Chrysalis break...still

We grip kettle bells side by side.  My friend and trainer says to me as we lunge and step, 

"You know what I've noticed about you?  I never see you eat."

"Yeah...I get that a lot," I wince and feel exposed like a nerve through a tooth.

I move through the feeling with my whole body.  I do not need to feel shame or hide.

I let it absorb into my belly, into the strong place where I carried my babies.

"Is that like, on purpose?" he asks.

"No, not exactly...but it's probably not an accident.  I still struggle.  I know you've read my blog..."

"Yeah.  It's brilliant," he says.

"Thanks...yes it is my longest standing daemon.  I have good days and bad days."

This morning I read my books.

The books change.  The practice of reading and sitting does not.

Facebook threatens to take this practice from me.  I have reclaimed it a hundred times.

This morning I read:

The only tranquility I knew was to anesthetize myself with food, an indulgence for which I paid dearly the rest of the time.  Nothing could save me from the mental and emotional anguish and confusion of being fat, feeling guilty and hating myself for lack of control. 

~For Today

I have been seeking forgiveness of myself for this.  For my compulsive eating and alcoholism.

It is not an intellectual decision.  It is a slow and tedious breaking out from chrysalis.  To me it has felt long, yet when I consider how long people choose to sleep in their shells, some an entire lifetime, it is not so long.  Perhaps they don't choose.  Perhaps an outside light never comes to alert them - there is a whole world out here. 

This blog started as an amends to myself.  The question:

What would happen if I just told the truth about this struggle, about what my head says?

What if I shared it?

In my other book I read:

"...we don't believe love will ever just come to us on its own.  We believe instead that we have to do something to make ourselves acceptable.  So to push ourselves to try to be good, to whip ourselves into shape, we hire an in-house critic to keep tabs on how we're doing."

In the margin I wrote:   I still believe this.

But I believe it far less...and I can see it is not a requirement for my love of others.  Perhaps, just as my allowance for others has turned in to an allowance for myself, this could become true as well.  I am still afraid of it.  I am still breaking out.

from the courtroom bench

From my seat on the courtroom bench I calmly, and frantically notice you.
For two people hell-bent on self destruction, we are so tame now.

Ten years ago, when we were still in our 20's and we still believed in fairytales, you would say to me,
"Tell our story.  You've gotta tell it.  Promise me you'll write it."
With equal desperation I would promise you, of course I will.  How can I let this fade, evaporate like a dream on the shores of consciousness.  Let's just stay unconscious.  Please.  Can we do that please?
Without making a deal, we made a deal.  We agreed to run it out as long as we could and suck up every last bit of one another's juice.  We savored it in the form of gin and intellectual rants and drunken fights with broken glass.  Like Mary Poppins' chalk pavement pictures, we superimposed ourselves onto movies starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson and got lost.  We listened to Ryan Adams and Pj Harvey until our bodies melted.  Poetry, we lived it and ate it and exhaled it's smoky tendrils.

I just flipped through an on-line album of pictures from Kurt Cobain's suicide.  They were lame images of a pair of sunglasses lying next to a cigar box of heroin rigs.  I saw his note written in tiny penmanship with a red pen stabbed through the middle and stuck into an empty planter box.  I saw the corner of his black Converse all-star shoe, and the driveway to his house up to the garage.  Then there were pictures of cops lazily standing around in pot belly suits, with limp hands and unimpressed faces.
Those of us who rage hard die so small.
Regardless of our internal experience, how massive and crushing and desperate it feels, we are confined to this one body.  It isn't much.  When we go, few people are impressed by our theatrics.

Now I am sitting in a court room holding the hand of my friend.  It is shaking.  Perhaps mine would be too, but I am here for her.  Her fear trumps mine.  Her husband was just convicted.  He is walking away in hand cuffs and a pin striped suit.  As he is escorted by the bailiff, he looks over to flip her a weak smile.  I am in the eye of the hurricane.  In your suit and tie you walk back and forth, doing your lawyer job.  I won't let myself make eye contact.  We do each other this courtesy of not seeing one another at the same time.  When you are not looking I notice that you have aged.  Your hair is going grey, and your curls have relaxed.  I also note that you still stand perfectly erect as a statue, as one who will not be swayed.  I wonder if you are still you, or if you have given it all away.  But your posture tells me that you have not.

I still want to tell the story, but it is not the one I promised to you.   I doubt you would want that one anyway.  Our story only counts because we didn't die.  Otherwise it would be a very short and predictable tragedy.   But I only know my half of it.
Just as I won't trivialize you by waving a dopey hello from the courtroom bench, I won't let our story be another Romeo and Juliette love jaunt to burn hot and die fast.  You were my friend and my guardian and my soul's gateway. You knew me before I knew me.  I lived and died with you. Your arms are the bars of a phoenix cage.

The Trifecta

Ever since we went to the concert, one line loops and sings to me,

"You can only dance in a hurricane, 
            if you're standing in the eye."

I had never known Brandi Carlisle, except for this one song Dad put on my ipod.
It's about stories, and how they don't really matter without someone to tell them to.
Then I think about my Dad, and how he has chosen to be a lone Maverick in his own desert.
I'm glad I've listened to his stories when he returns from a long stretch on the trail.
There was a time when I couldn't listen, because all his stories were at me and all of the dark things about to happen.  They were about God, or my fallen mother, about the world's crumbling morality and mine.  Now I write my own stories with a fluid hand, one that makes no apologies and tells no lies. He isn't scared anymore.
My tether to him transcends words, yes it is love, but love itself is inadequate.  When I hear this song I become him.  I am the aging man who hears it.  I am the man who has raised 6 children, whose whithering wife left when the youngest was only 4 years old.  I am a genius who never went to college, but instead found God.  As it turns out, God doesn't care much for genius.  I see the whole world all at once and it is too much, but I am up for the challenge.  I listen to the Les Miserables soundtrack turned all-the-way-up in my dark living room alone, but I do not feel lonely. I feel empowered.  I am a man of routine who buys only one type of sock and six of the same t-shirt because the cut is good and the material is hearty.  I always eat whole grains.  I deny myself pleasure because it gets in the way.  I can live in my truck on Mount Olympus water and Triscuits.  I know because I have done it.  I miss my kids desperately.  I know my dreams will sustain me when everything else is gone and I will die without apology.  I will go hard and fast down roads too scary for most people.  I raised a daughter.  Her name is Sarah.  I am very proud of her.  She is me but she is also her, she is finally feminine.  Her hair is long and red.  She has never stopped writing.  She will write a book for both of us one day.
When I hear this song I quiver but I don't allow myself to mourn.  I keep walking.  I let the dust settle on my shoulders with the heat.  My breath stays steady and propels me forward like a steam locomotive.  I have too much momentum to quit now.

