wasn’t doing what I wanted him to do. My needs were paramount, his needs were hidden, and so I spent that trip in a pretty California town pouting and silent.
Yesterday it was more of the same, a continuation of a game of no-speak, of withdrawal. I didn’t need to stomp my feet or tear at my hair as I screamed. Instead I kept my distance, kept quiet and tidy and far away, until I realized that I wasn’t having any fun. I was punishing someone else and punishing myself, too, and what sort of outcome did I expect from this anyway? It wasn’t an effective method, it was childish, and dulling.
What relief, to let go of the game, to be able to be there without a need to disappear or punish or put the whole interaction on the other participant.
On a long-ago night in a small Michigan town by the side of the lake, I sat with someone else’s family in a vacation house living room. They wanted to play cards (earlier it was croquet) and I had decided a long time ago that I was not a player of cards or croquet or charades or mass Monopoly. It was me against them, asserting my individuality. Being a pill but wanted to be loved for it. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t loveable. I just wasn’t able to meet them on their own terms. It had to be on mine, all of it, another test in the wasp’s nest, in this strange place with its accepting snobs. They were willing to take me in, but I wasn’t willing to take them on.
I sat reading a book as someone dealt. Outside it was crickets and stars. The light in the living room drowned out the night noises. I wasn’t able to listen. I should have dropped my book and walked to the table. I should have smiled on that trip to Santa Barbara and reached out my hand to the one who loved me. At least I figured out my childishness yesterday before nightfall, but I’m afraid I’ll have to recognize it again and again before I get it right, before I acknowledge the need and separate myself from it. Another process to churn through.
From the prompt "Ah, now I get it."
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: Not smiling in Santa Barbara, 2000?.
In search of relief
I contain the knowledge of change, the acceptance of it, and yet my stomach is a knot. My psyche demands permanence, unwavering support, the strength of others against my woozy frame. Can I hold out a pale, shaking hand to steady myself against your shoulder? Are you telling me you have your own worries? Should I get out the hammer now and destroy everything, leaving the scrap for kindling, or is it time to think about the structure, to see how I or we or the elements – the shifting earth, the angry skies, the relentless wind – will change it so that it fits, it works, so that there is no need to destroy?
Even my writing is controlled. Last night I was talking to my son about something or other before leaving his room for the night. We’ve had some of our best conversations in these in-between moments after his light is off and we cuddle in the dark. Somehow, we got on the topic of what it feels like to bite oneself. He does it sometimes, all kids probably do. For him, it’s curiosity, a desire to see the marks of his own teeth on flesh, to look at the patterns they make. I did it, too, but I did it when I was angry, and I did it in anger for years, well past adolescence.
The feeling is primal, like fear, the run from death or the devil, from the knowledge we all contain about our ultimate impermanence. The feelings bubble up within me, and for a long time they had no place. I took that kid anger out on myself, I didn’t know what to do with it, but here I am a grownup, shifting in good ways, my life changing, and yet I am so afraid and I am angry and I want to separate it out, take the chaos of feeling under my exterior and figure out what belongs where, like sorting clothing for the seasons before packing it away. I want to put the bad stuff in its place, or remind myself that, although it is still there, reaching out a clawed hand from so many years back, it is past, that where I am now doesn’t need to be affected by it.
Riding out the change without destroying the framework takes trust, faith in oneself, so here I am, eyes closed, hands out, shuffling forward.
From the prompt "Relief."
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, though I'm not sure one can talk about "clarity" with my prompts lately.
Image by paulscott56.
Two rooms
Wood is complicated. Warm. It is direct, sure of itself, with no need to put layers of paint between it and the world. She rubs her hands across it for comfort and reassurance. A circular oak table, the type with clawed feet at the end of its curvaceous legs, a walnut roll-top desk battered with age and use, a birdseye maple vanity with its mottled grain, remind her of a man who knew what he was doing. He wielded saws and hammers and drills, coaxed rounded shapes out of flat boards with attention – the lathe, the sander, his calloused hand intimate with chisel and splinter. She swept the sawdust out of his woodshop, saved it for the creation of flame, tossed it in the compost, breathed in the sharp rich scent of life that permeated the room.
There is no wood in this room, or at least none that hasn’t been choked out by paint. Everything is glossy, her thoughts bounce off the surfaces and back to her, mangled on the return, emphasizing her aloneness, her single quality in the emptiness, the only other living thing to exist.
The man was strong. He used to carry her high above his head and twirl her around. She protested, as anyone would, as she giggled. She couldn't stop. The confusion between yes and no was forged here, along with the paradoxical nature of the tickle, the way being pinned and tortured had an element of pleasure to it. Still, she turned off her skin. She stopped feeling the sensations. She locked herself inside her head, made the room with warm wood furniture and soft dark fabrics.
It is a comfortable mind, a retreat, a place where a fire burns contained in an open brick sarcophagus, chaos in a box. She sits in the overstuffed chair with a cat on her lap and another beside. The dog snores in his corner. People don't give animals credit for having emotional lives, she thinks. It's not as simple as dumb love and loyalty, and in her head she can acknowledge that, be open to it all, to the differences outside her perceptions.
She pages through a book of photographs from the past and watches the people come alive. She runs a cool hand up and down the inside of her arm until the goosebumps start. She closes her eyes as the fire crackles and the sun streams through a closed window. Outside there is weather. The trees struggle silently against the wind. Dead leaves dance across streets. Unsecured doors swing open and closed again and couples fight in person, on cell phones. They have silent conversations, the words felt rather than heard, and hold hands across great divides. She sits. The fire accepts her handfuls of sawdust, her sacrificial logs. In another room, cold and hard and bright, the other part of her waits in chilly silence.
From the prompt "Minimalistic." I wanted to call this post "Fuck Minimalism," more because I am in a foul mood than for any other reason, but that didn't seem appropriate.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one took a lot of editing, in part because I am tired. Nora-dog chuffed in the stairwell at 12:30 a.m. I finally went downstairs with her to see if there was anything to chuff about and opened the door to the back room where Nick the cat was mysteriously sitting (it's a no-cats-allowed room, for good reason). I evicted him before going upstairs. Then my brain raced here and there and THEN a car horn, constant and sharp, faded in and out of the bedroom until it finally stopped. I got back to sleep somewhere in the 3 a.m. hour and was up again by 5:20. I'm so tired that I am going on and on about this. And because no one in the house is up yet, anyone who has gotten this far in this long and boring paragraph might be among the first to know about my night.
Image by geoffbarrattgeoff.
Sound barrier
First it was the people, with their yammering, with their jabs and petty squabbles. Leaving them behind was no big deal, considering how little I interacted with them anyway. And I took it slow, stopped asking folks at work how they were or about their weekends, about their perfect children. I didn’t make eye contact when I walked the halls, the street, the parks, the supermarkets. People respond to feedback or its lack. They didn’t know what my game was, they didn’t care or notice or even think about it, until finally I lived in glorious silence, alone, unmolested.
I even turned the sound off on my television set. I watched the faces of the actors, the anchors, the grinning and grimacing idiots on the commercials, and tried to interpret the action without sound. This gave me the idea of walking around with earplugs. I practiced in my living room, my ears stuffed with a magical synthetic, pliable and complete in its blockage, a sound barrier. I danced to music by feeling the beat in the floor. I held my hand against the walls as they trembled with treble and bass. I watched the phone quiver in its cradle.
Living without using your ears is not easy. The cues we get from sound – the rumble of a car engine, the crash in the back of the house as a cat knocks over a plant – I had to intuit, to tune into the vibrations, the way movement disturbs the air and the waves of sound glide past one’s skin. It almost became too much, the soft touch of the small sounds – the cat licking its chest, the refrigerator’s sigh – intermingling with the macho waves pushing their way out of the garbage truck, the slaps from ambulances, a neighbor’s shrill screams at her daughter or her dog or her husband a nasty cut across my cheek.
But most of the disturbances came from cars. The highway, with its low rumbles and its pretensions to ocean waves, was a constant undercurrent. My insides felt like they were being jumbled by the trucks of San Pablo. I thought about constructing a suit out of sheets of aluminum, something to deflect the noise, but I knew that would have its own cadence and would rob me of my anonymity. I had to be like the rest of them. I had to stop noticing, had to let the sounds pass through me as if they didn’t exist, another way to erase the world, to stop containing it in my body.
From the prompt "A time you let go."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. LIghtly edited.
Image by lemasney.
Family table
If you want to get decadent, peel four cloves of garlic. Take the bread – Acme sourdough works well, and it doesn’t have to be stale – and slice it thickly into four to six pieces. You can cube it or you can keep the slices. It depends on your willpower, what you are going for. Heat four tablespoons of olive oil in a large sauté pan (low to medium heat), toss in the garlic cloves, and cook, stirring occasionally until they are golden brown on all sides. Remove the golden cloves. Cool them. Eat them. Puree them. Smash them with a knife and breath in the scent of tamed garlic.
Turn up the heat – not too much – and toss the bread cubes/slices into the hot oil. They will sizzle. They will drink in the garlic-scented oil and turn crisp with joy at what they are about to become. Stir them occasionally, until they are mostly brown, and then remove them from the pan.
Try your best to let them cool. Try your best not to eat them all before the family comes into the kitchen and claims theirs. Wait for the salad, for the romaine and the chickpeas and the feta, for the red onion and cherry tomatoes and kalamatas, for the red bell pepper and vinaigrette. Wait! Wait I tell you!
If food was purely love and not also fuel, then this is what I might make every night. Croutons. Real macaroni and cheese, bubbling and unctuous. The things that we used to call things (corn tortillas, faux sausage patties, salsa, green onions, tomatoes, jalapenos, cheddar cheese, avocado and sour cream cooked on a griddle until the tortilla was crisp and the cheese was melty, a combination of spicy, crunchy, and smooth). Pumpkin waffles, despite the dog’s fear of the iron’s dangerous beep.
Every Saturday morning I used to make pancakes, always the same, oatmeal batter with blueberries, and then I just stopped. Maybe this was the end, the line in the sand, the snap of the rope. I took one step back, and then another, watched them as they sat with their cereal, as they got smaller and smaller. I accepted that some children might like prepared rice and beans better than my own. I had ideas about the dinner table and family, ideas from an early life of meals where I was excluded or ridiculed. I swore this would never happen in my own family and so I made it easy, with as little conflict as possible.
If food was purely a combination of love and fuel and not also a tug on the heart, if childhood meals and tables weren't forever linked in my mind with my worth, with myself, the separation would not feel necessary. While they talk, I let my mind wander. I think about the dishes waiting to be cleaned, the lunches I have to make, the next task, because the moment is so hard to be in, with its associations, its sad recipes and I wonder if they notice me as I float above the room.
From the prompt "The wall."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I tightened this one up a bit. And please remember that these prompts are just little snapshots of writing, that they don't necessarily represent my continual internal state. In other words, it's not always that bad.
Image by kevindooley.
Indulging the fear
The popular girls didn’t wear primary colors, but they were bright, the Esprit t-shirts and the jeans in shades that never occurred in nature. That was how we measured value, in the clothes, the labels, the human search for approval and status in the most base of ways. You needed money, you needed to be an extrovert, you needed connection and cotillion tickets and a house with a yard. Your family needed a new car, or at the very least a car, and maybe even two parents, two parents who were supportive and together, with an entire ensemble of family behind them, too. You needed a group to support you, to ride along until you were able to swim by yourself, to be on your own.
I don’t want to come across as bitter – no, I’m not bitter – but I am close to the edge this morning, thinking about how we measure our value and the value of other people. It’s a strange way to think about humanity, to think in terms of how much a person is worth, not in dollars, but in the right to take up space, to demand attention and love. Aren’t we all worth the same -- that is, aren't we inherently valuable? We may be, but that’s not how it works practically speaking.
My fear is that I will die alone. We all die alone, of course, unless perhaps we take someone down with us, or go out in a jetliner crash or a conflagration at a packed hotel or train car or apartment complex, but I mean alone. The family that buffeted me when I was small has died and dispersed. The people I trust are few, and my own little family may not be enough. I can be brave, I can, I try, but sometimes it just hits me, the fear, the paralyzing feeling in the pit of my stomach. I may not be capable of creating the connections I need and crave, my self-protective shield is already in place, and I am not of enough value for people to reach out for me.
Yes, I am getting better, I am healing and I am brave and strong and capable, but this feeling of not mattering, of being existentially alone, is overwhelming right now. Maybe it was the continuation of our home reorganization, the weekend spent emptying a closet that has been packed with boxes since we moved here, the dismantling of the antique armoire we bought a decade ago to make room for a new configuration in the back room, this rifling through a recent past, through days of connection that feel very far away. Maybe it’s the process of making the room into something else, a physical acknowledgment of change. At any rate, I’m drowning, the whirlpool is pulling me underwater, my lungs are filling up, and I don’t know who to reach for. I feel like an item on discount at the dollar store, unwanted and cheap. Disposable. I am on my own.
Dying alone, living alone. It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I don’t see how I can get out of it at the moment. Surely I’ll feel better tomorrow or the next day or next week. For now I’m just going to indulge this feeling, tinged with fear and self-pity, for a few more minutes before I put it away, box it up until I am ready to feel it again.
From the prompt "Very popular."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one took a bit of editing for clarity.
Image by Sebastian Fritzon.
The sacred against the asphalt
It is easier with my eyes closed, with my mind only on sensation, on the thick succulents with their reservoirs of water at the center. Even the bees don’t mind my gentle touch, and the ladybugs tickle the back of my hand, while the praying mantises dart away. I can feel their presence, their fear, and so I hold my hand still until they take cover.
In the room there is nothing but a cool breeze, the sound of the neighbor talking in German on his cell phone. I hear the highway traffic, the soft thump of cat paw on roof shingle. You are silent, I feel the warmth of your breath, and if I pay enough attention, I hear the flow of blood, the heartbeat, my own life humming in my head against the rhythm of yours.
