One Thousand and one

I set to folding folding folding

late into the night, hands cramped

the crumpling of paper and dreams

in the darkness of the light

 

I hang them in sets of 25

or fifty, when they’re smaller, lighter

like the weight of my new dreams

smaller dreams, safer dreams

 

to see you, healthy, safe, happy

I needed a present that would tell you

just how much time I spent wishing

that it could all be different (but it’s not)

 

I needed you to know that I care

in the form of the thousands

of little birds hung on strings

the bright colored paper and beads

 

something tangible, real

a solution that doesn’t come from doctors

or pills or cures that don’t work

or don’t believe you when you say you hurt

 

if wishes are one for a thousand and luck lies with an extra one

how could I not choose to sit

through the night, folding folding folding

bringing that wish to you?

 

Blacklights and Bleakness

I laid the car seat back in the parking lot, curling into a little ball, legs tucked up, shins pressed against the steering wheel.  It was a Sunday evening, and the music was pulsing across the parking lot, lights and techno spilling out of the dance hall and into the darkness.  A group of young dancers sat on the porch, their laughter mingling with everything else.  I fought back tears.

It had been another long week.  Another week of firsts.  First time to get that phone call.  You know, THAT one, the one everyone talks about?

“I’m sorry to inform you miss, but um…”

Someone you love is dying. Someone you love is always dying, technically speaking, but this time it’s different.  This time your Dad wants to talk about quitting his job, about spending as much time with your mother as he can before she passes.  This time it’s so close, so real.  And you’re so helpless, thousands of miles from home, curled into the front seat of a car you borrowed the keys to, a car so big it swallows you alive, like the bleakness of this week.    The thought of loosing your family.  The thought of having failed your best friend.  The thought that when you called to talk to your mother, first she mentioned that it must to be really hard to love you, and then she questioned you on your receptiveness to assisted suicide.  Dad refused to help her you see.  So it falls to you, the only one wearing white in the dark dance hell.  The bright one under black lights.

Optional

I spent the afternoon figuring out how I could retire at the age of 45. I spent the mid-day looking at vacation destinations.  I waltzed into work at 11am, looking offended at 11:15am when my secretary asked me if I’d just gotten in.  It was one of those weeks, where coworkers wandered past at 9pm, yelling into my office, “Go home,” and I just chuckled under my breath.  If only they knew, that I’d spent my day dreaming of being somewhere else, of being someone else.  I couldn’t go home.  I didn’t have one.  I felt awkward in my own skin.  I felt like an invader in my own home.  And I wanted desperately to be living a life other than my own.

It always got this way, a few months into happiness.  I’d always been bad at accepting what life threw my way.  At swallowing the bitter pill of normalcy.  I wanted more.  I’ve always wanted more.  But at what point is it selfish to continue to look, instead of accepting what life has thrown your direction.  At what point is walking away from everything you have a form of dishonor and disrespect to the people that have placed faith in you, in your ability to contribute, to see a thing through to it’s end.

An tattered anthology sits on my desk beside me, it’s yellowing cover laughing at me as I type this.  “Getting the Most Out of Life,” it’s entitled.  And it contains witty articles on how to live a perfectly stereotypical 1950′s life.  It was waiting for me this morning on the abandoned book shelf at work, calling out my name as I headed for my first coffee of the day at 11:02, right after walking in the door.  “You have to live on this 24 hours of daily time,” it tells me.  “Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul.”   All I can think is that I’m totally fucked.  We all are in some sense, in this fast-paced give-everything-you’ve-got-plus-a-liver-or-two world, where we never learned to say no.  Where we never learned that every single little thing in life was chosen, was optional, if only we’d grown a little backbone.

Fuck 1950′s expectations and those lives where your perfectly coiffed hair is sister to a string of pearls and pretty pair of pumps.  Free-will should never be optional.  And is hardly worth squandering because we feel like we’re expected to live a certain way, to contribute in a certain way.  I choose to do more.  To have more.  To love more and to loose more.  Not because someone told me it’s the right thing to do.  No. But because I don’t want to fall in love once, and then, when things have fallen through, which they inevitably find a way to do, be stuck believing that I’ve lost all of my worth because you can only “zing” once.  I don’t want to believe that my only contribution to the world comes in the form of my hesitant scared womanhood, my monthly blood calling out to be broken with child bearing and motherhood, being a grandmother the only evolutionary reward for being a woman, the alternative to certain death championed (and enjoyed) only through helping my children feed and raise their own children.  A theory of whys not hows as strange and powerless to make our lives more worthwhile, just like all the rest.  I want to want more.  I want to be thought capable of more.

And yet, when all is said and done, when I let my defensive theories go long enough to embrace the truth of my life experience, I have to believe somewhere deep within myself: that love is more than stress, and the desire for children is more than a defense mechanism developed from multiple penetrations, from being trapped under the oppressive cover of male dominance.  I want a family, and it can’t just be because of the stress of my past or the nurture of my childhood or the unchangeable, unchallengeable state of me-ness that is my genetic coding, that this inclination within me is as strong as it was when I was born.    Nature or Nurture?  Am I nothing more than a product of my surroundings, “hard to love” and powerless to resist this future? This version of me.  Not optional.  But inevitable.

incomplete

She sat across the hotel room from me, on the neighboring double bed, watching me carefully as we talked about my past. I was being open with her, actively trying to exhibit a level of trust in her that I thought I’d long since given up. And you could see the shock in her posture, her rapt attention to my every motion, every facial feature, the way her whole body leaned towards me just a little too much. I was enjoying this attention, this connection. I’d gone so long with a wall built up between us, that I could bearly believe I was living the present moment, that it wasn’t some kind of dream.