I went to this concert with Katrina.  It was her birthday gift to me.  I turned 36 years old.  I wore a white and green striped dress with red Vans tennis shoes.  My hair spilled down and trickled gently along the hot summer current like water from the sides of a boat.  Her dress was the color of cantaloupe and so were her earrings. She is very good at that, matching her earrings to her dress. We walked in sync together up the gravel path to the mountain venue, our flat shoes crunching. I knew the sun would set later, and it would be beautiful.  Especially with all the smoke in the air from the California fires.  Funny how fire can make the sun turn pink like hibiscus.

We sit together on our blanket in the grass with bare knees like junior high girls.  We talk soft and easy with heads leaning into one another.  We watch the people, all somewhat wealthy, or at least comfortable enough to afford these tickets.  There is something silly to me about people with money.  I wonder if she notices this too, but I say nothing.  I am happy to be here in this simple space with her.

As we walk to the bathroom she whispers,
"I wish I hadn't worn these panties, they're so uncomfortable."

"Mine are too.  I was just thinking the same thing!" I exclaim.  "Let's take 'em off in the bathroom."

"But what if something...happens?"

"It doesn't matter.  Even if people see up our dresses...it doesn't even matter, right?  Why does it matter?  We don't know any of these people."  I flash her a Cheshire grin and she can tell I really mean it.

"Alright...I must really trust you, Sarah,"  She sighs.  But I can tell she feels better and so do I.
We sneak out, both grinning now, with panties balled up in our fists.

After the opening band, best friend number three arrives.  Her name is Butt-Nutt.   I don't know how this came to be...it is just her name.  She is the most wild.  If we were that workout show from the 80's, you know the one with the three circle tiers of intenisty?  She would be high, I would be medium, and Katrina would be low.  Yet we have all sought to destroy ourselves at some point, with equally piercing intent.  The trifecta is in order.

1. • ri·fect·a
     trīˈfektə/
     noun
     NORTH AMERICANAUSTRALIAN/NEW ZEALAND
     noun: trifecta; plural noun: trifectas
     1.            a bet in which the person betting forecasts the first three finishers in a race in the correct order.
     ·                                       a run of three wins or grand events.
     
     

And this is the hard part...it is the most important part of the night, but I can't tell it to you.  I can only tell you what happened on the outside.
I was the first to cry.  The sun had barely set.  The sky flashed it's elusive color of turquoise.  The color I have wished upon after a long day and tired feet.  Brandi Carlisle was letting her whole soul escape through her throaty voice and chest up to the stars.  My head leaned in to my Butt-Nutt whom I had been certain would die of a drug overdose on the street, or worse.  My friend who got sober and lost her son anyway.  My friend who was at my wedding in a silver dress with movie star curls. The one who my baby's placenta and exclaimed it to be the most beautiful thing she had ever seen!  My friend onto whose immaculate white comforter I sobbed my deepest grief when I got divorced and broke all hearts into more pieces than I thought could ever be mended.  My friend who wailed the Pretenders with me into the night while driving fast down State street and promised to be there forever.  But I was 26 and she was 19, how could we know?
Now, ten years later, we know.  At least we kind of know the truth...life hurts so much more than we were prepared for.
Then my head leans the other way and is met by Katrina.  My quiet friend who scales mountains with me.  Who followed me up a massive sand stone cliff in Lake Powell only to rappel over 200 feet of unknown and gorgeous blazing rock.  That was our first adventure, and we just kept going for long swims through the lake with arms that know the water as automatically as Mom fold clothes. We scramble up with bare feet shivering and tight to lie on hot rocks like lizards. We are perfectly balanced like a good sushi roll.  When she asks me how I am doing, I answer her more honestly than anyone else on the planet because I know she will listen and understand me even when I can barely articulate.  Sometimes she can see around my next corner but she doesn't tell me what's coming.  She trusts that I will deal with it just fine.

We have been the cast of each other's stories, switching costumes, alternately playing the mother, the mentor, the traitor, the clown and the accomplice.  There are lines of worry etched between Katrina's eyes which belong to me.  Up under my ribs is a scar where I cut my heart out and gave it to her as a apology.  Horizontal across my forehead is the crease made by Butt-Nutt's heartbreak. On her, you will rarely see it.  Butt-Nutt's real name is Georgia.  Georgia is a place spread wide and buried deep.  Do not let her jig fool you.  She may hop like a grasshopper on stilts which seem to always bounce back, but those legs are made of lead sometimes.  She has good reason to be firmly planted.  Katrina's shoes are always dainty and she walks softly on the ground, a trait I will never acquire.  She knows how to pace herself so she will never have to quit.  She will not complain about her bunion.  She will keep walking until you are ready to turn around and go home.

On our little blanket, time collapsed around us that night.  All of the stories so concentrated into our small space were more than we could contain, and we found ourselves sweetly and surprisingly crying.  I spilled over onto Butt-Nutt first, and it became contagious.  But how could we not cry, really?

"Anyone who says the arts should not be taught in schools is an idiot," I mutter.