The garden, the room, the smooth coolness of the pillow, the heavy hot weight of a cat against my hip: I am not to open my eyes, I don’t want to, but one can’t stay closed forever. The challenge is to open up, to acknowledge the world, to take it in all forms, to let it enter you as you enter it.
Last night on the dog walk I looked across a quiet side street and saw a tree, its trunk like grey withered skin, its canopy high and round and dignified. I saw the tree, green and grey, with leaves like hands. It had being and separateness, its own life in the world. I remembered the closeness of childhood with nature, the way I befriended trees and said goodbye to them when my mother and I moved on. There was no barrier between me and them and I didn’t need to close my eyes against the world, to distract myself with chatter and the glowing screen, with a book cracked open at every opportunity.
This is what I want, no division between me and you and trees and plants. I want to take it in, to see it clearly, the sacred against the asphalt and cracked sidewalk. My hand reaches for yours in the evening fog, both of us aware of the music of blood flow, of life, separate, related, part of the world.
The photo above was the prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was lightly edited.
Image by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon Mistress.
Testing, testing ...
Today I am taking the GRE . The last time I took this was probably in … 1991? Twenty years ago. I took the train to Mom and Kevin's place in Wilmington and she later dropped me off at the testing site which was in Newark or in Philadelphia, where I sat with a bunch of other children in the high-ceiled room of a library, us with our scratch paper and our pencil marks and our dim light and our nervousness. Five years before, I had taken the SAT – my main memory of that is that it was scheduled the day after a Halloween party and I was tired and slightly hung over, but it went fine, because my brain was young and supple and accustomed to tests.
In the fall of 1985, along with every other junior in my high school, I took the PSATs. Except that I had to leave early for my ultrasound appointment, so that they could check on the age of the fetus, which I fudged the whole time, holding on to my lie until the pregnancy’s sad end six weeks later. All I remember about this pretest was the auditorium, my unexplained secret, the way we had to talk to the guidance counselor about my early dismissal without actually telling her the reason I had to have a doctor’s appointment right then. Now I wonder if I really have to have it then. We were in emergency mode by that time and skipping one half of the PSATs probably seemed unimportant.
I remember the before, sometimes a bit of the during, but I hardly remember the aftermath of these tests. Generally, I did ok. But here I am, over 25 years from a math class, knowing that I am going to totally screw that part of the GRE up. I’m worried and not worried about it at the same time. It’s like the logic midterm, knowing that I am going to toss myself over the side of a cliff and knowing that there is little I can do about it.
I failed the midterm, but luckily almost everyone else did, too. This is where my connection to my fellow philosophy students, all young men who were at CUA on a special scholarship where they were in the seminary (none of them became priests) while simultaneously getting a bachelor’s and master’s degree in philosophy. They used their power (not that they had a lot of it – these were tough years for these guys) to toss the results of the test out. It was true, our instructor was an ethicist, not a logician, and often would write long proofs on the chalkboard only to have a student point out a flaw in his formula, necessitating an entire rethink. There was a lot of crumpled paper in that classroom, a lot of groans. In the end, I got a C.
Last night I went to bed before ten p.m.. I read my escapist romantic book, A Town Like Alice, and I dreamed of phone calls that didn’t go through and children waiting for absent parents. In the last dream, I was in an elevator that was fluffy with loose insulation. I took it down to the basement, to the place of secrets where the walls were ripped away, showing their vulnerable insides. I watched the men working. I worried about their lungs, about the fibers floating in the air, about the way we contain the past. I waited for a sign that it was time to go back up again.
From the prompt "Surprise, surprise!"
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Edited slightly beyond the 12-minute mark.
Image by randomduck. This picture makes me homesick. The Childe Harold is no longer there, but I spent a lot of time in that basement bar in my 20s. J's cousin was a bartender there. My husband and I had at least one early days date there (I even remember the conversation) and a coworker took me there for a final beer after I quit my last full-time library job. Zorba's, the Greek restaurant to to the right of the Childe Harold, was where I went for an (illegal) Guinness on my first or second night in DC in the summer of 1989, drinking, eating, and reading under a Dupont-blue night sky, watching the people go by.
I need to visit. It's been too long.
The match in the dark
Data in means words out and my data in has been parenting, getting my fingers dirty in the garden, suppressing bad thoughts and feelings and attempting to fit them into a nice neat framework. I’d like to tidy it all up in my head and say that it’s under control, that I’ve weeded and pruned my thoughts and the paths of my mind are gravel lined, but would that be me?
I can’t always separate out who I am from who I think others want me to be. I want to appear to be in control on one level (while always being tautly in control in a different sense internally). But this idea of my mind, my psyche, my inner being as some sort of tamed garden leaves me cold. It’s the imposition of thought control, and though the idea of my thoughts, of my self, being nice and neat and tidy and always kind is soothing, it is also dead.
These are my fears at the moment, at least the ones bobbing to the surface: I will never be able to write fiction that sticks, it will all be this talk talk about me or various vague inspirational chitchats. One of my August tasks was to file up my old writing, the stuff I’ve kept in piles in my desk and in our back room, which was a humbling experience. The drafts of my never-ending story (Has it ended? Maybe it has.) from its painful and self-conscious beginnings, my attempts to write memoir, good but still tinged with pain. The fiction isn’t bad, at least it has its moments, and maybe I should pick it up again, but I don’t have any ideas.
There seems to be this dichotomy of literature, fiction is the primary branch, thriving in the sunlight, while personal essay and nonfiction are shadows on the sidewalk. Do I want to write fiction because that’s what I think I should write? Am I any good at it? How do I embrace my style and continue when I feel like an asshole, like a writer of tripe, the always autobiographically based chest-beater?
I am just beginning to figure out who I am, setting out a foundation. The process involves exploration and pressing forward against self-doubt. Let’s toss aside extreme self-consciousness, not let my questions, the bottomless pit of analysis, get in the way. This is what I can write now and later I will be able to write something else and the wit is there no matter what, my substrate of dark humor and dark life, the match in the dark against the dripping brick wall.
From the prompt "I can do it."
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.
What I don't want to write about
It seems I spend half of these appointments in tears or pressing my fingernails together or taking tissues (the preliminary step is to place the box near me on the leather-cushioned couch as I sit down) and forming them into shapes, compressing them, combining them into one huge ball that I lob at the trashcan as we leave.
I can’t write about it. I can barely talk about it. And I don’t even know what “it” is, except this amorphous and yet specific feeling. After the appointment, I traveled the wormholes of the Internet, looking for verification, for clues from the outside that once or twice or more a long time ago, something made me this way, made me angry at touch, at being robbed of something, of having my body be out of my control.
It’s a relief, actually, to just go with my hunch and see how it has played out in my life, in my history and present. Having a name for something, trusting in myself, makes a huge difference. It’s all part of the same journey that I’ve been on for a few years now, and suddenly I could see another source of the self-blame, of the anger turned inward, of the unspoken belief that I was responsible for every bad thing that happened to me or to the people I love.
I still struggle with the beliefs of a child, that I am the center of other people’s reactions to me, that the world somehow revolves around me in a negative way. My mother once told me that she thought her mailman was angry at her because her Netflix movies weren't arriving on time, a ridiculous thought, but I understood it, this frozen feeling of being important, the negative focus. It’s both egotistical and withered and part of the same game, the child alone in the room, while her parents fight outside of it, the girl who thinks her thoughts can be read, that everyone knows how bad she is, and there he was in the room with her, in the dark, in the light, when no one else was around, to prove it.
From the prompt "What I don't want to write about." For some reason, it makes me think of a song. Belle and Sebastian, Fox in the Snow.
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 renee.hawk.
They hover in the air
My dreams are all about train stations and men in suits and lost dogs. I walk across moonlit fields against the sound of rustling in the trees. In the dark, I reach out to touch the gnarled bark only to discover old bones grasping back at me, my predecessors. It’s a dangerous journey, alone at night, and sometimes I wish I’d brought a dog or a cat or a friend. I am lonely and the people I’ve chosen to surround myself with (this loose cadre of disconnected souls) are wrapped up in their own lives. They emerge out of the evening fog only to let it swallow them back up again after a hug, a supportive talk, a shared beer in bar laden with the memory of smoke.
This is what scares me, this stepping through the swamp of loneliness, of total reliance on self while still trying to be open to the wills and ways of others. I remind myself that I am lucky to feel, to palpitate the heart of darkness, quivering and clammy where its exposed to air. I am being here now, that’s for damn sure, and I allow the feelings their moment when I can. There will be no suppression, but it all feels like a juggling act, a balancing act, like I’m in some sort of fucked up circus with the tightrope and the scuffed ballet shoes and the bowling pins hovering in the air in their struggle against gravity.
But I am here, trying my best. Sometimes I comfort myself with thoughts of a different age, the wake-up in a room spicy with Vick’s VapoRub, the green glass of the humidifier lit up by nightlight a glowing beacon. My breathing is tight, my flannel nightgown is sweat-soaked, but I know that soon my grandmother will be in with a cool washcloth and a warm dry hand.
I hold it all together myself, I have to, I’ve always had to, so this is no different. The difference is that I am grasping my own hand, pouring the cool glass of water, hugging myself in the dark, knowing that this is what we do when no one else is able to, that this is the reality of life.
Still. I want to lie on cool sheets and have them minister to me, bring me weak tea and cinnamon toast. I want them to talk to me, to tell me stories. I want to know their problems. I want an even exchange. But none of us are there yet and so I wait, I prepare, I make my plans in the darkness of four a.m., waiting for the comfort of another life.
From the prompt "Looking up."
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 Double-M.
Soothing
I’m through with the melodrama and the 3 a.m. thin hopes, about love, or the pursuit, or this idea that my savior awaits with capable, nimble fingers and an accepting disposition. I’ve let got of the fantasy, of the idea that I deserve something, that someday, as I am walking down the street, or as I sleep at night, a team with bandages will come upon me and wrap me from neck to toe, will take me away to a calm grey room where the meals always come on time and I never run out of time, and there are books and visitors and all the responsibility for my trajectory has been taken out of my hands and that’s fine.
I’ve stopped reaching out desperately with clawed hands and a tear-streaked face. I’m no four-year old or five-year old or fifteen year old, waiting for the parent, for the delivery of food and love and support. Find it within yourself, the books said, learn how to soothe yourself, and I see the wisdom in it, the softening when I need to, the surreptitious hugs, my arms firm, my hands stroking my shoulder blades, there, there, you have five minutes to feel crappy and then you move on to the next task.
It helps to keep busy, to move or organize, to swipe dust off of shelves and scrub the bathtub, the sink, the dirty tile. There is always work to do. The Internet, with its playacting, its attempts at closeness, can make it worse sometimes, those moments when I am aware of being alone, a person by myself connected to a machine and no one else is out there looking out for me and I need looking after, I need it, and doesn’t anybody care?
This is what the self-soothing is about, caring for myself, understanding that I can’t expect others to take over the caretaking, that I am the parent, the responsible party. Even the old fantasies, the being imagined and held in someone else’s mind, are no longer appealing. Why give over my autonomy, my sense of self?
What is next? Is this about building a different kind of wall, the I am me and I don’t need other people? I am all about worry, about preparation through anxiety over the things I can’t control, but I can answer this question. No. That’s not what this is about. It’s about boundaries and being who I am. I have nothing against the conversation, the back and forth. I am not without hopes and the occasional fantasy, the feel of a hand on my back as I look into the other’s eyes, the soft lips, the yielding, two adults, two equals, in their lovely exchange.
From the prompt "Quitting."
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. More of the personal growth thing. Hope it isn't getting old for you guys.
Image by Lovin Earth.
The reorg
The things I’ve uncovered. The things I had forgotten about, had jammed in the back corners of my mind and my underwear drawer. Ancient, redundant, and obsolete forms of birth control. Orphan plugs to long-gone electronics. A disposable camera two-thirds finished with photos from my December in San Francisco, the days of my brief internship at Greens, shots of my little rental in the Inner Richmond, where I slept poorly with thoughts of the surprise baby to come and worries about the ghost I knew was floating somewhere above me, somewhere in the house or in the air. My fear and my newly pregnant state meant that I took midnight bathroom breaks with my eyes closed, my hands feeling in front of me for the wall and the light switches.
I’ve gone through files, too, the piles of stuff that I’ve meant to deal with for a long time now. We have reams of house-buying papers, many redundant since the short sale took nine months (oh, like a gestation, the closing practically a stillbirth) and we got duplicates of things, the same mailings only slightly different, for months. There’s the baby stuff, with the baby almost a first grader now. Yesterday afternoon, the depressing Mad Men on in the background, my new addiction, I went through the boy’s file to divvy it up. There were doctor’s reports from his various “well baby” appointments, vaccination records, the hospital bill. And there, tucked in with his stuff was an ultrasound picture, his first photograph. I picked it up, then saw the due date printed on it: January 23, 1986. Different baby. Different life and death, not so painful now, but still, part of my history.
So I comfort myself with thick red wine. I allow myself tears and then move on to the next box, the next pile of papers. I shop for new underwear, thinking of the smooth fabric of microfiber bras, the enhancement of cleavage, the way I can present what little I have to the world. As if the world cares. But I do. I’m going to move on and look good and I’m fine, or I will be fine, and at 5:00 p.m. today or maybe earlier, I will open the next bottle of wine.
From the prompt "Comfort food." Here is an earlier take on the same prompt.
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 anandham.
Under the surface
She had alibis, the appearance alibi, the shyness alibi. A coworker once told her she would make a good drug mule. No one would suspect the hint of darkness at her core, the nights she spent watching her boyfriend break apart cocaine with a razor before handing her the rolled dollar bill, the bottle she hid in her underwear drawer, her dreams of men knifed in broad daylight by women in leather catsuits and masks. She could exploit her appearance, or, really, exploit their inattention, so there she was, pinned and loving it, in the backseat of a broad car from the late 60s, the car older than she was and made for large families or the creation of them, her parents clueless, her boyfriend elsewhere.