As we sat there together, she asked me two questions that stick in my mind.  They weren’t particularly complex, in fact I swear I’d been asked those same questions 1000 times before, but it wasn’t until this exact conversation that they ever matter.

“What do you like most about yourself?  And what do you like least?”

Except, I think she asked ‘what do you feel like other people value most about you.’  It wasn’t what I valued most about myself that mattered in that instant.  But she definitely asked me what I liked least about myself.  I remember this because I really had to think about it.  The list was so long in my head you see.  After a minute or two of silent reflection, I responded with “my lack of self confidence.”  It tied it all together you see, encompassed everything so wholely that I didn’t need to say any of my other flaws, because they were all derived from my lack of self confidence.

Except my impatience.  I constantly joke with those around me that when god/the universe/whoever you happen to believe in today happened to pass out virtues to us mortals, he completely forgot to give me any patience.

Anyhow, somehow this all tied back together in my mind.  To incompleteness.  To living life one day at a time.  To not being too scared to embrace the “white hot truth”, to live and love each day without missing the point, without rushing through the small things that make it worthwhile.  Without hating yourself, pushing yourself, so hard that you forget the rapture, forget the joyousness,  of just being alive.  Of being on the journey.  And not of reaching the destination.

http://www.daniellelaporte.com/inspirational-quotes/78-inspirational-fire-starting-quotes/

I have been running so sweaty my whole life
Urgent for a finish line
And I have been missing the rapture this whole time
Of being forever incomplete
—Alanis Morissette, “Incomplete”

 

Friday Night Fun…

Shout out shots then run from the world
Flinging UNO cards and Jenga blocks at your problems
Until your heart bleeds vomit and you can’t remember a damn thing
Except stealing towels and back rubs
And the cold heaven of the bathroom floor calling out your name.

Bibles and Bullet Casings…

It’s 6 in the morning, as I plunge headlong into the chilly June waters of Walden pond, fighting panic and the cramp of cold unstretched muscles.  “You must be really hardened,” the woman next to me had said as I waded into the water, trying to forget that all the other swimmers had wet suits while I stood there in my practice suit, arms and legs freezing.  ‘No,’ I thought, ‘I’m not hardened; softened rather, after two weeks of family, of obligation, of fighting to hold onto my concept of self.’  As I weave my way across the pond, struggling to keep the lines straight in my head, I fight the fear by singing “It is well with my soul” in my head, two drastically conflicting images filling my consciousness.  I flashback to standing at the memorial service for my grandfather, the voices of an entire congregation raised in memory and in honor of him, tears streaming down our faces as we morn the loss of such a kind, good man. My heart is heavy with grief.  But I also flash back to sitting in the kitchen with the new man in my life, as he excitedly tells me about his favorite dance camp memory, of the swelling of voices in the early morning all singing “It is well” in perfect harmony, passion in his voice as he recounts the memory and shares that it is his favorite hymn. And now my heart soars!

I hide my face behind a pillow as I sit curled under a blanket on the couch, my roommate telling me that she can see the joy in my eyes any time I mention him in conversation, recalling that her sister had that same look before she was happily married to her husband.     “I’m just a few short days of falling,” I tell her, “I know I am.  I can feel it.”  “Falling can be terrifying, can’t it?” she says.   I smile, and instead of the same old terror and panic, I let the feelings of hope and joy wash over me.  “Nope,” I say, “It feels fantastic!”  And in that moment, I mean it and suddenly I know the answer to questions that have stood like walls in my mind.  “Are you over him, M?” I recall my mom asking just a few short hours before.  I had paused at the time, staring blankly at my plate full of hash browns, wondering whether it was actually fair to say yes, knowing that I’d thought I was free of him so many times before, but that somehow his memory had always found a way to return and haunt me.  This time is different;  I am sure of it.

I reach into my purse to pull out a stick of lip gloss, my hand brushing something cold and metallic.  “What in the world is that?” I wonder, stopping in my tracks to dig into the chaos to find the mysterious object.  I discover that it’s a bullet casing, the discarded blank shell that my uncle reluctantly passed to me after my grandfather’s military funeral service.  I’d never been to a funeral, or a military service, so had no idea what to expect.  After completing the flag folding ceremony, the honor guard performed a 21 gun salute, guns cocked at a 45 degree angle towards the small open sided pavilion where the family sat.  When the first shots were fired, I was so shocked by the noise that I blinked all of the tears out of my eyes.

It’s the middle of the night and you come my place to spend time with me.  My mother and grandmother are asleep in my bed, snoring away softly, worn out from a fast-faced graduation weekend.  I sneak out of the house to meet you and we stumble through the darkness arm in arm.  We come to a cute little park and get drawn in by the play equipment, a large swing and sideways merry-go-round seeming to call our names as we wander under a starry sky.  You lay down on the merry-go-round, fighting centrifugal force as you attempt to stay centered while I push it faster and faster.  I hop on right above your head, leaning into you to steal a kiss as the world spins around us, the surrounding world blurring together sweetly.  ‘If ever there existed a perfect moment,’ I think, ‘it’s this one right here.’

____________________________________________________

The merry-go-round of life spins ceaselessly,

lives lived in a chaos composed of individual moments,

the web of society connecting generation to generation

and strangers to friends, as we pass on cherished memories,

favorite hymns, spent bullet casings, and family bibles,

worn from use, tattered and torn, but still valued,

like our souls, thrown about in the ebb and flow of life

the waters of experience a bracing medium,

as we pass from love to love, moment to moment,

with only our memories and our lust for life

to keep us company in the darkest of nights.

Vulnerability

“I only think in the form of crunching numbers…”

Measuring, quantifying

worth of hours spent wondering

what I’m missing

why nothing feels real

connected

only not.