All of these lines across my face 
Tell you the story of who I am
So many stories of where I've been
And how I got to where I am
But these stories don't mean anything
When you've got no one to tell them to

I climbed across the mountain tops 
Swam all across the ocean blue
I crossed all the lines and I broke all the rules
But baby I broke them all for you
Because even when I was flat broke
You made me feel like a million bucks
You do and I was made for you

You see the smile that's on my mouth
It's hiding the words that don't come out
And all of my friends who think that I'm blessed
They don't know my head is a mess
No, they don't know who I really am
And they don't know what I've been through like you do

~Brandi Carlisle

At the Edge of Light and Water

This morning I have "baby kitty eyes."  Because last night I walked the neighborhood in squeaky flip-flops, sobbing into my hair curtain.
Note to self:  It is very hard to be convincingly angry while wearing flip-flops.
Suddenly I was 17 years old hiding behind my swath of dramatic red hair.  I felt comforted by it's camouflage. Beneath it I could cry as much as I needed to.l
The tears came for no reason, at least not one big enough to justify this teenage outburst in a 35 year old woman.
We had just been on a date to see the new Mad Max movie.  In the dark I kicked my bare feet onto his lap.  He held them like kittens in his wide hands.  The sun was setting to pink when we left the theater.
Then we got into it over who was going to be late to work so they could return the carpet cleaner to the rental place.  The car grew tight as we yelled over each other, both hot with self-righteousness. Andrew pulled in to the garage and pushed the little button to close it. I scurried under the metal door before it could clang shut and trap me in domestic prison.  I was Indiana Jones barely escaping with my whip and hat, only for me it was my purse and cell phone.
I shouldn't be complaining.  He just shampooed the carpets.  I have it better than many wives, and mothers of 3 children.  I can still escape to the mountains and go rock climbing with my friends.  I sweat and feel more animal than civilized person.  I get dirty like a kid in summer.
I paint canvases in the living room under bright sunlight.  I attend creative writing workshops, use the word fuck when it suits me, and write stories that make good girls blush.  I go for sunrise runs on well seasoned legs.  I'm a member of a gym with people who make me laugh and push me beyond my physical limits.
My soul should be fed.  These are the kinda things they tell you to do in Health magazines right?

excerpt from my most recent sketch book 2015

So why is my chest shrieking:  RUN!

I haven't done this in a while.  I haven't been consumed by a silent roar and tried to outrun it since we moved to this house 2 years ago.  But right now I am frantic going full steam ahead in one direction.  I just want to keep going until all ties fall away and I am a single entity.  I want to streak into the setting light behind the mountains and let my soul catch fire.

A young family rides slowly past me on their bikes.  The dad has a toddler on one of those plastic seats mounted to the back of his frame.  They are so tame, like lions at the zoo.  I know Dad could ride hard and fast without his family in tow.  Does it drive him mad sometimes to be so subdued?   Does he ever ache to drink whiskey instead of milk?


I do now.  For the first time in years, I wanna head straight for the bar.  I know something will awaken there.  It is the girl who will not be tethered.  She takes everything she wants, every shot.
She feels no guilt.  The alcohol swirls little Jiminy Cricket until he cannot chirp the annoying truth at her.

sketch book 2015

But no matter how fast I walk, I cannot un-know the truth:
That is not freedom.
I would be tethered to something far heavier than a family.  I would not move fast at all.  I would only sink.
The truth and the reason I am crying these hot tears is because there is nowhere to run.  No matter how fast the whiskey.   No sex, no distance covered in miles, no size 3 dress, no man, no woman, not even a child can ease this for me.

I am meant to feel this.  It is my deafening, limited and human self.  It is the price I must pay to keep my heart open to the only sustainable source of light I crave.  The light I chase in the sunrise before anyone else is awake, and I can cry in a way that is not lost or frustrated or heavy with longing.  My longing is quiet because I am right where I need to be.  On those mornings, I cry because I feel peace.
All of my questions are answered, even the ones I can't articulate.  I float the ocean's horizon line suspended between two worlds.  I often draw this line in my sketch book.  I feel most quiet here where both things are true.  They negate each other and I am weightless along this edge.  The only thing to remind me that I am human is the breath drifting easily from this body.   This beautiful whale that is one throbbing muscle of propulsion, too heavy, yet necessary.  I know whales rejoice too when they jump from the water to hit the sun.  Our only way out is to rejoice.

Back on the sidewalk, fireworks explode all around me in every direction.  It is the day after the 24th of July, and I am on a military base of pyromaniacs.  I'm also on the phone with my friend, Misty.  I've been walking for nearly an hour now.  The rage has cooled to smoke and tendrils of laughter.  From the dark behind me a man runs up and slaps my ass.  It's Andrew.  He is breathing hard from running to catch me.  The street grows a little brighter.  I feel myself shrink next to his 6 foot body.  I also feel more tears, but not angry ones.

"What are you doing here?  ... Misty...I'll have to call you back."

"I used the "Find my iPhone" app to track you.  I love you and I was starting to get worried.  You were gone for a long time."

We stop walking.  I cry into his soft black t-shirt.  I press my nose into his chest muscle and take a long drag.  I have been filleted.  He can do this to me like no one else.  He will not buy my complex package of artistry.  He will only do one thing over and over and that is love me without question.  We walk home together.  He carries my silly flip-flops.  My feet are bare and he waits for me to tip-toe around the rocks.  He reminds me to wash my feet before I go inside.  He just shampooed the carpets.

sketch book 2015

Lead Feather

Post Run Poetry.   Walking past manicured Sandy city lawns.

Lead Feather

the weight of a hearty soul

like a lead feather

this paradox assigned to me

I did not choose

each time I am deceived by my form

I appear to be a feather

but when I lift fine hairs to the breeze 

they do not carry me

instead the wind laughs

making ripples of static along my spine

I know I was there once

but I am irrevocably here.  Now.

weighted by this hearty soul

I Went for a Walk at Sunrise

This morning I went for a walk at sunrise.  I wore my thin, lime green sweats and no bra.  My lion's mane was still roaring from last night's dreams.   I exhaled a vapor like mist over water.  It was that quiet.
I tried to take a picture of it, but the sunrise was never for you. It was always for me. I wanted to fold her up and give her to you. So she could ease your black grief with her colors.