Sometimes she would go down to the bar a few blocks away and sit, waiting, waiting for the lonely men with their beer or whiskey, the ones who treated her to new things (oysters on the half-shell, too-spicy salsa, the layered shots and stories of grownup life). They touched her hand, they stroked her hair. Most of them didn’t want a thing but conversation. They liked to take her apparent innocence, make a fetish out of it, the girl they were protecting from their like, the quasi-daughter, the fantasy.
On her last night in her hometown, she befriended an elderly man at the bar who regaled her with New York jazz tales from the 40s and 50s. He told her she looked like Veronica Lake. He spoke of his dead wife. And when it was time to go home, she walked with him hand in hand, accepting a chaste kiss on the cheek before he stepped, alone, into his house.
From a photo prompt.
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 shimonkey.
And so I emerge
But also: love and its loss and what the others are saying about me, judging my value by what I provide, saying that if I can’t do that, then what am I good for? Oh, it still scares me, love and its exit, its decisions about me, my value going down, down, like the stock market and housing prices, like interest rates. This is part of my shifting thinking, realizing that I am not a commodity, that I have intrinsic value, that sometimes love does a turnabout and it isn’t necessarily about me, it’s about chemistry and its lack, or the way history piles up on us and changes us and our viewpoints. It’s about someone else’s history and what they are capable of, too, something that is out of my hands.
It wasn’t until a few days ago, with all this practice at staying in the moment, feeling the fear without trying to buffer it, feeling the pain, too, that I realized this was part of my underlying assumption about myself, that my value was only in relation to what other people thought of me, to how they felt about me, that I had to keep on dazzling them (with words, with deeds, with a show of my goodness) to keep the feelings alive. My feeling of self has moved here and there, attached to those who attach themselves to me. Love and its loss means my creation and destruction. It’s no wonder that I avoid getting any deeper into it. Immersion into the other means potential death, my self reflected in black, fading into nothingness.
And under all of this was a self that I had submerged, something that felt ugly and wanting and bad, just plain bad. Well, she’s here, she’s scrubbing off the blood and dust, she’s exposing her wounds to the sun. Underneath it all, her skin gleams and her smile surprises and she has things that anyone would want to be close to, an agile mind, a quick step, a surprising viewpoint. She is me and she’s not perfect, but she has a right to be here, to exist in the world, and we’re still scared, we’re both scared, but getting stronger every day.
From the prompt "I am no longer afraid of it."
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 of a Wonder Woman wall mural in Rio de Janeiro by Digo_Souza
Cleansing ritual
Against graying tile the splashed remains of coffee create a Rorschach test, along with the grounds from last night’s bungle with the grinder. They play beside the ghostly circular outlines of a wine glass and a hardened brown remnant of a banana peel. Dirty dishes lie dormant in the dirty porcelain sink. Recycling, all bottles: beer, wine, gin (the odd duck in this household of soft liquor), a large caper container, waits for someone to walk with it in arms across the house, through the front door, and down the steps to the bin.
A knife lies ominously next to a partially autopsied peach, the fruit’s pit moldy and split, its juice adhering it to the battered cutting board and still on the knife, too, waiting for her to clean it off.
On the floor, the ridiculous Mexican tile that takes in every stain, every remnant of cat puke and the overflow from the animal’s water dish, every sticky watermelon drip (oh, that he would stop just ripping into it with his teeth right beside the refrigerator), there are crumbs from a late night attempt at a sandwich. And here’s the bread, too, left out, gone hard by the darkened cheddar and bleeding tomato.
Did she do this? She remembers a dinner without eating, the preparation in the kitchen that took too long, their impatience, the bottle of Zinfandel heavy on the grape (now in the recycling to-go stack). There was an argument, something about politics or was it love or the two of them combined, and she cried or maybe she made the kid cry, and then there was the sob over the sink. Later, after her coffee and her little pill, she will check the sent file in her email, will cruise Facebook for the trail of oddities, of strange comments and overwrought complaints, but for now, it is time to clean up.
Hot soapy water, coffee with soymilk, oatmeal with blueberries and maple syrup, the sink bubbling and steaming like a cauldron, the cleansing ritual, the soothing ritual. She will wait until they wake up to take the bottles outside. The dishes watch patiently as she rolls up her robe sleeves and gets to work, wielding her water and vinegar spray against last night's kitchen transgressions.
From the prompt "On the kitchen counter." Yes, the setting is my kitchen counter, but the writing is not about my life.
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 TimeMachine Sailing.
Ironic pants
When did the poufy sleeves come back and the little gathers at the waist, the floppy jackets with the frou frou and the belts and buckles, like some romantic domantrix’s version of warmth in the city? I want flat, classic lines and all black. I want inscrutable t-shirts. I want formfitting -- but not second -- skin. I want a little hug near the tummy while I still have what it takes. I want non-ironic pants.
Slowly slowly, between the self-help books and the New Yorker and New York magazine and the New York Times Sunday paper (What I am doing in California? Clearly my literary loyalty lies elsewhere.), I’ve been rereading Martin Amis’s Money. His best book, I think, and quite a contrast to his last, The Pregnant Widow, which I read a couple of months ago. Still, there are parallels: Martin has a thing for women’s pants. Our pants have power, or they can, over the salivating male, the one who is helpless in the face of heavy breasts and a pendulous ass, helpless against the sway of hips. Pants are the thing, with their waist-love and the way they cling to form.
With this return to the 1980s in fashion, or the return I see reflected in the clothes at Crossroads Trading Company, my main source for duds, I wonder if complicated high-waisted pants are the next style to be resurrected. I wore them, yes, I did, those things that crawled up past the belly-button, with complicated clasps and foldovers, waistband compensations for style, an obfuscation of fabric, a militaristic series of pleats and flaps. Everything I’ve put on in the last couple of years has been hiphuggerish, though not hippieish, and I like the unfettered feel of shirt fabric against my belly, the unconstructed nature of pants that cling below the waistline.
I burnish my belly. I wave the kettlebells every other day, I praise the antidepressants that help keep me here, that wake me up at 4:30 in the morning, along with the dreams. I clothe myself in simple shirts made of natural fabrics, am continually in pursuit of the perfect pair of pants, of the right skirt with the right black boots and the soft clingy sweater. I am not going to give up on fashion, to pretend that it no longer matters. I will age gracefully or not at all, never having been one to embrace teenybopper, there in my flat-waisted pants and my too-cool t-shirt.
From the prompt "In fashion."
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.
And maybe someday I'll write a post about my heavy-on-the-symbolism dreams last night, me with a house ripped from its foundation, pulled on a truck, looking for a new place to call home. In the last version of it, right before I woke up, the house and I were returning to the original site, thinking, "why not back here again?"
Images by Huzzah Vintage and funkomavintage.
From where I stand
I have lived off the bravery of other people, have let my opinions lie in an unopened room, have held myself back out of fear of rejection. I’ve simpered and smiled and played the little girl, I’ve put my freak flag in the back of the bottom drawer,
So the fantasies are of escape, of a woman driving the getaway car through streets of flame, full of power, full of dark arts leavened by joy and confidence. They give me just enough life to not pursue life, and there are too many steps to get there anyway, and there’s the risk, the risk …
And meanwhile, things rearrange themselves. I can say what I want to say – outside of saying things that cause pain – and if what I say brings on rejection or challenge, I can stand up to it. I can have opinions and I can speak my mind. You don’t really know me, none of you have met me in real life (or only a select few have), but can I tell you how amazing this is? Years of fear of being crushed if I reveal myself? Decades of quietness, because to not express myself in one way means that I am paralyzed, that the words don’t come, or if they do come, they are mumbled, mangled, easily abandoned?
This is all new, you know, and requires practice and constant reminders that I am ok, I’m good, I’m good, that I need a place to stand, that I have a place to stand, and I can offer up what I think because what I think has merit, it has grounding. And in the process, I accept what you have to say, too, knowing that it doesn’t threaten my small self, that I don’t need to crush it. I am large. I contain multitudes.
So ineloquent. Or not enough. But within me I can’t contain my excitement, the unrest, the feeling that I am about to step outside, that I am preparing myself for any weather, for the rebirth, for the light dance in the rain and the sprint against thunder, for the stroll by the riverbank in the heady air of springtime and the decay of fall, my feet crunching on gravel or fluffing up the dirt, crackling the fallen leaves. In the winter the snow silences my step, but I can see my breath. I can feel the life within me, reaching out for you.
From the prompt "An escape."
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: My mother's shoes, my shoes, taken by me.
Goodbye to all that
We have boxes and boxes of baby stuff, things we kept around, you know, just in case. Just in case we went crazy and did it again. We even tried to go crazy and do it again, but it was a half-hearted gesture and now I know it will never happen again for me. So I go through the boxes. I remember a different time, one that was simpler in some ways, though it was also overwhelming and painful and I was so strung out from lack of sleep that I couldn’t enjoy what enjoyable bits there were.
When we moved here from DC four years ago, the boy wasn’t even two years old yet. We actually moved from Alexandria, Virginia, where we lived in a cold drafty house, a place where we spent less than six months. The wind was biting that winter and the snow piled up and then there was sleet and rain. I felt so isolated from our cozy DC Adams Morgan neighborhood and then we were in Berkeley and the isolation continued. There was the strangeness of being in a new place, knowing no one, with a kid that was a homebody who needed me intensely.
“We need to be nice to each other,” I told my husband at the time. We were not up to the task. The stress of isolation, of moving, of his new job took it out of us. Maybe we both were depressed. My mother’s visit that first summer showed me how sludgy my life had become. Often I wouldn’t get dressed until after noon and couldn’t manage to even get out of the house once the day really began. My husband and I were snappy with each other. Mom was embroiled in her own troubles, too, the same troubles that had been distracting her before we moved.
So: the boxes. I have been going through them slowly, deciding what to hold onto in a sentimental nostalgic time capsule of unreality, deciding what is saleable (money would come in handy right now), what we should give away. I go through the geological layers of our son’s early life and our lives, too, as a relatively recently married couple with a baby, following the traditional pattern of man in the world, woman at home.
Who are we now? We are parents. Our son is an elementary schooler. There will be no more babies. Eras are ending all around me. I no longer cling to them, but take my comfort in thinking about real geologic time, how our existence on this earth is but a spark, a spark quickly extinguished. My only choice is to get on with it, be kind to those around me, and forgive myself and others for the mistakes we’ve made before I am covered by dirt, turned into ash. Before I return to the battered earth.
From the prompt "A baby."
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. (Yes, I skipped yesterday. The prompt was "Obama." I didn't feel like getting political here, plus the boy is sick and I was otherwise occupied for much of the day.)
Image: The boy, me, and Nora-dog, summer 2005.
Packing heat
I like to pretend that I don’t get angry, that it’s all modulation and reasonableness and no drama (oh, God forbid the drama, which translates into inconvenient emotion). Sure, there are flare ups, sudden explosions of short shouted words, bitter and small as they leave my mouth. Yes, there are times when I navigate my grocery cart around the morons and the clueless in the Berkeley Bowl that I might, just might, want to slam my cart into someone, knock them to the ground or at the very least leave a nasty bruise on their yoga- and Pilates-muscled thigh.
But yesterday I realized that I had been a ticking time bomb, a powder keg waiting for a spark, a heady mixture of really pissed off and really sad and the tears intermingled with the tooth grinding and I woke up this morning with a headache and memories of random dreams, of the old classmate with the black Mini, of the old love interest who showed up and stripped down to his boxers, made himself at home in the living room reading the New York Times.
Ah, but I dance away from the topic even now. Nice girls – sweet girls – don’t get angry. What is it about anger that scares us so much? When I was little, my mother was explosive, a shouting, glass-tossing, running out of the house like a maniac angry person. This was my emotional incubator, a place where insults were regularly traded during moments of hotheadedness. Not a functional model, but neither is ignoring anger or controlling it to the point that it is as if it never existed.
I want to feel this anger, to ride it, to let it dissipate slowly, slowly as I heal or change or get used to the new landscape of my life. But I feel guilty about it, too, because anger usually has a target and my target doesn’t seem to be able to take it. The anger enters this person and does its internal damage. It smashes and destroys and brings on paralyzing guilt. It clears the shelves and drinks all the whiskey. It was precisely this dynamic that made me tamp down the anger in the first place, but the dynamic has been rendered meaningless. It matters less now, and so my anger is back. With a vengeance.
It’s packing heat. It doesn’t care who it tramples. It hates itself at the same time, a bully without a home, a feeling without a use, the furnace of pain personified, directed, because without a direction the anger has nowhere to go but inward. It pummels me, or I pummel myself, because the anger and I are one, we dance together, her and me. She’s my skin, my teeth, the glint in my eye when I walk down the street.
From the prompt "It makes me mad."
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 ElRobboz.
Exit stage left
The kitchen has a door to the back deck. The hallway has a door to the deck. The back room has a set of French doors that lead to the deck. Our stairway has a door, too. None of these doors are solid, they are transparent, glass-paned, they let in light and a view and keep things airy. We live in a house of glass thresholds, where supposedly there are no secrets, but some of the doors are covered over, in film, in fabric, the crannies of hidden disorganization, the jammed rooms and closets and the places where private things go on.
Someday one of us will open the front door and walk away. That one of us, the she or the he, will carry his or her life on his or her back. I used to have just enough stuff, enough belongings, to fit into a car, and then it became a small truck, and now our things intermingle. They traveled across the country a little over four years ago in a massive truck. Slowly we’ve been acquiring more as we’ve also slowing been shedding the old, the clothes from fifteen years ago, the things that are no longer age-appropriate for the kid.
What do I stake a claim to here? Almost all of it is us. I imagine the men, anonymous in their jeans and sweaty t-shirts or their incongruous bland blue uniforms, moving the boxes out. One of us, the he or the she, is crying or trying not to cry, and the other one, the she or the he, is maybe not even here, or is on the phone in the yard, or pacing in front of the privacy fence, one hand gesturing, the phone crooked between chin and shoulder.
Someday, we will divide these things. The door will become someone else’s entry. I will walk or drive or be driven past the house, will note the new trim, the bikes locked on the porch, will see how someone else has taken this shell of a house and made it theirs. The new folks won’t know our story, or the story of the people who went here before us. The house will be wiped clean of context, ready to be painted with fresh emotion.
But I am getting ahead of myself. The main door to the house is to my left. The heat hums in the corner. I have a cat behind me and a cat beside me, two lightly snoring sleepers. Nothing has changed and yet everything may be different, unless I can score a lucky card today, or this week, unless someone yanks our arms and pulls us away from the precipice, a good Samaritan, one who knows the worth of one plus one plus one plus history and heartbeat and shared brainwaves against just enough doubt to make it all feel impossible.
From the prompt "Walk through the door."
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 *Fede*.
Dithering in the dilly-dally
In the last week or so, I seem to have lost something. The words I use to describe my life at the moment run from feeling trapped or having no place to stand or feeling like I have no viewpoint. It’s a type of freefall, though I am not falling at all, I am hanging. The chair is suspended in mid-air. I am tied to it. Every hour or two or every 18 or 113 minutes – my experience of it is random – the chair pivots and at each turn whatever my view is at that moment is the absolute truth, until the chair turns again, and the views get all mixed up in my mind.
It’s impossible to live without a hypothesis, without a point of view. Try it, try losing who you are in emotion and its source and look at your life and your reactions to it and pretend that your reactions all stem from your past. Then change it up and pretend that your reactions are totally about the moment. Briefly see the truth of both sides, of the melding, and sit, paralyzed in your chair as it twists this way and that.
It’s all so obtuse, gentle reader, or so it feels as I try to explain without really getting into the nitty-gritty of it. I need to find the path again, to move forward, to jettison the chair. I either move forward on my own or with a companion, with a posse even. I’m getting impatient, having lived with ambiguity for months now. My world feels like it is shrinking, that my options are few, and while so much of it is sweet and right and smooth as whipped butter, something vital is missing.
Is the missing piece within me, the answer in my heart? Do I need to work harder at creating this piece in my current context? Is there something I can do with my life to bring the piece to me?
Frankly, I’m tired of the dithering and dilly-dallying and the thinking about this. It’s the type of exhaustion that leads to something rash, the packing of a satchel and taking to the rails, the slow melt into an unmade bed. These are easy, relatively, and don’t require the assistance of others. My chest is tight and my heart moves from here to there and they tell me to quit it with all of this ambiguity, to clean the windows of my mind and sweep the floors and just fucking get on with it. But I’m not the only one in this game, I am responsible for others, I don’t want to do anything rash and so I do what feels like nothing at all.
Determination is easy if your mind is clear, if the consequences seem less dire, if it feels like you aren’t in the middle of a choice about so many different things, if you trust your own mind.
From the prompt "I am determined."
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.
Images of spinning chair by me.
Let it rain
My eyes are dry, though rain threatens daily. My muscles ache, like I’ve been running, though whether it is away from something or towards something or merely running in place, I don’t know. I ended yesterday thinking about desire, for escape or for fulfillment, the desire for companionship, for touch, the radiation out of us, the force field. I don’t want to want a thing, but I want, and the want grows in the fetid hidden dark.
For almost my entire life, I’ve wanted to escape. First it was from my home life, the kid’s imaginings of being a grownup, out from under the control and capricious decisions of adults. Then in my first marriage I focused on the crush, this person that represented something else … art, instability, dark emotion. There has always been something outside of my life to focus on, to stare at in my mind, a pretend safe/unsafe place where I would be challenged (emotionally? sexually? physically? I’m not sure.). A new career. A new place. A changed and charged conversation.
If my individual therapist were up to the task – lately we’ve just been having conversations. I see her put her notebook down and I know that the rest will be pleasant, but not about where I, um, need to go – I’d bring this up, because I think this is the tip of something large, something that I can chip away at or work on in some other context. Maybe when our needs aren’t met as children, they live on, they rise like some sort of mutant dough, ever-expanding, like something in a sick sit-com, and the room we build for them keeps getting bigger, too, it presses against the sides of our mind and things leak out and the way to deal with the pressure between needing in real life (the way we need and love those around us) to the fantasy needs that necessarily separate our bruised selves from the real needs …. Well, it all intermingles.
I fought the need to escape last night, felt the pressure in my chest, a version of the same tension I’ve been carrying around for days. I don’t know if I am up to the task, but I have to keep on going forward. I still can’t tell the line between real needs and fake ones and so I am here, I am here. I am trying.
It's hard to be good, to be clear, to know my own motivations.
From the prompt "If only ..."
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 Pinkat, cropped slightly.
Distracted
This week has been a bad one for writing. Everything has layers and requires more work than 12 minutes, more time to be thought out. The old stuff, the bad stuff, comes more easily but writing about it is a sham, like going back to my old high school decades after graduating. Everything is smaller, not true to memory, and the teachers are different and they painted the lockers a darker shade of blue. The guy who called the vice principle a corpulent bovine is working on Wall Street and my friend with the dyed black hair, the one I probably should have kissed at least once, who turned me on to Steve Albini’s band Big Black, teaches graduate students in conservative Arizona about the ways of corporations, the world of finance.
Therapy has rendered my creative mind useless. That and spending every day organizing things, tossing out this, boxing up that (this isn’t metaphorical, unfortunately, though the house is looking better and my son’s room is improving incrementally from a hoarder’s paradise to a place where we can see the floor). Yesterday was all about birthday party preparation, the house cleansing, the frosting whipping, the cake baking, the Chex mix roasting, the goody bag stuffing.
So I could write about my aching muscles, the way I sweated and gasped through the kettle bell workout and through the Berkeley Bowl shove, through the vacuum pushing and the dust rag dampening and the hot stove slaving. I finally sat down after 8 p.m. to organize the goody bags and then it was up to read 3.5 pages of Martin Amis’s Money (my third reading of the book. He’s so good.) before collapsing in a beery puddle.
Then … then! One of the cats went on a one a.m. tear and the dog barked to be let up the stairs at three (I’d closed the door to the stairs in error) and the boy came into bed at 3:30, all cold hands smoothed on my belly and back. Up at four, asleep again until 5:20, and then the stumble, the rumble of heat and my belly and the thoughts about what needs to happen before one p.m. today. It’s life, it’s dull, and so is my brain. And the tension, the tightness in my core, just doesn’t let up.
The image was the prompt.
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 Jane Underwood, of the Writing Salon.
Adulterated joy
Except for me, it’s all at the surface, I have a direct line to my emotions, to what is going on, though I don’t always know the source. I knew that the very idea of family was threatening, the translation of woman/man/kid into me against them, but it had never occurred to me why. Years of threes, me on the outs, the sacrifice, the undesirable, the way I had to build a framework to protect myself, the avoidance even now, now at 41 -- it pulls me back to the days of John the Murderer or Jim the Silent or Kevin the Troubled Genius. That's the background, anyway, for my internal tightening, my bracing against rejection. I am not thinking of these people when I am locked away inside my own head.
I walk past whitewashed bungalows in our neighborhood, grandparent houses with stiff drapes browned by years of cigarette smoke and television rays. Inside the furniture is dark and it smells like sauerkraut and over-boiled hot dogs, like coffee and fake cream, like sewing machine oil and old man sweat. I ache for my grandmother, for the simplicity of two, of being enveloped by love. The year I lived with her and my grandfather is summed up by memories of breakfast on a tray in the kitchen, toaster waffles with margarine and syrup, sausages, and a jelly jar of orange juice. The filtered light of a winter Eastern Shore dawn comes through the casement windows. The kitchen is warm. I am safe. It mixes in with the memory of getting into her bed on snowy weekday mornings, cuddling up close and listening to the radio for school closings. There were quite a few in the winter of 1977-78.
If you ignore mourning, if you try to pretend that loss is all about self-development and looking on the bright side, or if you’re a kid and don’t know how to deal with it, it pops up at the oddest times and years later. The bungalows tell me of other peoples' grandparents, of love going stale in empty houses, and the television is on constantly and the threat of loss hangs everywhere.
My mother and were sometimes two and then a man came along and we were three and I was on the outs, the three-year old standing every night at a dinner table set for two, the melodramatic seven-year old shunned, the preteen who was excluded from dinner conversation the teenager eating alone and living on her own in the year-round coolness of a summer bungalow.
My grandmother and I were always two. She shared her Coke on ice with me, let me lie next to her in her bed. She taught me about double-lined two-way streets and the rules of swimming after eating. She was there on weekends and school holidays. And then she died in front of me and I could do nothing about it, watched helplessly as she slumped on the chair. Nine years old without an advocate.
Maybe this is the tension I’ve been carrying all week, since that session of threes. Connection means loss and relying means loss, too, and so I see the lines of it all, I see it, but you still can’t remove the truth from the matter. There is no pure joy, no happiness without pain, no life without death. Someday I’ll be the one going out, or the one left alone, and my heart tells me “don’t’ get used to it. They all leave and no one will care about you when they are gone.”
From the prompt "Pure joy."
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. This one was lightly edited. Yes, I skipped yesterday. It was taking too much time, had too much to develop. Maybe I'll post it someday.
Image: Me at around three years old, my grandmother's cigarette smoldering in her hand. I've posted this picture before. Unfortunately, I don't have any other pictures of my grandmother and me.
The bigger picture
The cracks in the parched ground represent lives lived, paths that no one should have taken, the way one thing flows into the next and then it’s all over, that brief period of time when we lived, when our blood flowed and our muscles were strong, our joints unfettered, our minds still clear and easy and free of clutter. It stretched off past the horizon, looked eternal, but this was an optical illusion. Somewhere at the end there was a grassy field, a meadow with flashing larks and swooping sparrows, a beach where waves lapped at the dry earth before disappearing, the sun boiling it down to nothing.
The earth started as an amorphous cloud of gas. Gravity pulled it together, the heaviest metals sunk to the core, meteorites pummeled the unsettled surface. It was fire and magma, volcanoes and explosions, and then it was rock and the oceans formed and life began, the bacteria, the protozoa. There were no vertebrates, no invertebrates. Slowly things changed, so slowly, and would you believe that trilobites, those marine arthropods, lived for something like 270 million years while humans have only been here a relative millisecond, around 200,000 years?
The continents were one. Lizards came and fish and amphibians and mammals. They predated the dinosaurs and then they died out, too, or most of them did. The dinosaurs had their reign, the large continent cracked into pieces that slowly drifted apart. The mammals reign now. Human beings are at the top of the heap with our big brains, upright forms and opposable thumbs. We burn the remains of plants that once furred the earth, releasing the carbon dioxide that has been stored as rock. We steal the energy of what was formerly alive, killing the earth in the process. Or changing it in ways that we can't fully anticipate.
The world we will leave behind will be wet, humid, with heaving oceans, our plastic and Styrofoam and electronics floating in the soup. Those left will have adapted to the heat, will be able take the supersatured air and the rays of the sun that knife through thinning ozone.
I find it comforting to imagine that our time here is short, that the average human lifespan is nothing compared to the earth’s epochs, that when our struggles are over, they are over, not even a memory. Human beings matter no more than trilobites, except that we are taking down the earth with us and the animals, we are changing the landscape. We are the catastrophic event, but our personal catastrophic events, the small tragedies of life, don’t matter against the backdrop of the whole of earth's history.
History without humanity becomes something else, a story without a narrator, without a theme, nature and its forces ruling without regard to conclusion or story arc. Does unwitnessed violence exist? There is just life, lived for the moment, trying desperately to reproduce itself before burning out.
From the prompt "Another country," which was actually the prompt for July 29th. My response for today's prompt was too personal to put up on the web (but not too personal to share with a stranger). I haven't fact-checked this one, so I could be wrong about the earth's formation, etc.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Most of the time. This one has been heavily, ponderously edited.
Image by mozpkim of Chile's Chaitén volcano erupting in 2008.
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.
Peevish
I have a neighbor, a woman who’s all stick arms and knee bones, her hips two spikes jutting through her clothes. You can count the woman’s ribs from fifteen feet away through her tight shirts. But her chest, this heaving thing, two solid breasts that truly do bring melon/tit comparisons to life! She sits out on a chaise in her yard – the front yard – her private bits barely covered with a shimmering swimsuit (though I don’t think she uses that bikini for swimming), eyes closed, body buttered, some surprising periodical at her side (the New York Review of Books? Come on, babe, we know that’s above your mental age, above your brain-stretching capacity).
Why the front yard? Does she enjoy the slowing of trucks, of cops, of the cyclists riding innocently to work, staring, not daring to honk or slam on the brakes, but taking all of her in? She stretches her delicate toes, the nails pale pink, her ankle accented with a golden bracelet so fine that I can’t see the links from the upstairs window. “Get a job!” I want to scream at her, I do scream at her, internally at least, and then I return to my computer, for my flipping around the Internet, to my Go Fug Yourself and my Gawker and my Facebook friends.
I read about bad men and drug habits, sneer at politicos who wax rhapsodic about their dicks to strangers. I IM with some dude in Toronto, tell him what I’d like to do to him while he sits passive as a blinking cursor. Sometimes we Skype, both of us silent and staring. I reach out to touch my computer screen – the surface of it is smeared with fingertip marks, with the juices of nectarines and plums, with bloody dots of cherry juice – when I want to touch him or for him to touch me, but the screen is as close as we get to touch.
In the store strangers give me a wide berth, but I don’t take it personally. My aura is dark brown, it’s black, I know it, and that’s bad, bad, but what am I to do? I watch. I message. I dream of the melding, of the veil between me and them dissolving. I forgive the people who ignore me, who brush up against me without knowing that I am there. I wake up and stare at the ceiling. I prowl the virtual streets of shame.
Cool as the proverbial cucumber.
From the prompt "Pet peeve."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one is lightly edited. And, despite the first person point of view, it really is fiction.
Throw those crutches away!
This makes it tolerable, the lack, it lets you wallow in it, brings dreams of escape, of the trip across a continent for love, the feel of a stranger’s hand on your fishnet-clad thigh, the adoration from hundreds (ok, dozens) of readers, writing you about the way you captured it, you nailed it, you got ‘em right in the eye.