For you, my friend, who has lost her only baby.  Just yesterday it happened.
I held my vigil behind you in the court room.  I could only see your neck and the twist of golden haired bun perched there at the nape.  They were choking you with recounts of the last year.  I knew you could barely breath, but you stayed for your Bon-boy.  You held fast to your spot, and would not let anyone take it from you.  If this is where his mother sits, it is your spot.  His father did not show up.  But you were there, holding space for your son laying tribute to his childhood with your tears.
The judge talked for over an hour.  He could at least offer you an explanation.  But later you told me you wished he'd just shut up and get it over with.
I tried to hold my body perfectly still, as a soldier would.  I mirrored the sterile walls, the right angles of perfectly aligned squares, their red mahogany wood and limp American flag.  All spoke of an authority greater than ours, more powerful than the agony of birth's push.  I was with you then too.  I held your hand as you clenched your entire muscle body in one effort.  The only time you had ever worked so hard in harmony with your own heart.  Afraid, yes.  Afraid to let him come and yet throbbing to meet him, and I whispered into your neck,
"Let him come..."

Our foreheads pressed together in knowing. I can see the white in your knuckles squeezing.  I can hear the milk of my voice trying to ease your heat, the acid of life burning.
You got him here.  You held him.  You nursed him.  You cooed into his face.  You were his first love.
I still have the hospital bracelet in my jewelry box.  The one they give to the Dads.  They gave it to me.  I am sorry he is gone.  Because I remember how we felt when he was new.
http://chrysalisbreak.blogspot.com/2014/08/andrews-snooze-button.html

It is a possibility for every alcoholic mother, to loose our children.
I was very close to losing mine.  The reason is fair.  We know this.
The juxtaposition we are faced with:
"If this is me, they deserve better. This child would be better off without me." versus the thin hope,
"Can I become more? Can I give this child what he needs?
After everything I've done...all of my negligence, my black-outs, can I get off this runaway train?
Can my glazed and absent eyes be replaced with a warmth worthy of this child?
I exhaled booze into his button nose making memories of queezy uncertainty...and worse...so much worse.
How can this be mended?  How can I ask this of him?  He is so innocent."

But this I have learned, my friend.  No matter what, we are their mothers.
Whether we stay, or leave, if we are absent or present, we will affect our children.
This affect will last for our lifetime and theirs.

So now begins the nebulous and tedious task of forgiving mother.
Both the one you have been and the one you came from.
Every mother who's best was not enough...which turns out to be every single one of us.
Somehow.  No matter how much we love, we will fall short.

That is why our children are born in to a world of music, of sunsets, of sleep and hot chocolate.
They are born into a place so vast that it makes up for a mother's singular human self.
Our babies will seek and find comfort outside of us.
They will find it in the warm sun, in a prayer, a hot bath tub, and a long talk with their best friend.
They may also find it where we did, in alcohol, in drugs, in running.
They may know the screaming of their own soul as it races away from life down the highway to adventure, to romance to poetry straight into the guts of their own story.
How can we deny them this?  How can I tell them not to take risks, not to challenge the status quo, not to be what I was?   I ripped my own heart out.  I needed to.  I examined it thoroughly.
Now I have delicately placed it back inside this body, this soul which is finally at peace.
For all of the possibilities of what our children will need, we must forgive ourselves.
We must put our heart back, so we will be ready.

I hope your baby will know you someday.
I know he can be better for it.  Your life is rich with heart ache.  The soil is good.
All the intentions you gave birth to on that day I held your white knuckles are not a waste.
He will need you someday, somehow.

I pray that when he comes looking, your heart is thick and juicy and thrust deep into the ground.

Lightening and early morning goldfish

I wake up at 5 am to hear my goldfish smacking it's tail on the kitchen counter.
I flip on the light, and there he is, all orange and white and waiting to die.
I scoop him up and put him back into his bowl.
Immediately he starts swimming fast like a miniature dolphin.
I stare, amazed that he is still going, waiting for something to malfunction.
But he doesn't.  He returns to homeostasis plunging his giant mouth in and out, splaying his thin tail through the first morning light.  
I siphon a few cups of water off the top, just so he doesn't jump out again.
He's lucky Kit the cat spent last night outside on the porch.

A few months ago Beckam decided it was time to clean the fishbowl.
Sophie was babysitting.  I checked my phone to find 8 missed calls from her.
I call her back.

"Mom!  Beckam dumped the fish down the garbage disposal!  Don't worry I got him out.  He's okay."

I am impressed to hear she reached her hand into the sink's abyss to pull him out.  I tell her she's a good babysitter.
Now the fish has a few chinks in his armor from his adventure down the drain. 
There was also the time we came back from vacation to find him barely breathing in a 2 inch puddle after the cats knocked his bowl down.  Once again I scooped him up, gave him water and he came to life.  This fish just will not die.

My next thought was:  why did I wake up at 4:51 am?  Was it to save the fish?  

But I know the truth.  It is because I haven't eaten for about 15 hours.  I also went to the gym last night.  Tiny and I climbed the rope to the ceiling 4 times.  Sweaty and beaming, we slap a high five.  My arms are tight with blood.  When I exercise and don't eat, my body won't turn off.  It can't settle into rest.  It's waiting for dinner.  I don't intend to wait make it wait forever...I just don't want to give this up...not yet.  There is a vibration, a rush through me.  I want to ride the crest until it smooths back into the ground.

Last night Andrew and I sat on the porch swing and watched the lightening storm.
No wind, no rain, just blue electricity against a grey sky.  My bare feet rest idle across his legs and I feel the leftover summer heat.  I laid my head on his shoulder and remembered a time when it was only this.  Only he and I and the summer.  Before the kids.  Before the two car garage and the budget.  Before we turned 30.  There was so much energy in the sky.  I wondered if any of it was entering our bodies as we sat there.  How can we witness it so intimately and not be affected?  Maybe that's why I couldn't sleep.  
Or maybe it's because I didn't want to sleep.  I wanted to stay with him, with the storm, and with my freshly laid skin still electrified.