Then? Nibble. Rip off a bit of bread, shove it in, chew surreptitiously as you chop the garlic. Allow yourself a bit of cheese. Sample the vinaigrette, a drop here, a dram there. Listen to the sounds of your family laughing, playing, arguing while you are there in the sanctum, the kitchen, the locus of creativity and loneliness, your task to provide, to pretend that you still get 100% satisfaction out of caregiving.
At dinner you can eat, one helping is all because that’s all it takes to fill you up, the plate sparse with pasta, the asparagus piled next to the sandwich. You’re stuffed. If you've been drinking beer, now is the time to move on to wine. Wine burns a trail down into your stomach, it clears a path for tears if you’ve been holding back, for fantasy if that’s what you need.
It’s the only way you can take it, the tasks without interest, the empty life of dust removal and scrubbing and wondering what is next. You love them, love the people in your life, but they are not enough. There is something lying ahead of you, some quest or discovery and you will not let the alcohol get in your way. You can cap the bottles, let them remain in the refrigerator, on the shelf, these substitutes for feeling, these maudlin tear-producers. (Or, let's not kid yourself, you could just cut back.)
The wine days are over, a memory of the need to loosen after holding it together. The key to maintaining a self is to listen to your heartbeat, to what stirs the pain, to building a flexible framework for love and self-support. Where wine fails, conversation and action take over. You are on a path now, necessarily alone, naked, your feet moving forward while your mind, two steps behind, looks back at what you once were.
From the prompt "Too much."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I spent a little time editing this. Clearly my brain starts out in the old way (the melodrama, the desperate wish for escape) and then is surprised to find itself in a more hopeful paradigm.
Image by cabbit.
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.
Making the break
Yesterday’s internal premise was about growing up. Not the physical process, the way that cells divide and hormones push changes, but the internal process, the maturity of mind, the separation of self from others, the necessary break. I realized that this was a break that I’d never really made, that a lack of childhood made me cling to childhood, that I’ve been wandering around in an adolescent (or worse: toddler) miasma half the time. Once you notice that, there is no choice but to grow up and it’s a relief, to let go of the need to be parented, the need to be seen by the love object, seen and supported like a babe in arms.
Lest you think that this means I’m “over it,” that what happened to me doesn’t matter anymore, I have to say that this just means I own it and the results, the hidden fears, the needs that I must meet by myself. I still cry about it, cry about her and what she went through, cry for her clueless sad parents who couldn’t help her, cry for the way she’s spent years being controlled in part by a past that is long gone. Her is me, a version of me, and I embrace her, but I also tell her that the time has come to let go of adolescent views on love and its expression, to embrace herself and what she wants, to reach out without being crushed when other people don’t automatically reach back.
I no longer stamp my feet when things don’t go my way, but I do have a way of disappearing when angry, of putting up a shield, of deciding that the mortals around me don’t deserve my delicate thoughts, that they are part of the problem and my solution is to disappear, to send out a cloud of ink and anger and blame. Now I feel the feelings, watch the others, separate myself from their reactions. I differentiate.
I take responsibility. Maybe I take the wheel, or control my own destiny. The clue is deciding how to balance connection and independence, to really feel that they don’t need to be separated, to keep on acting “as if.”
From a photo prompt (above). Image by Jane Underwood of the Writing Salon.
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.
Dulled
I remember the sharp object, the way it glittered under the kitchen lights, the nicks along the blade, the way you told me that it was more dangerous this way, blunted so that you had to use more power to cut. The blade could slip, it could jump from the red bell pepper on the cutting board (our sacrifice, still intact, unaware of the awaiting evisceration), jump from its flesh to your opposite hand.
“A sharp knife is your most important kitchen tool,” you told me. I watched as you straightened it against a steel, remembered a time when we couldn’t keep our hands off of each other, the panting across tables, the wanting and wantonness. Time and proximity had dulled us, too.
The nape of your neck looked cool, too cool for me to touch. The kitchen tile held my feet. I decided not to say anything, to let this lesson be without subtext, decided to ignore the dangerousness of blunted emotion. Straightening over, you took a thumb to the blade. You showed me the difference, held down the pepper, and sliced into its crispness.
Love, when it is sharp and new, when the couple is like a single knife blade, has its own dangers: the melding, the way the we are reflected in the metal, the way love's intensity threatens our core. Time dulls, and little pains do, too, and then you press too hard and someone gets cut, the sanctity of skin and blood vessels and self violated.
We ate salad that night, crisp romaine and bell pepper, the vinaigrette sharp, the olives a sour counterpoint to freshness. We sat across from each other, silent under the sounds of knife and fork, under the soft collisions between metal and ceramic and tooth. I watched you, the observer. I prepared myself for the cut, for the jagged gash, like I’d been preparing myself since the beginning.
You would not disappoint.
From the prompt "I remember."
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 GavinBell.
Listen to the silence
One or two times a week, my husband or I sit down with our son to practice his writing. We're gentle. We're nonthreatening. Still, the pressure comes from within: nearly every time he dissolves into tears about selecting a topic. The subject is too large for him to narrow down. He claims to know nothing about x, a subject he's been talking about for days. He rejects all suggestions. There are too many choices (this is a child who is plagued by choice), too many things to be anxious about: the topic, the creation of sentences, the frustrating way that his brain still flips letters, the actual sounding out and writing of words. We push through and I try not to get frustrated myself, to remember that this is for encouragement, to help him in a no pressure environment. No matter. I end up feeling like a torturer. Still, we generally get through it. He's learning perseverance as well as getting comfortable with writing.
And what about me? I’ve put off this write since 6:00 this morning. Perhaps I don’t want to think about the sound of my narrative voice, don’t want to let the outside world into my head (the rumbling of a muffler on the fritz, the whine of the washing machine, the actual buzz in my ears that is a side effect of the medication). Or perhaps there are too many topics, from real to metaphorical, that I don’t want to write about, topics pressing at the edges of my skull that I am not yet ready to let out.
Last night I had a dream where I was staying at a hotel with three friends. The hotel was fancy and expensive and we each had our own room. But two of us were placed in an annex of the hotel, a long walk outside to a cinderblock structure that was dirty and cold, more motel than hotel. It took some time to find it, and my fellow Siberia-dweller wandered off to the bar. I knew she’d be getting drunk and I was hoping to get there with her once the whole room thing was straightened out, even though I knew this was bad, that I was encouraging her alcoholism. I prepared myself for a confrontation with the staff, felt my anger start to burn before I badgered the bored desk clerk for room changes, for what we paid for, was finally making a stand when … I woke up, right before the boy came into our room for his nightly sleep migration.
This happens more than I’d like, my wake up moments before the boy appears, my dreams interrupted and then interrupting my ability to return to sleep while everyone else in the room dozes. Did the sound of him wake me up? Am I "listening" to the boy in some other way? Are there other ways of hearing? And were the three of us in that dream different parts of me coming together again?
Lately I’ve been feeling a strange connection to someone I thought was a lost cause. This feeling is bodily, visceral, the feeling of music coursing through me, the "sound" of connection. I can't verify it, feel almost crazy to attribute it to what will remain unspoken. But I know what it is.
We cut ourselves off from the sound and beauty of the world around us. We block the signals of other people, switch off our receptivity and in the process lose ourselves. I’ve been tuned out for a while, scared by what the world might reveal about me. I've been afraid of other peoples' needs negating my own. I can't live that way forever, risk becoming dead inside, cold, like marble, like a smooth stone drowning in a rippling creek.
I am emerging, I am sending off welcoming signals. I am me and you are separate and beautiful. You shine in the dark, not waiting, but knowing that I'll be there soon.
From the prompt "The sound of ..."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. The words are not coming to me easily this week. Maybe I've been talking to my husband too much (a joke, a joke). Maybe there are many things percolating, waiting to ripen in my mind. This one took some work and I'm not sure how I feel about it. It certainly does meander.
And because this is the first song that came to mind when I was thinking of a title, here's a link to Transmission by Joy Division.
Image by theclyde.
Desk neurosis
It's exciting and scary at the same time, this continual shifting, the feeling that bravery is required and I am up to it, or have to think that I am. I wish I could go into more detail , need people to share this stuff with, but I don't know how to do it safely. What am I capable of doing? How will facing my fears and going forward change my life? It's easy to speculate about it, much harder to do it, but I am almost there.
***
In middle school I rifled through the drawers, looking for proof, for my mother’s journal, not hidden enough, somewhere in the bottom drawer perhaps. I opened it to look for evidence, to invade her privacy, to make sure that no one would leave me in the middle of the night. In it I found deep unhappiness starkly sketched. The journal verified my stepfather’s dislike of me, my role as a roadblock, the tight arguments they apparently had about my existence.
When she kicked him out two years later, she used me as an excuse.
Before I was aware of the desk, it traveled with my mother and me from apartment to apartment. It witnessed dead air, electric violence. When I was three years old, it came with us to live with a man named John. Here it absorbed fights and alcohol fumes, witnessed slaps and yells and John’s large hands moving toward my mother’s throat. Stoic, it watched as I stood at the dinner table night after night, the desk as silent as any adult in my life, foretelling my future. When my mother left in a hurry, me safely ensconced at my grandparent’s house, the desk migrated to the basement of John’s apartment building. Someone broke into it and stole all of my mother’s records, the Beatles, the Doors, the jazz albums that originally belonged to my grandfather.
She gave the desk to me when I got married the first time. It’s inhabited apartments and houses. I keep the checkbook in here, bills that need filing, old cell phones and computer cables. In the bottom drawer I keep old love letters that no one but me cares to read, the ephemera of what went before, when everything about life was unsettled but exciting all at once.
This bottom drawer contains emotions lost and volatile. I keep the journals my grandmother wrote after my grandfather was burned in an industrial accident, two notebooks of medical scares and bitterness, next to the love letters. Kevin’s teenage angst and poetry notebook lies on top of the burn diaries. The drawer contains them and so do I, these two suppressed lives gone, the words of the dead. I am the keeper of memory and severed connection, of history and sadness, of other peoples’ secret thoughts.
The desk holds hidden lives, realities experienced behind a mask. It reveals the deceptive moments when everything is either clear and bright and easy or muddied with uncertainty and censored thoughts, as if these were the only two possibilities that life and love offer. It holds privacy invaded, shows the way that thoughts living in isolation wither, how I hold on to our idea of other people without their input, keep them frozen in time.
I keep the evidence of infatuation and anger, the proof that once I dazzled strangers, that love and hatred interlink.
From the prompt "On my desk."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was edited beyond the 12-minute prompt mark.
Out the window
What was inside was bloody, raw, contained in plastic and paper towels and then the butcher’s paper, like it was your heart, or maybe even part of your brain, some vital part of you that held you back, but something that you needed, too, and then it was push up the window and toss it out and nobody was there to catch it, to hear the thud, to notice what you were doing.
You threw caution out of a side window by a part of the house where no one travels, near the winding blackberry bush and the invasive trumpet vine. You threw it and forgot about it and inside whatever it was, that vital part, just rotted away, and you told yourself how foolish it was to toss it out the window as you stitched the wound and changed the bandages.
The scar was ridiculous, too, a sign of your haste, your foolishness, this lightning rod on the side of your chest, like the clichéd tattoo of a teenager. “I’m stuck with it now,” like you were stuck with every other bad decision. You skin was crisscrossed with marks from other times, the times you let your boundaries be violated (so many small marks in the same place created a trough across your stomach), the indentations of withdrawal, the craters on your feet from all the running away.
To experience the metaphorical as the physical is a gift, a curse, a way to read the past and to hide from the future. In the bathroom, a cabinet of salves and gauze and ace bandages awaits. Wrap yourself protectively. Sit in the sun and reflect. Let caution grow again in you, slowly, a small protective thing. Let your decision-making be brave, do not toss the caution away, nurture it but ignore it when it leads you in the wrong direction. Just don’t kill it.
You are not brave, but you can be. Act as if, as if you had the heart and mind of someone else, as if you were whole, as if the most important thing in the world was the separation and then the connection, the only way to live life fully.
From the prompt "Out the window."
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 Debbi Long.
The stand-in
Sometimes a young man shows up on the porch. The door opens, a hand reaches out, the house swallows him up. He might live there, the only male I've seen enter the sanctum. Presumably a husband/father figure exists. He works in Belgium, in Luxembourg, in Italy. He wires money to a joint bank account, sends letters home in a tight script, the words leaning back in resistance. The mother homeschools the children, teaching them about revolution, about biofuels and flouting convention.
We watch them from our living room window, from the gaps in the privacy fence gate. In the beginning, both girls were friendly, but now it is only the towhead who raises a tentative hand in greeting. A silent figure on a small porch littered with leather booties and biking shoes, she watches my son and me when we walk home from school, when we trace chalk robots on the sidewalk out front.
They travel with their own personal force fields. I do too, I do, and I want to disable the protection system, mine, theirs. I want to borrow a cup of sugar or toss the turbinado on their scraggly lawn in some sort of magical gesture: make me part of this place, bring me into your home, show me the books on your shelves. I will take broken eggshells and make them into a potion (add sourgrass and fennel fronds and blackberry leaves, crush them with honeysuckle) I will mix it into a pitcher of plum-spiked lemonade. I will pour the mother a glass and convince her to tell me their secrets, to take me in like a lost dog.
From the prompt "My mother."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I edited this one from the original, though not much.
Image: View from our living room window across the street.
Fictionalized
I’ve become accustomed to writing in bursts at 4:30 in the morning, giving the quick impression, the fast take. The rest of my time lately has been spent in household tasks and I tell myself this is fine, really it's fine, at least I have something to show for it, some signs that yes, I can write. Maybe I’m not meant to write drawn out stories. Maybe these bursts are my thing. Maybe it’s time to accept the fact that, like most writers, I’m just going to have to plug along without ever selling or really publishing a goddamned thing.