When I was first in recovery, I was so afraid to loose my identity.  
There is a line in the 12 X 12 that says:

 "If I keep on turning my will and life over to the care of Something or Somebody else, what will become of me? I'll look like the hole in the doughnut."

I felt panicked with so many questions.  
Is it selfish then, to be in love?  
Am I not allowed to desire anything?
Is ambition really just self-centered fear manifest in the form of fabricated achievement?

Whoa.  Big questions.  I am still learning.  The answers swell and shift as I age.
But this is what I know about those huge, over-arching questions.  They are not helpful.
They will not aid in the walking of my path today.
When I hiked the Appalachian trail, all I needed to know was that my body was strong, the forest was worth walking through, my friend Monica was with me, and I could see the trail.

Rather then swim up river begging her to make me feel alive.  I ride with her.  When she is smooth I am smooth.  When she roars I let her echo fill me.  I understand that she is more powerful than I am.

Riding the wave in Lake Powell 2014

ticket stubs from the symphony

I tried to convince myself to go for one of those miraculous 6 am runs...but my body couldn't be sparked to lace up shoes.  Sore muscles snuggled in to the sheets.  They grumbled their acid in tiny pricks pinning me to the bed like a deceased bug in a collection.
"Here we see the housewife in her dormant state.  Soon she will rise and make coffee, waffles, and begin compulsively washing laundry."
My mind though, she bings awake at 5:30 a.m.
She is ready.  She is curious, still eager for what the day will bring after 35 years.
She doesn't know she is a housewife.  Her imagination radiates in 12 directions before the body rolls from it's pillow.  I sometimes marvel at how my entrepreneur father still dreams in full color at nearly 60 years old.  After so much "normal" life, he believes something amazing is just around the corner.  I guess we are are not so different.
So now I am hear, slugging the brown shit out of the pipes.  Trying to clear the throat of my writing voice.  Sipping coffee in my thin white robe and hair stwisted up in a bun from our trip to the pool.  We are swimming again today, so I get to stay like this.  A kid in yesterday's play clothes.

Tomorrow I will facilitate a writing group unlike anything I have ever done.
As so often happens, I am in awe of this new twist in my path.
How did I get here?
Four women are coming to my house.
The one thing they have in common:  they all lost their partner to a heroin overdose.
One of them is my sister.  She was with Troy from 16 years old until his death at 31.
For half of her life, he lived by her side.  Now he is gone.
Last summer when I cleaned out Mom's garage, I found a small box of notes he had written to her.
Nothing profound, just a post-it note that had been stuck to a candy bar.

"I brought you this candy because it is so sweet and you are so sweet.
 I hope you have a good day.  Love, Troy."

There were ticket stubs from the symphony.
Some of the notes were so small.  Things you might have thrown away.
Now they are all that is left.

Our group came about because each woman came to me independent of the others, and asked for help in writing about their grief.  I am honored by their trust, and I hope I am worthy of it.
I haven't lost a person in this way.
I won't assume to know what their experience has been or what ache still rolls deep.

I just looked up Troy's obituary.  His eyes in the picture looked alive, they were still bright and questioning with a bit of teasing behind them.  I can only imagine how my sister must look at his pictures and wish he would come to life.  How she must cry.
As I read his obituary I thought: this is not Troy.  This is generic.  This could be anyone.
I hope my sister gets to write about the real Troy.  The one who was hers.  The one who will always be hers.  Perhaps I've got it wrong.  Maybe she needs to do something else.  Maybe the story she will tell is different than I expect.  Probably.
So as I enter this new space, I pray that my expectations will wait reverently on the sidelines.

morning paradox.

Anniversaries are funny things.
There is an assumption that everything immediately changes at the 365th day.
I understand we need to measure time in some way.
If only for sanity and navigational purposes.

When I watched the movie Castaway, it hit me that to be alone with no person or measurement to break up my existence would be a mute version of hell.  Like in dreams when I try to scream and make no sound.  Days would run together like a toddler's over-painted rainbow.  No red, orange, yellow...only a brown puddle that was supposed to equal a life.

I want to celebrate the passage of time.  I want to celebrate it with the people who have divided it for me.  This is a strange gratitude.  To be thankful to a person for separating time into moments for distinct pleasure.  It is like saying to the sun,
"Thank you for blue.  Thank you for green.  Thank you for the distinction in 100 increments between the two."

But that's how I feel today.

My tweenager has been here 3 times already to hang from the corner of my desk.

"Go away," I tell her.

She rolls her eyes, and slumps her curls so they touch the computer's mouse.
She only wants my attention when I am busy.
I realize that I would not be any better off if my writing were never interrupted.
If I could go deep into the voice which retells my stories, and stay under for hours, I would not be more satisfied.
In fact, I would be lost.

So I find that my irritations on this morning of my 10 year anniversary of being sober, are in fact what make it worth while at all.

One day in a college bookstore

Water from the faucet is growing warmer.

I leave my hands in it after the dishes are already washed.
My vision is blurry from hot salty tears crowding their only exit
I hold my hands under the water and let the heat of everything build
I look out the window into blue sky and pine trees.
The glass is clean because I windexed it yesterday.
My body tenses and holds in air, ready to dive under and let this wave pass.
Instead I let it slam straight into my chest.  I let it hurt.
I press still wet hands into my cheeks.  The fresh and the salt mix together.

This is the house-wife's pain.  The lonely apex at her kitchen sink in sweat pants.
One white blossom hangs from a geranium.   I planted it in an old orange teapot.  I thought myself so clever, really winning at this whole domestic thing.
Now it holds space with me as I cry.
I miss my friend...

We bought our graduation hats together and marveled at the little tassel:  Class of 2010.
In the college bookstore, on her long grasshopper legs and high heels, she did a stupid jig.
I recorded it on my phone.
I was graduating with an Art Teaching degree, hers Film and Media arts.
It used to be other people who could succeed, and now it was us.
Together we were beating the odds.
Our laughing rippled out across a sea of Philosophy texts and scientific computers.
One hopeful curl which turned out to be too small.
It was not sustainable.  It petered out against the swell of books on Psychology and Mental Illness.