Why is it so important to have thousands of readers? What is it about the mind meld process of reading someone else’s words? Is this a power trip, me wanting to insert a bit of me into you? What do I expect from this process? I am trying to let go of the shoulds, the idea that I should be writing one thing or another, that I need to please everyone in my life, that I should ignore my core in order to satisfy what I think other people want from me.
I don’t want to write for the masses. I have no desire to do the marketing dance, to write stories that will fly off of bookstore shelves (it’s good to not have desires for impossible things anyway). In order to please myself I probably need to write more, but, as with everything else, I have a hard time separating me out from the rest of it. I need to be disciplined, to push beyond the ease of four or five paragraphs. But what to write about that will please me, will keep my attention through self-doubt and difficulty?
My past is no longer up for being detailed. Leave me alone, it tells me. Make me into something else, please. Fictionalize me. In these conversations, I have to talk back. Then, past, why do you insist on historical accuracy? When I escape you in words, why do you hang over my shoulder and correct my “facts”? The past is fading, it no longer speaks in full sentences, but still, it can correct with a look. I parade it out in therapy sessions and crying jags, give it its due so that it will dissipate or return to the files in my mind, the places I will refer to when I need a situation, a fight, a season of loneliness and booze.
Still. I turn to the rest of you. I borrow your sentences, I watch the sunset filtered through filmy blinds. I see your lives reflected in mantel mirrors. Sooner or later, you will show up in my words, barely disguised. I promise to treat you with kindness, with affection, with acknowledgment for your strengths and flaws. So please talk to me, will you? Give me material, give me conversation. Don’t leave me alone by the side of the road, wordless, my head resting in my hands.
From the prompt "What I know about writing."
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. This is the final prompt of this session. The next one starts up some time in July. The boy is home and campless for the next couple of weeks, so I'm not sure what my writing time will be like.
Image by Ben Fredericson (xjrolokix).
Tear down this wall
When the wall is old and deep and wide, a familiar part of the landscape, a barrier of your own ingenious imagination, choose a time to tear at the crumbling edge, at the bits of mortar and brick that are coming loose, carefully. Bring a friend. Work slowly. Words will tumble out of the gaps, and emotions, full situations from childhood, or dense chunks of suppressed feelings, the things you think you shouldn’t feel, but do, the fears, the dark sticky evil thoughts oozing through the cracks.
.
I didn’t totally appreciate this until yesterday, after my appointment (Take a minute to pay attention to how you are feeling my therapist told me. “The tension runs from my head through the middle of my torso, the center of me. There is a burning sensation at my heart, like a fire. It is wordless, a mix of anger and sadness.”). She told me to leave the feelings there, to walk away with a light step and calm interior. I made a half-hearted attempt, but my tears were insistent. My life was disappearing from underneath my feet. At home I tried to stop the flow of thought and escaped emotions, but the wall would not be patched.
It was an unsettling feeling, to be teetering over the void again, but to recognize that I had some control over it, that this was part of a process, of healing, of change. I also saw how I tried to cope with it, by distracting myself with fantasy, with escape. The fantasy no longer works. I see it for what it is, a delusion. It makes me feel old and sick and dirty and undesirable, which is part of this whole sad journey, the separation of me from the old emotions.
Walls on their own aren’t necessarily bad things. We don’t need to have minds like open fields where every plant, every hillock, is visible to passersby. But the walls could come with doors, or they could be beautiful constructions, wrought iron fences where clematis vines travel, simple picket structures with wide gates and daisy borders. Or maybe the way to think of our vulnerable selves is to picture a library, the books finely bound. Some are old. They crumble and you must treat them delicately. Others are new and shiny and beg to be opened. Know which is which. Share the brittle volumes, the dark histories, with people whom you can trust. Take it slowly. Know you deserve good things, that you can treat people well, that we’re all mired in something or other, the past, the search for acceptance, the stress of life, of money troubles, of lost love.
From the prompt "Good advice." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach. Here is last week's take.
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 michaelgoodin.
Soul container
I like to picture myself in the mirror of his mind, constant, perfect, beautiful. He contains my soul in cupped hands, treats me gently, always wants to know how I’m feeling.
Thinking about this prompt this morning, how I dealt with it last week and how I always want to focus back on love, the love that I am not sure I believe in, the slipperiness of sex and the danger of it, too, I thought again to the theme of being a character in someone else’s mind, fully known, maybe even created by them, and totally loved. I want a man-god to contain me, to see me from fault to fault to cracked fault. I want to matter on some fundamental level to this idealized creature, this fiction.
What is this all about? Well, isn’t this part of why I am in various therapies, to expose this man for what he is, to rip off his corny toga and see my history written on his skin? It comes back to the original story, the neglected teenage years, though I know it goes further back than that. I still don’t understand how I was allowed to essentially live on my own from fifteen onward, how I stayed in that little unheated, unplumbed guest house even after the baby was born (dead, as my mother coached me to push), how the focus was on me taking responsibility and not on my withered and suppressed grief. I was invisible, I was a blank slate for meaningless platitudes and no one was able to come in and rescue me from the situation.
I say that the antidepressants have separated me from my stories, from my past, and its true. I don’t have as much of an urge to tell the stories over and over again. I’ve contained them with words and made them public. But this story is so huge and meaningful and layered.
When I went to the psychiatrist, when I finally was ready to admit that I was depressed and needed pills, I told her the story. She was appropriately sympathetic and said something interesting: that a year or two of therapy was not enough to deal with this sort of trauma. Of course, she’s working from a therapeutic perspective. But it made me realize that yes, this event did matter, that I have to deal with it, that maybe I’ll be seeing my therapist for a while on this one, despite my urge to just pretend that with the dissipation of my depression, all is well.
So: the man-god who grasps me with his mind, who sees all? He is a vestige from the long time of invisibility, he is my childish desire for parenting, for the hand hold across the street. He plucks me from my past and saves me from myself. It’s effortless, the dance between me and this man. He massages away the scars and heals my soul.
He doesn’t exist.
From the prompt "The best feeling in the world." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach. Here is last week's take.
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 from the Pime Missionaries of North American (who knows where they got it from). It hasn't escaped me that some people get this feeling of being seen and held from religion, from an idea of G/god. But this is not an authentic path for me.
Baltimore pastoral
Norm's father was a drunk and he is a heroin addict. His mother, Anna, took the beatings and she lives with two sons who don’t speak to her or to each other. One sits in his room, drinks beer and watches television, the other lives like an alley cat, thin and sly. He slinks between neighborhoods and drives other peoples’ cars. He hides his works under seat cushions and stows away the crack pipe in holes in the upholstery.
He says he is going to get clean. He doesn’t mean it. The life suits him, the cheap beer in boxcar bars, the in and out familiarity of Central Booking and the Baltimore jail. He gets arrested for stupid stuff, loitering, driving without a license, uses the jail time to detox, then goes back to it when he is released. You can go for a long time on heroin, years lost to its pleasures, the nodding in front of the TV set, the corner deals. His friends are prostitutes and homeless men and when the nice naïve lady moves in across the street, lonely on her stoop, the clothesline burning her hands as she wrenches it too hard, he sees an opportunity. She sees self-destruction incarnate, the desperate eyes and trembling hands.
He has an easy way, she tells herself, and easy way and a light touch. And when he’s sober, Norm has a talent for carpentry. He works with his hands and she’s always been a sucker for that, the three dimensional knowledge, the things of beauty that men can create. Wasted, wasted, wasted. She must reveal his goodness to him, save him from the streets.
From the prompt "Promises." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach. Here is last week's take. This one is based in reality.
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'm working on fourish hours of sleep and have no idea about the quality of this one. A little too much tell and not enough show, but that's how it goes.
Image by ktylerconk.
Reluctant room parent bares all
When we sat in the florescent-lit classroom last September, our five-year-old children ensconced elsewhere as we learned about the year ahead, what kindergarten would be like, I had no idea what I was doing. Yes, I signed up to be a room parent, one of the first on a list of four or five. I thought that it was part of my job as a sometimes-disgruntled stay-at-home mom, a hyphenated sort, to do that kind of thing, you, know, for the children or more specifically for my child, though I’d be helping other peoples’ children along the way.
Confession: I am not a gung-ho type. I like to be left alone and I don’t like to incite others to give group presents or bring treats to various parties. I don’t have fun ideas for teachers and if I had my way my son and I would spend long afternoons in imaginative splendor, him hopefully with a friend along, me coasting and thinking and being.
Another confession: I didn’t realize back in September that I was depressed, that I would take my family along on a melodramatic ride this school year, that many of our post-school afternoons would consist of me being cranky and removed, anticipating the four p.m. IPA. I didn’t know how lonely I was or how desperate, or that I would find it difficult to get motivated to even cook dinner, let alone organize our disparate group.
I know it all now. I’m feeling better, though with the new uptick in the antidepressants my sleep has gone to shit again. The lovely thing about a long stretch of insomnia is that it forces you not to care about the little things (unless it makes you a sodden sobbing mess, but the meds have dried up most of my tears). It gives me a clarity and I see our classroom, our sets of parents with their home lives and their work lives and their problems like everybody else’s and I just don’t care. I have a job to do, the gathering of cash, the classroom squirrel storing things up for the teacher’s present. I harangue you all to sign the card, to bring sugary crap to the end-of-school party. I forward the many missives to give money here or provide food there.
Some of you know me better than others. But I realize as the year winds up and I look back at my mistakes, at how my hopes for this brave new world of elementary school were naïve, at how I was looking for a way out or a new path and was misguided … I realize that it takes a long time to know anybody. My public face is deceptive, though not deliberately so. I am contained. I am a good girl with snarky, dirty thoughts. I look sweet and I may even act that way, but in reality, I am a pit of twanging nerves and imagined violent scenarios.
Or, families of Room 188, that’s how I feel this morning, up before the morning birds have started their business. I hear one of them warming up now. I thank him for his perspective, for the liquidity of his voice. I’ll get another cup of coffee and think of my day. I’ll think of the children.
Sincerely,
Jennifer (blonde boy #3's mom)
From the prompt "Warning signs." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach.
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 of shadows on playground sand by me.
Take it without tears
Somewhere in one of the hodgepodge boxes in the back room, in one of the dilapidated cardboard containers stuffed with what remains of my childhood and my foolish teenage self, is a small ornamental box, a box within a box. In the smaller box is a strange collection of ephemera: Loudon the sheltie dog’s puppy teeth, a tangle of bobby pins, a small card from my high school boyfriend D where he wrote “I love you,” and an orthodontic "appliance" called a rapid palate expander.
My orthodontist hammered the rapid palate expander into my upper mouth in front of an audience. Every procedure was a performance. The three chairs for patients in varying states of pain, their mouths agape, were in a row in front of two similar chairs for waiting teenagers, which were all part of a large common room. You either got a front row seat while you waited for your own torture or you were only a moan away from it all.
Waiting patients tried not to stare, and when I was in the chair, drooling as they made a mold of my teeth, wincing as the cruel dental hygienist twisted the wires, eyes watering as Dr. Tjersland wielded the rubber mallet, I pretended there were no boys in the room. I closed my eyes and thought of the fish in cylindrical tanks in front of me or quietly hummed Duran Duran songs.
According to one orthodontist’s web site, the rapid palate extender – or RPE – works by “simply activating the expander through turning a screw in the center, with a special key . . . [placing] gradual outward pressure … on the left and right halves of the upper jaw. This pressure causes an increased amount of bone to grow between the right and left halves of the jaw, ultimately resulting in an increased width.” Simple. Painful with each turn of the screw. Food often got stuck in between the roof of my mouth and the RPE and I’d hack it out like a cat rids itself of a furball, complete with raspy sound effects.
Eventually, the thing was pulled out in a public removal, pried off with pliers or some other piece of handyman equipment adapted for exquisitely sensitive mouths. With more room to grow, my teeth could now be jacketed in metal and connected by rubber band. It was progress. My tongue explored its new cave with a growing sense of freedom, anticipated the taste of metal and blood, excited about the straightened teeth to come.
I kept the device as a reminder of what doctors do to unsuspecting children, as a record of public stoicism. Someday I will point to my now crooked teeth and will show my son the torture device in a stern warning to follow doctor's orders, to keep turning the screw and accepting the metal, to wear the retainer.
From the prompt "Boxes."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I expanded this one a bit.
Image by mag3737.
Stay
In the middle of the night, when the dreams wake you up (always a bus and an almost stranger, the meeting in a restaurant turned to a mysterious journey. Last night it was Emily with her magic eyes and her reserved manner and there you were on the bus and there she was behind, dragging a fifteen foot bench they had left by accident), quiet your mind, tell your brain to rest, that nothing is so important that you need not sleep. The night is a dark time for thoughts and love. It is the time that ghosts steal souls, that your life leaves through your breath.
But don’t think about that. Think about small, soft things, sleeping puppies, the tomatoes growing out back, the feel of butter sauce in your mouth. If you must go to the bathroom, walk there with your eyes shut and ignore the cat as he rubs his scent against your calves.
The truth is that nothing is really important, that life is a series of moments connected by time. Yesterday in the sunlight you thought you were happy. On the Bay Bridge, the traffic inching for a reason that had not yet been revealed, you thought of the repetition, its “here-you-are-again” nature, the bridge above and below, the bay gleaming out the window .
Then you passed five police cars – it’s a habit now to count things, so goes life with a kindergartner – and a tow truck, but no car. The police officers were looking over the edge of the bridge and you thought: oh no. Oh no. The boy asked you and your husband what you were oh noing and neither of you really wanted to talk about, so you glossed over it instead and besides, the scenario you were both imagining was unlikely.
But you knew the feeling, the desperation, the substrate of nothingness that might lead someone to the edge of a bridge in the mixed weather of a June Saturday. Another person out there who thought that nothing would ever get better, that they were evil to the core, or so sad that they should end the dance early. It’s an edge you’ve been on, though not quite as precipitously, and you wished that you could hold out a hand to all the people suffering, could hug them and reassure them. Together you would form a community of black humor and heavy sighs, a mutual support group of deep sadness, everyone rooting for the fleeting moments of sunshine.
It wasn’t a group that you thought you belonged to, but now they are your brethren, the depressed and desperate, and you love them for their depth of being. Stay here, you tell them, stay here with me and we will prove that we can live.
From the prompt "Good advice."
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. Turns out the reason those police cars were on the lower deck of the bridge was because a man had stopped his car on the upper deck and was standing on the ledge. He was later arrested for a suspected DUI.
Image of the Bay Bridge by Thomas Hawk.
Why I've gathered you all here
I still walk, I wander the streets of Berkeley and Albany. I take in the flowers, the bungalows in various states of repair, stuccoed in purples and calming greens. This is my secret life, going from appointment to appointment, from therapist to counselor to doctor, observing the lives of others, their public faces. It's the slow way to travel, though I am a fast walker, and my mind records and remembers. Here is where I waited in the rain, my head filled with me, with friendly warnings for the coming earthquake, waiting for the car with my husband and son to whisk me away from the flood.
The sidewalks are empty and the houses silent. I wander during weekdays when the rest of the world is gathering cash and stress and knowledge and I go to my helpers, the people who prop me up and make me hopeful, like an old lady grasping the arms of youth, one on either side, as she attempts to make it up the hill.
I have dreams about children running away from me and lost pets, about clocks that don’t work and friends who tell me that they won’t invite me over. Last night, my heart trembling, I broke out in a sweat and dreamt of the end of the world by machine, the last of humanity stamped out by falling metal. I woke up from that, and from the next, an old friend in a ratty apartment by the ocean, the dangerous walk to her place from a bus stop. She’s a mother of two now, two southern babies that I’ve never met, and I’ve consigned her to the past, to memory, have kept her there like a fine piece of china, delicate and easily broken.
I’ve consigned you all to memory, I make up my mind again and again, keep you trapped here. You can’t talk unless I tell you to, and eventually you listen to my ramblings, to my explanations, the perfect imaginary audience.
From the prompt "Whispering."
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 striatic.
Chasing the dragon
We chase down the moment of first contact, of redemption by touch, again and again, try to make it real, to give over to surprise. That’s how you find yourself a year later, sitting at the bar in a too-short dress with uncharacteristic sheer black stockings. Your cleavage shows beneath a silky shirt. You are relieved to have made it successfully to the bar in your fuck-me heels without twisting an ankle. Your toes ache. You rehearse the scene again in your mind. I’m a working girl and he’s here on business. I’m a working girl and he’s here on business.
When he walks into the bar, the reality of him makes your heart sing, the familiarity, the knowledge of what is underneath the suburban exterior, the dirty mind he hides under an actuary's precise language. Suppressing an urge to smile, you smolder instead, remembering your kohled eyes and your thong (but who could forget the thong? It lodged itself uncomfortably in your crack two seconds after you put it on).
There’s the chit chat, the role play. Your knees inch closer. His hand appears on your thigh. Under your skirt. Dangerously close to private places. He tosses down enough cash to cover the tab and you leave together, hand on ass. You don’t wait for a hotel room for the decorum of cover, but do it right then and there in the back seat of the car, under a fog of breath, clothing pushed aside.
And it’s close, it’s close to that first moment, the role play, the games. Still. You knew what was going to happen, knew the shape of him and the way his fingers danced, his scent, the weight of what was going on between you.
From the prompt "The best feeling in the world."
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 Helga Weber. It took me more time to find a suitable picture than to actually write this thing. And I'm sure it shows.
Forever young
It was true, I would sometimes see her getting out of her car at Northeast Liquors by the golf course, alone save for a yapping rat terrier in the back seat of her boxy Ford. I was always gliding by in a car, in the passenger seat, my mother or boyfriend at the wheel. The cars were small or large, old clunkers at any rate, with gas gauges that were out of tune, the remains of someone else’s childhood on the back seats, the scuff marks of small rubber soles, the sticky soda stains.
Once, in the confusion of spring, when all the kids wanted to be outside, making out under the bleachers or smoking pot in their cars, Elliot, my blue-eyed middle school crush turned 6’2” stoner, offered me a line. Of what – speed? cocaine? – I don’t remember, but I took it. I snorted a line of something in social studies class while Mrs. Ackerman lectured us in her high whiny voice, the voice of loss of youth and idealism. A few months earlier, I had scored some mushrooms for Elliot, courtesy of my older (also stoner) boyfriend. Maybe he was repaying the favor. I don’t know.
She talked on and on and we looked at her with the cockiness of 16 and 17, disgusted with her weakness, the weakness of flesh and adult predilections. My mind in a rush, my words suddenly tumbling, and the images, too, I tried to imagine her as we were. Perfect, without decades of questionable decisions behind her. We would never drone on to classrooms of hormone-engorged teenagers. We would do amazing things, would never get old. There would be no rumors of our youth, and when people looked at our old pictures, they wouldn’t be able to see the difference between yesterday and today. Our skin would remain tight, we would always be up on the latest music.
The 80s would last forever and so would we.
From a photo prompt that wouldn't look related to what I wrote, but is in a roundabout way.
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 (from found film ) by hartman045.
Pep talk
What I have instead? Something small and organic, pliable, a brain stem, a heart beat, the lungs that sometimes wheeze and cough. I make promises that are hard to keep. I lash myself to those with troubles. My soul filters my experiences through the past and desire. The exterior is banged up, carved with initials, the marks of my old self (the childish lines) my middle self (the legible signature), my current self (a scrawl), of the people I have loved and lost. My stories are written on it, they emanate from it, and now I bathe it with sympathy and talk and pharmaceuticals.
This is it. This is what I’m stuck with, this humanity (this pretension!), this scarred and mangled thing. I can picture it as a thing of light and beauty, pure and warm, the best parts of me, whatever those might be, but that would mean ignoring the rest. But it purrs and hums, it loves this attention, it tells me that it’s worth it. I give it pep talks, show it the good amongst the bad, remind it that its brethren, the souls of other people, are sullied, too, not clear and hard and pure. It’s what we’re stuck with.
We make promises we can’t always keep. We hurt the ones we love. We cut ourselves off from other people in order to protect ourselves. We pretend we are atoms, disconnected from the world, ok on our own. My soul is reaching out to yours, it extends acceptance and love and warmth and the knowledge that perfection isn’t possible or necessary, that pain is a part of the game, that all of this is too hard and yet we have no choice.
From the prompt "Promises."
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'm getting to the "I don't know exactly what to write, so I'll fall back on something philosophical" portion of the RR. It's getting boring even for me, so I thank you if you've gotten this far. Only one more week ...
Image by Travelin' Librarian.
Dry spell
Then her stories went, or her understanding of them disappeared. The past that she had mined so well and for too long fell away. Turned out everyone in it, the villains, the protagonists, hell, even the animals, would have benefited from therapy, from antidepressants, from a little change in perspective. That would have changed everything, the group sessions with her mother, Kevin, her father and stepmother, the circle in the room with uncomfortable chairs and threadbare carpet, her balancing a quiet newborn on her knee because he would have been saved, too, killed by the darkness as he was.
And the present, too, the latest catastrophe after years of drought, of careful control? That could have been prevented with the right mix of drug and talk. She pictures herself in a stiff satin cloak, the collar high, her dress underneath of soft linen, distributing medication to the masses, to those who are trapped by circumstance, to the stressed, to the withdrawn, to the self-medicators slack-jawed and satiated with sex or drugs or hours in front of the television.
The need to create in her dried up. Her imagination withered. There were no more scenarios of 1 a.m. shooting galleries or people thin with want, want of love or attention or drugs. Sex became as theoretically simple as writing instructions on a piece of paper, robbed of its darker elements, robbed of subtlety and play.
Still. She wants to hold on to feeling better, so let’s not go there, ‘k? See, she’s fine, she’s good. She just slept almost 8 hours. She woke up without obsession. She is reading books. She is talking more with her husband. Every morning she has hot amaranth with blueberries and almonds. Fried foods no longer appeal. She’s healthy, she’s returning to herself – hello, self – and isn’t that enough?
Let’s let the two of them get reacquainted. Then it’s back to work. The darkness will always be there, the stories (newly shaped, someone else’s) will return. And she still feels the struggle within, hidden by newfound contentment.
From the prompt "It closed." I'm feeling insipid these days, at least as far as writing is concerned, with a trace of Pollyanna tossed into the rest of it. Maybe I just need to be in the moment of feeling good with the realization that more work remains -- because it does.
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 ifijay.
Like a record, baby
They psychiatrist asked if I had obsessive thoughts. I tend to obsess, I told her, but I thought it was a personality thing. You know, the minute examination of every detail, the post-fight righting of wrongs, the history rewrite, my chance to tell someone what I really think and to imagine them listening, the perfect audience.
In my mind, my imaginary conversational companion is unadulterated by his own problems, totally loving and caring, with a mind free of prejudice and hurt. Recently I realized again that what I am looking for is to exist in someone else’s mind, to be fully formed and real and "me" for someone else, to be their obsession. It doesn’t work that way, of course. There is no perfectly objective (yet deeply loving) mind out there where I can be held gently with understanding and grace. The people I wasted my obsessions on were as broken as I was, maybe more. My strange new clarity of vision shows me that I was a speck of a thought for them, if I was a thought at all.
I’m beginning to feel separate from the rethink and the silent conversation. I still have them – old habits die hard – but they strike me as being more and more ridiculous, a fantasy, some safe way of fulfilling a need to be heard and seen without actually communicating directly.
I finally scored some melatonin yesterday, in liquid form, and took it before bed, hoping that I wouldn’t wake up at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. like I have lately. It worked, or my idea of what it should do worked, and I fairly sprung out of bed at 5:20, full of energy and hope, my mind clear of obsession. Is it the drugs, all of this? The way I can interrupt the thought process, the way my husband and I are communicating differently? Is it the therapy, currently at a rate of 2-3 sessions a week (and I am so tired of me, let me tell you)? Will a few more nights of good sleep make a difference, too? Even without good sleep, I've seen a difference, a return to my old efficiency, the clearing of junk both real and metaphorical.
My worry is that this is all false, that it will go away, that the pills I take are more speed than mood enhancers. The doctor will look at the side effects (insomnia, appetite suppression, the hum of my brain reaching my ears) and take away this pill. Or maybe I’m ascribing too much to it – how could I get lucky on the first try?
As with everything else these days, I have to live with the ambiguity.
From the prompt "Around and around."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I tightened this one up a bit.
And because I'm feeling silly and on my usual 1980s kick, here is a television ad for Calvin Klein's Obsession perfume, circa 1985.
Image by tricky™.
Erase you
These are the things she lost: the desert highway, a single lane cracking the parched earth, her parents in the front seat, their voices not raised but tightened. Her brother is sleeping beside her, resting his head on her shoulder and her stomach wants to revolt. She wills it to stop. Tight words, short. Her father takes his eyes from the road, his fist shoots from his arm, a move of precision against her mother's nose. The car goes silent. By the time they get to the motel with the pool and the sheets translucent as onion skin, the blood has left a trail down her neck and into her cleavage.
The smell of sugar and butter and flour, the standing mixer going on the counter, her grandmother’s fleshy arm, her swollen hand cracking the eggs. It’s a birthday cake. Or is it cookies? The memory is slipping away. She is left with sweetness and powder in the air, the oven radiating heat, the sound of talk radio in the background.
The boy with the scar just above his lip who stared at her for two years before finally speaking, his body language suddenly confident, the proprietary lean over her locker, his breath of spearmint, the circles of underarm sweat on his polo. He fades, turns into a man, and then the man becomes mist as well, all because of the night she picked up the telephone to hear whispers and dirty words. She read the pauses, pictured the work of hands and imagination, the power of language. And now the boy is gone, every version of him, the memories sucked away.
Spring. The soft green leaves, how they feel like thin rubber between her fingers, the competing smells of flora and fertilizer and liberated earth, the year she and her daughter planted sunflower seeds by the front fence. Every morning they would tumble from bed to see if the seedlings had pushed to the surface yet, the girl pulling her mother towards the door. Her daughter's first word was flower, she remembers that, and the memory warms her skin, gives her the feeling of dirt under fingernails. She pictures the arc of a hose, watches a pair of chubby feet stumble across grass. Flower. What does it mean?
What if. What if we could erase the bad memories? It’s a movie plot, yes, and also the premise behind the development of a new drug (or, really, a new application for an old one). Why not erase the bad? But what are we without our memories, good and bad, those learning experiences that made us? And what about the integration of sense with event, the way we cross-reference smells and songs with our stories?
Ralph Lauren’s Polo cologne, the ubiquitous background scent of the 80s, reminds me of a boy I knew just long enough to suffer the consequences, The smell brings back his small lithe body, the dance where we met, the quiet bit of nothingness on a bed in the Little House that led to my ruin. If I couldn’t identify the source of distress – if the smell made my heart race, switched on my adrenals without me knowing why – then how would I interpret it?
Instead, I use this stuff, his wrist with the heavy gold bracelet, the swoop of hair over his sweet young Italian face, the inexperienced handjob in the back of a family car and the way the girl doesn’t give a shit but goes along anyway. There he is at the cousin's wedding, a plastic glass of champagne in his hand. There they are in someone's parents' house, sitting on the steps after another messy event. I see his tortured face hovering over her by the light of a television. She is silent, always silent, silent and enduring.
From the prompt "We finally did it." I know that this drug doesn't really erase bad memories, that it's more subtle than that, and I know this topic has been tackled elsewhere ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), but it got me thinking.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I extended this one and it feels very much like a snapshot, a work in progress with lots of flaws.
Image by paulineRroupski.
Not about Oprah
She was on long enough that I associate her with high school and early college, with that stretch where my boyfriend D and I played house during breaks at his brother’s place while his brother was away (me with the pork loin and the cocktails and the afternoon television, him with the construction job and the dirty laundry, the laundry that I washed). In fact, I associate her with another show that is disappearing, All My Children, my soap along with that stalwart, General Hospital. She is part of this faraway world where there was cable, yes, but not so much of it, and no Internet, and cell phones were these monstrosities that you only used in your car, and didn’t we have horses and buggies then, too?