No one else knows this depth of sadness.
I go into it alone while the kids play swords in the other room.
I can hear them shouting "Hi-Ya!" and it makes my tears seem ridiculous.
But I don't care.  I stay with them.
If it I tried to explain why this memory hurts so much, it wouldn't make sense.
Or maybe it would, I don't know.
I guess I believe that other mothers weep for similar reasons at their own kitchen sinks while doing dishes.
It's all I can do to honor my tiny memory.
It didn't seem right to wipe my eyes with my sleeve and take out the trash.

The Bear

Inspired by "My Friend the Bear" by Jim Harrison

"...Where I keep the bear...I found her as an orphan three years ago, bawling against the dead carcass of her mother...We embrace ear to ear, her huge head on my shoulder, her breathing like a God's"

I know this bear with huge head and breathing like a God's.
She has hugged me with her whole body, and it is an otherworldly experience to be so enveloped.

The night I told my best friend Monica my parents were getting divorced we were sitting on the gaudy lavender couch with lemon flowers.  We were surrounded by Jesus, not the actual Jesus, but wooden framed tributes of a man in the clouds, a man who had never done anything for me.
This was Monica's house, dainty porcelain statues of saints and mothers glowed with the moon.  All of it echoed a home holier than mine.
We were in 7th grade.  I had yet to develop hips or breasts or get my period.

The living room was dark and quiet in the way that makes my tummy tickle.
From the hallway shadow cave, Monica's mama bear came softly in.
She wore less than I'd ever seen her wear, just a thin white silky nightgown over her hefty body.
Her hair was a tiny bun, over which she usually she wore wigs of luxurious curls, but not tonight.
She was without her weighty clip-on earrings of diamonds and onyx.
That night her face was immaculate like one who had never lied.

She came to the couch without saying a word.  She sat behind me and wrapped her velvet arms of dough around my 13 year old body.  I let myself cry into her, knowing it would be the last time I was aloud to be held as a child by a mother.
I pressed my eyes into the pillow of her arm and dropped all my tears.  They came up from the depths of a place I could never find my way back to now.  I didn't want to stop.  I knew that when I looked up everything would be different.  The hard shell of my chrysalis was already forming, already inhibiting my vision and blocking out innocence.  I just wanted to stay tucked under her chin like the fold of a napkin.
She never did say a word.

That same year Monica and her Mom moved to Roosevelt Utah.
I started high school without my best friend or my Mom.

I discovered the lightness of feet as I ran from the school doors at full sprint.
I flew from the principal, from boredom, from normal and landed on the slippery seats of Kyle Reese's vintage Ford Galaxy.  We all piled in, a band of lost children.  We went to Denny's and ate hearty breakfast.  We drove to the mountains and talked about poetry, skateboarding, train-hopping and everything which lay before us uncharted.  We fed our souls because no one else would.
 I discovered adults really don't know what they're doing half the time and they don't deserve my trust.  I learned they only have power over me if I believe their authority is real.  I decided it wasn't.

I did carry an old photo of my Mom, though.  It was from when she still had red hair like mine, before she bleached the color out.  Her eyes were soft with no make-up.  Around her neck laid a delicate gold chain with a seagull flying from the end of it.
I couldn't fault that version of her.  In that picture she was me, her eyes still saw tiny prayers to Jesus everywhere.  I knew that no one had given her the answers yet.  Not then, and not now.

My Friend the Bear

Down in the bone myth of the cellar
of this farmhouse, behind the empty fruit jars
the whole wall swings open to the room
where I keep the bear.  There's a tunnel
to the outside of the far wall that emerges
in the lilac grove in the backyard
but she rarely uses it, knowing there's no room
around her for a freewheeling bear.
She's not a dainty eater so once a day
I shovel shit while she lopes in playful circles.
Privately she likes religion—from the bedroom
I hear her incantatory moans and howls
below me—and April 23rd, when I open
the car trunk and whistle at midnight
and she shoots up the tunnel, almost airborne
when she meets the night.  We head north
and her growls are less friendly as she scents
the forest-above-the-road smell.  I release
her where I found her as an orphan three
years ago, bawling against the dead carcass
of her mother.  I let her go at the head
of the gully leading down to the swamp,
jumping free of her snarls and roars.
But each October 9th, one day before bear season
she reappears at the cabin frightening
the bird dogs.  We embrace ear to ear,
her huge head on my shoulder,
her breathing like a god's.

  ~ Jim Harrison

I should...

I should sneak out for a run.

My family is plugged in to miscellaneous electronics, and I pull my laces tight.
I think I ought to feel guilty leaving them this way...but I am actually delighted.
On the nimble feet of my teenage self, I tiptoe out the window.
Using my thin spider legs, I slip into the mischevious night.

The tops of trees make a web across the sky and I skim over it.
Each time I think this may be hard, or I may be old, I relax into my muscles and my breathing.
I become light again.

This practice has been with me for 18 years.
I don't run to be fast or strong, not really.
I run to realize where I am.

As I walk back to the house with the last air digesting, I see Pepper.
I see our morning walk to preschool.
I see her be so small on the crunchy rocks with her feet in sunday shoes.
Her satin princess cape ripples over the gravel.
Wild hair unfurls from the top of her crown.
I see Beckam in the rickety old stroller, his fat calves pudging out from his seat.
I see myself, tired or not tired in my sweats and weak ponytail.
And I know:  it is all good, even this small memory.
Life can grow from here, we have more than enough of what is important.
Green shoots up from every crack along the concrete track back to my house.
It is over now, like a dream this scene fades as quickly as I can recall it.
She is already in kindergarten.
I can only remember preschool Pepper for a moment when I walk this sidewalk.
Like an unexpected angel, I revel in her presence.
Soon this memory will be replaced by an older version of her, and Beckam will tower over both of us.

When I return to my house, it is with open eyes and plenty of space to receive what I find.

Ashes of Glittering Fire.

"Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,
its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones
toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire
where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song."

            ~ Mary Oliver excerpt from the poem Humpbacks

This is the ocean, this place of glittering fire.

Getting ready to receive Gary's ashes
Greeting the water.

Right now I want to cry because it is the place where I splayed my uncle Gary's ashes in wide fans along the current.  I want to cry because I waited 9 years to swim him out to sea. It took that long for Aunt Robbie to be ready to release her partner, to let him diffuse back into the tides.
I thought the task would be heavy, sodden ashes sinking fast and the weight of it on me as I tread water.  I was afraid my legs could not hold us both up, could not pump fast enough.

He said as he lay waiting for cancer to take him, "I want my ashes sent into the ocean and I want Sarah to take them there."
I'm crying because when I actually dove into the water and felt her familiar brush along my lower back, my thighs and streaming from my toes, I came up smiling.  I knew this was not a sad thing.  It took my breath away to know this, and I sat ebbing in the tide with a full chest.  I've never written about it because I've been afraid I could not do justice to the grace I found in the water that day.  Maybe this is why Aunt Robbie waited so long.

She wanted every detail to be perfect.  We spent over $200 on flowers from the markets of downtown Los Angeles.  I think it was Wall Street.  The sidewalks smelled like piss and I saw whole logs of feces in the gutter.  I kept my daughter close as we moved briskly through a paradox of homeless, brown wanderers and brilliant blossoms of every color.  The blossoms billowed out from cardboard cylinders and I couldn't help but find them equally tragic to the street addicts who were their neighbors. Both were so full of life yet doomed to die too soon.  We chose colors of purple and yellow.  We bought orchids and hydrangea and roses to throw into the water.

The flowers and my daughter Sophie

On the boat there was fresh coffee and pastries.  The sun came out with unexpected fervor.  We took off our jackets and lifted our faces to her from the white-washed deck.  Again I was surprised by how bright everything was in spite of the occasion.
The navy came in crisp white and played the trumpet because Gary was a firefighter for 36 years.
I was struck, by how handsome government ceremony can be.

The boat captain also wore white.  He was straight and tall with a good sense of humor.
"Who is the diver?"  He asked.
Once again I felt inadequate.  I am not a diver, only a strong swimmer and lover of the water, but I stepped forward.
There was some confusion about my diving without certification.  He said it was not permissible.  Absolutely not.  Perhaps today would not be so perfect after all.
Then he found out I would wear no scuba gear.  Only fins and my bare skin.
"Oh, well that's just fine," he smiled.  "No problem there."

Aunt Robbie wanted me to wear a wet suit.

Back to shore wearing the necklace of Gary's ashes.

"I really don't think I'll need it," I told her.  But I smiled and let her rent one from Sport Chalet anyway, just in case the water was choppy or too cold.

But when I got out onto that ocean, when I smelled her salt, and heard her roar, I could not dishonor her by pulling a thick layer of rubber between us.  I knew I could trust the water to do her part.  I would do mine.
Uncle Gary would understand this.  He was a diver for 50 years.  He took dive lessons from Mel's dive shop at age 14.  At age 21 he was the youngest trained scuba instructor to come out of LA county's UICC (underwater instructor certification course)  He died September 6, 2005 at 64 years old. His true love was apnea (breath hold) or free diving.  He did not like the encumbrance of tanks, preferring to kick freely and swim, to turn as a dolphin might.
The water was his mother, as she is mine.  I know she will not hurt me.  If I trust her and swim when it is time to swim...float when it is time to float.  She will hold me.

I loved my Uncle Gary.  He took me snorkeling on the So. Cal coast.  I wore a coral one piece swimming suit.  I was 14 years old, my hair wild as a lion in the coastal air.  He let me wear his fins and his snorkel.  He gave me a small knife and taught me how to rip muscles off the rocks.  I'd pry them open and take the meat underwater to feed the fish.  They swarmed around me in a solid current like a dream.  The ocean opened her twinkling jewelry box.  She let me turn over her treasures in my hands, with fingers that glowed white under water.  I floated on my belly, suspended between two worlds and marveled at how I could be in the water and yet there was endless air.
He let me stay... and stay...and stay while he kept watch, my casual sentinel.  He didn't bother me about time or sunblock.  He just held his post on the rocks, a wise old seagull, smiling, assuring me I could take all the time I wanted. He knew what was happening.  He knew I was falling in love.

In the water with Gary's ashes October 2014

As I released his ashes to the water, all I felt was joy through my entire body.  My legs pumping hard in the fins, keeping me upright and worthy of my faith in them.
"Do you see it!  How beautiful it is?  Can you see it!" I shouted up to the people on the boat.
They looked down to me from another world, from a world I had just left.
I wanted to stay here with Gary, and felt I knew him better in that moment than I ever had when he was alive.
As the last trace of grey dispersed to blue, I tipped back into the cradle of waves.  I let them hold me as my chest expanded, a natural buoy.  I can still close my eyes and conjure it, that depth of breath.
My body became a thin flat film over the water, and I don't know how long I laid there.  I felt the captain yelling to me.  I looked up to find he was smiling wide at me from the boat deck,
"You gonna stay out there forever?"

"I would if I could," I told him, and he smiled even wider.

Chasing Night Fish

I am manic and I can feel it.
When I breath in simple oxygen it is like nitrous filling my nasal cavities with sugar.
I lay awake at 5 am trying to convince myself that healthy people sleep more than this.
I inhale the nitrous sugar and would rather be upright...writing.
My head is loud, but not with worthy or actual obsessions.  Someone left the radio on and they are scanning the channels, just skipping from commercial...pop-song...talk show interview.  I am not attached to any of these stations, but I cannot turn it off.
Only two play real music.  The running channel and the writing channel.
Now that I am a bit older, I prefer the writing channel.  My knees are grateful.

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” 

Allen Ginsberg

The cats carry me down the hall on their tide of mini-meows for food.
I press the coffee button on my trusty, maroon coffee pot.  The one I got for Christmas the same year I got the Crock Pot which sits in it's groove in the cupboard.  Untouched and misunderstood.