There I am in the living room with the shades drawn. I’m nineteen years old. I’ve cracked open a beer (some habits die hard) and dinner is cooking in the oven. I’ve set myself up for the waiting game again, trapped in this house because I don’t drive and it’s near nothing convenient. Oprah is on, she comes on after GH, and there is a row of transvestites or sad broken women on their way out of the gutter. She hasn’t yet gotten to the decades of largesse, where she gifts her audience members new cars, vacations, makeovers, husband swaps. D comes home a little late, musky, he smells like sweat and pot, and I don’t want to talk to him because of the pot. Maybe I’m a little drunk, too, from the half beer, and I’m tired of waiting, always waiting for him.
The passivity of it! My ass on the floor or on the sofa, the feeling of the waiting inevitable, waiting for someone else to take over the narrative. I’ve never thought of it as passive before, but now I see it. Oprah tells me I can do it, that it will be ok, that little abused girls with moxie and ambition can go anywhere, can roll out wagonfuls of fat in front of a studio audience. They can act, they can interview, they know what the people want. So I watch and I wait and when D emerges from the shower we fight some more.
From the prompt "Oprah."
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'm getting to the point in the RR where it's harder to write about things that interest me.
Image from the blog Dave's Lunch. I'm sure Dave got it from somewhere else, but if you want to see a blog with lots of pictures of a man putting food into his mouth, this is the place to go.
Clarity / Insight
That’s not a good thing. We need to convince ourselves that our lives have meaning, that the structure we impose is there for a reason, that despite the fact that we all know how it ends (badly) we have to keep on shaping and forming and being as though it matters. This feeling was one of the worst I’ve felt in what I still hesitate to call my depression and I’ve felt pretty bad. Before I started the antidepressants, drinking was a way to access the bad feelings, to lose myself in maudlin tears. Sometimes it was a way to delude myself about the future, to be in some hazy moment where, somehow, all would be well and I would be lifted out of all of this, out of all the hard work, by some magical force.
But the drugs are giving me clarity of vision. I can’t buffer myself against the future with slightly hazy evenings of escapism. Instead, the alcohol and a triggering situation pushed me right against the edge and it wasn’t an escape, it was a dagger to the throat, the tip of the blade piercing the skin.
It’s not as if I get drunk. I have one, maybe two drinks, occasionally three over the course of three hours. But I am a small person and the beer I drink is high in alcohol. It’s been enough to smooth out the edges of boredom and worry. Or at least that’s what it used to be. Now I see that this habit has to stop, another thing to let go of, a coping mechanism that is a form of avoidance.
The next step is creating meaning. I have no idea what the future holds. I live necessarily day by day. I’m in transition though it looks like I am standing in place. It’s the internal framework that is moving, by force, by thought, by feeling, and if I concentrate too hard on the process, I’m lost.
Goodbye to all that, the escape, the avoidance, the long corridors of revisiting myself alone again and again. I'm hopeful this morning though hope feels ... odd, strange, like an exotic fruit I've never sampled. I have to taste it while it's still in my hand, ripe and fragrant.
From a photo prompt (not the photo above).
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was lightly edited. Hoping something dark and fictional comes my way tomorrow.
Image by mako.
Written in the body
This man, the first familiarity, melts away and suddenly I am kissing my body double. His legs match the length of mine. His feet are tanned and small. Our similarities, the smallness of our combined frames, surprises me. I mourn the body who went before. It is the last time I let the physicality of someone, their solidity, the feel of their lips, the way their legs intertwine with mine, become an object of attachment.
When my body double leaves me, I don't mourn the loss of his corporeality. I mourn the loss of tenuous connection, the closeness of two damaged souls meeting periodically to solve the problem of the human need for touch. And when the next man comes along, his feet like miniature anvils, his body broad and short, I let the concept of physical attachment go completely. I don't record the feeling of him against me, the pressure of his hand in mine. It simply doesn't matter anymore. All that remains are the labels. After that marriage ends, I often catch myself almost calling the new man by the old one's name. A matter of habit.
This was the sloughing off of connection and association. We are animals of contact, of the burrowing together under covers, the familiarity of the loved one’s body, of their smell and the way their chest rises and falls, the cadence of their walk. I remember the first man best and after that let go of the musk, of the tracing of thighs and knees, of the texture of hair between fingers. I simply do not want to get too attached. The pain of the inevitable break is too much.
But to realize it! There I am in a fast car looking down at his feet, here I am on bright blue wall-to-wall and he is about to kiss me, here we are together at a country-western bar, talking talking talking. And here he is, boyfriend #4, husband #2, with me for over thirteen years now, the long history, the beauty of context. He knew Kevin, my mother’s cruel boyfriend. He met my grandfather, dead since Valentine’s Day 2002. He’s known my animals. He’s the father of my child. Our history goes on and I know the feel of his hand in mine, have cried in his arms, a sensation I have deliberately and slowly forgotten.
I need to remember again.
From the prompt "The key." But this had nothing to do with the prompt. I've been thinking about this bodily attachment, how detached I am from it now and why that happened. When I was up at 1:30 this morning, one of the images going through mind was of D's feet, his foot on the gas pedal, and how strange it was when I started dating J, how the differences between them were so obvious and palpable and how I missed what had come before. That was the last time I mourned someone's physical presence, more of my self-protection system doing its job overzealously.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I rewrote this one entirely, though I'm having a hard time taking it further. They've upped the dosage of the little purple pills (because that's how it works) and my thoughts are hard to hold on to this morning.
Image by William Degen.
We'll get clean together
Later, on her doorstep, the porch light on, the properly coiffed mother waiting in the kitchen, they kiss, a peck, hard lips, stiff shoulders.
The scene: blue jeans and tight shirts and fast cars, the James Dean wannabes with the whiskey and the rebellion and the Freudian underpinnings (see the mother with her clinging ways, her eyes lingering romantically on the boy as he slams the door and leaps into the heavy metal car?). The girl doesn’t wear skirts and smokes cigarettes and there they are groping in the back seat. Their hands are like smoke, they drift here and there, it’s the smell of seduction, of the hand down the underwear and the pressure of going beyond and the unbuttoning and unzipping, and who wants to go to fairs anyway unless you can start a fight?
He drops her off two blocks from home and she climbs up the trellis to her window. Ravished. Rebellious. His mother is waiting up for him with Ovaltine and crackers and runs her hands through his greased mop, tells him how handsome he looks. His entrance, all alcohol fumes and cigarette smoke, is dramatic. His father sleeps in the spare bedroom.
I want the bad dirty fun, the darkness of wrist holds and secret corners, the make-out sessions in tunnels. Don’t give me fresh-scrubbed young men or polite conversation. A friend recently told me that the stereotype is true, that every woman wants to be ravished on the dining room table, the cutlery and placemats pushed to the floor. We want the spontaneity, the badness of it.
And it might be true. It might. You can clean it all up later on, wash away the crumbs, attend to the scratches and marks, the moment of passion over.
From the prompt "Good clean fun." The post title comes from a White Stripes song, "Ball and Biscuit."
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 from a 1950s album cover by K'vitsh.
I never tire of it
The quality of the air changes according to the season, thin and biting in the winter, the layers of shirt, sweater, scarf, coat, hat. My feet crunch in the snow, the ground reflects starlight, and every house, every window tells a story. In urban Columbus, we took our dog walks at night together, me, Mr. X, and sheltie-dog Loudon, walked by the old Victorians, the brick Italianates, the houses with brightly colored gingerbread and lace curtains. We glimpsed in windows to catch a bit of artwork, a hand caressing the back of someone’s hair, the unkempt mop, the rake of fingernails, a little girl on a swing floating across the living room.
In the country, along Eastern Shore roads, there were no streetlights, the houses kept their distance with thick boundaries of lawn. My neighbors, paranoid with their motion-sensitive security lights and their barking dogs, closed thick curtains at the first sign of darkness. I focused on the air, always summer-hot in my memory, so many stars above, the musical notes of the crickets accompanying my step. Without the distraction of sunlight, of other peoples’ lives and belongings, sensation became paramount: pushing through the thick humidity, the pain of gravel on my feet, the wind shaking tree branches.
Berkeley nights are cold and damp. During the evening dog walks, I watch the sky, dodge the street cats, glance into bungalows to see the built-ins, the families in dining rooms, reading on couches. I admire quirky artwork and wooden trim through window glass. If I’m lucky, the sky is clear, the stars low. I can trace the flight of the planes against deep blue, identify the planets to the dog, who doesn’t care a whit about the sky, but instead sniffs the flowers, the tree trunks, the bare patches in the grass.
From the prompt "I never get tired of it." This morning I slept in (until 5:30: yay!) and didn't start writing until immediately after I took my medication. Writing with the initial medication-induced heart-racing is not a good thing. It's harder to corral my thoughts. I'm beginning to have my doubts about the little purple pills, but have to keep taking them for at least a month to see if they are effective. Messing with neurochemistry is scary.
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.This one needed a bit of tightening up.
Image by prophetofdelphi.
Shoeless
The bottom of the Elk was mud and leaves, a thick layer of it, and no swim shoes, just my feet pressing pressing, the mud getting between my toes and wasn’t high tide the best, when you had to swim out to the raft without touching? I swam until I was shivering, until it was time for dinner (5:00 p.m. sharp) and then back up the road I walked, towel around my waist, hair clinging to my shoulders, body browned by sun and mud.
It was the ethos of summer, no shoes unless I absolutely had to, the freedom to walk down to the river by myself because there was always someone familiar there to watch over me, a grandparent, generally, not necessarily mine, someone who knew my mother and her parents since my mother was a little girl. But I barely remember their names now. My grandmother died when I was nine. The other grandparents got older. I got older, too, not so cute, rebellious and angry and sneaky and can you believe the way she took advantage of her poor handicapped grandfather like that?
Still, bare feet in teenagerhood, bare as I walked the slate stepping stones from the Little House to the main one, for the shower, for the bathroom, to use the phone or make something to eat. On late summer nights, I walked barefoot down to the beach, to the parking lot with its cars and guys and beer and pot. Drunk, I drove my grandfather’s golf cart without shoes and Maureen and I were probably both barefoot when we took out my his car on that early summer night. A mistake. Not the lack of shoes, but the action, with predictable consequences.
Late that fall, I may have slipped on shoes before the ambulance took me away. More likely my mother packed me a bag, since I was half-naked anyway. It was cold that morning, but when I went into labor and had to call her, had to make the walk to the main house to use the phone, I doubt if I put on shoes, distracted by pain, by what was happening to me, by the threshold I was crossing too young.
From the prompt "Barefoot."
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: My feet.
Taut framework
So. The framework that I built to survive, the carefully constructed structure? I’m dismantling it. Rather violently it seems. I’ve got the claw end of a hammer, I’m not only pulling at nails, but I’m ripping at the plywood, at the 2x4s, at this 70s construction of formaldehyde-soaked particle board. The photographs on the inner walls are faded, I can barely see them, but I feel the heat emitting from them, the danger. Part of me wants to just burn down the framework, maybe I’ve even started a fire in the corner with the lighter my grandfather left behind and the tinder, too, the piles of magazines, the candy, the sawdust. It went out on its own, I discarded the metaphor, or rather I am right now discarding the metaphor, realizing that I am in control here. It doesn’t have to come down all at once and if I burn it down, I destroy not only a part of myself but my ability to access it.
But the feeling. I carry it around with me, we’re familiar with each other, the tension and me, my protection system. It asks me if I really want to go there and I say I don’t have a choice. Together we go to our appointments, we wake up in the middle of the night. The feeling informs my writing. And yesterday, the two of us lying supine on the couch at my therapist’s office, enjoying the stereotypical position (we usually sit), we went down a path in the woods and met the best part of me. She was tall and maternal and kind, pale with red hair, and she enveloped the two of us in her satin cloak while we cried.
I hate the weakness, the feelings I can’t put into a framework, the little girl so controlled and angry. I don't want to forget her, I don't want to dismantle her world. But I have no choice.
Still. It all scares the fuck out of me.
From the prompt "In the middle." This is the sort of overwrought stuff I would prefer not to post anymore. Not that I think it is poorly written, it's just personal and intense in a way that I am tired of sharing. But here it is, small group of readers.
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 Dave Anastasi.
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.
My results may vary
I started taking the pills Tuesday morning, the smoothing-of-emotion pills. Side effects may include insomnia, anxiety, weight loss – and their opposites. I might find a sudden increase in my sexual thoughts and responsiveness (though no one told me this one – it came up in searches on the drug). Maybe I'll sweat more. Lose my appetite. Become restless.
It’s true, my heart is beating faster. My mouth is dry. After I finish this write, I’ll take my daily dose and I’m beginning to wonder what will happen – will there be a cumulative effect? Will I be a crazy woman by the Sunday, my heart racing, manic in my energy levels? “Some people enjoy the energy boost,” the psychiatrist told me. I could use an energy boost. I’ve been unable to get interested in almost anything lately, have had to force myself to do simple things like keep up with our bank accounts, something I would normally do with a control freak’s precision and regularity.
Mainly I don’t want to feel like life is something to be endured. I want to wipe away the hopelessness and the images I’ve been having of my own death. It is only now that I have the pills in hand, that they are coursing through my body that I can see how I was sinking into something deeply and profoundly sad. If the purple pills work, I might be able to clear a path to the future. At the moment I am in the waiting room.
It could take up to a month to see if this stuff is effective, and, to be honest, I was feeling a bit better by the time I saw the doctor. Still, the prospect of doing away with the crying jags, of scraping away the grime and seeing the world around me, is a beautiful one.
But please, little purple pills, don't take away my ability to write, to flesh out the dark underbelly.
From a totally unrelated photo prompt.
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 was having a hard time concentrating this morning. Hope this isn't related to the medication.
Image by Rev. Xanatos