I pull my hair into a cascade ponytail at the top of my head and wonder when I will wash it again.
Probably after I work-out today...or tomorrow.
It is the color of autumn sun.  That's what Micah from high school used to call it.  We would go out to my '72 Impala across the street from Viewmont high school and make out.  He wasn't a very good kisser, but he understood the Beat poets, and there was a knowing in his eyes.  Now he has a thick beard and still works at a brewery downtown even though he is 37.  He probably still understands those Beat poets too.

He was always headin' off to Ketchum Idaho which is where Hemingway died, and I'm reading a book about his wife.  Hemingway's wife, whom he calls Hash, and how she fell in love with an alcoholic, which is what my friend is doing right now.  I can see how it happens.  It is fascinating to watch from this far removed seat.  I used to be the star of this movie and now I am 7 rows back in the dark wearing soft sweat pants and bare feet.  Before they become pathetic, alcoholics themselves are intoxicating.  They hurl themselves at the night trying to sucking up every drop of inspiration between the twilight and the dawn.  To dance with them can make you forget.  You can forget there was ever anything worth preserving...not a marriage, or a mortgage, or a car, or a job, or the laundry folded and put away in drawers.  They pull metaphors from the sky and splay them with words like lace over you, while dancing the finest swing step you've ever seen.  They don't miss a beat and their eyes, the way they invite you to join them like fish hooks for your soul.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge...

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks...

...who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
...with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years."
Allen Ginsberg ~Howl

But in the morning they turn grey.  They hide from the sun, from themselves and when they go dark they leave a vacuum.  Not the normal space of leaving, but a black hole that sucks in and takes more than its' share of light.
I am one who did not die.  One morning I woke up and could find nowhere to run, and no strength for chasing angels.  My body was heavy and real, made of bones and flesh and eyes tired.
I laid down in the dirt to cry, and the angels I had been chasing laid down and cried with me.
Now I tend to my antique store.  Usually I reside peacefully with the artifacts in my care.  I respect them.  I respect what they represent which is my own humanness.  I cannot outrun it or create any great art piece that will not reveal this truth.  No one can.  Not even my teenage idols, not Jack Kerouac or Tom Robbins or Ani DiFranco, or Bukowski, or Gary Snyder (Who I met at the library once and he was a small man with a wide smile.  He didn't die either.) or Ayn Rand or J.D. Salinger...none of them.

Sometimes I still miss the madness though.  And I wonder: is one life better than the other?  Really?
Either way we all die.   So do I die from the dangerous tight-rope that is drinking and hitch-hiking and writing and failing and tasting everything?  Or do I die safely tucked into my insurance plan, my family, my college degree and my antiques?
At the bottom of my question I find the truth:  
                                              I cannot answer that for anyone else.
                                              I can only know my own life.
                                              By the light of the morning which greets me at my window...
                                              I know that my best writing and living and loving is happening now.
                                              It did not happen when I was chasing idols and glittering night fish.
                                              It happens quietly in my sweatpants and coffee sunrise.

I do not fault these artists, these alcoholics for their wild rides.  I am grateful for theirs and for mine.
I don't need to quantify one as better or more worthy than another.  If I ever think this to be necessary, it is because I have forgotten the angels in the dirt.
Were it not for the ride, I would not have fallen there, and the would never have come to me.

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

— Jack Kerouac 

The Beats shoot some breeze ... (left to right) painter and musician Larry Rivers, Jack Kerouac, poet Gregory Corso (back of head to camera), musician David Amram, and Allen Ginsburg. Photograph: John Cohen/Getty Images

Letter to a Former Self: Part 2

Dear-Freshly-Re-married-Sarah,

I know you just smashed the teapot into the kitchen floor as your insides screamed,

"Why the FUCK did I sign up for this, again?"

I know you are now sweeping up the glass and the water in a house that is yours but doesn't feel like it.  You want to cry but you can't...not yet.

I know you're afraid that you will loose control and get fat and he won't love you.  I know you still have secrets, even from yourself.

Please know, this will never be easy.  It's not supposed to get easy.  I am writing this to you 9 years down the road with this man, and I still get scared.  I still look over at him sometimes and think he is a stranger.
I have since become at peace with this.  Because I realize that although we are married, we are separate people having separate experiences.  I will never know what it feels like for Andrew to love Sarah, and he will never know what I experience when I watch him sleep.

Over time you will move out from your "spot."  The spot where you lay your head on his tattooed chest and he is your savior.
Right now at 9 years I no longer need him, I only want him, and this is scary.

But what I really want to tell you is:   whatever truth is in you keep expressing it.

And if you need to break dishes - break dishes.
I may go home and break dishes right now just so that my soul can make noise.  So I do not become so functional that I don't recognize myself.

I also want you to know that it's okay to have doubt.
It's okay to yell at your kids.
It's okay to swing on the swing set and wish it would disconnect at the chains and send you up into the wide blue.
It's okay to join a writing group and tell unflattering stories about your own life.
It's okay to want to run beyond your own house.
And if when your legs stop running, you sob from a place deeper than words into the twilight rain, just say thank you.

The most important thing for you to know is:  none of these impulses are anyone's fault.
This lion in you has always been there.  Just look at your orange mane, and you'll know.
When she roars it is deafening, and it is vital.

So far, when the roar recedes he still loves you, and you still find comfort in your spot.

Letters to a former self: Part 1

"What is actual, is actual only for one time.
And only for one place."
         ~T.S. Eliot

Dear About-to-be-divorced Sarah,

I know you wake every morning with a sour stomach and reach immediately for your journal as your only purge.
I know you do your best with little Sophie who is only 2.  It is good that you share your watercolors and brushes with her so she can spread swift fans of blue over her paper and the kitchen floor.
This counts.
I know you look at her and experience a full body shudder when you realize you'll be caring for her alone.
You won't be alone.  In fact you are not alone right now, and I think you can sense that.

I want you to know, your heart's integrity will be rewarded.  I know it doesn't feel like integrity.  Right now you carry a guilt so concrete, it is hard to even get dressed.  But that's what it is, integrity.  You are beginning to learn that honesty is not always shining.  Sometimes you are the lotus in the mud.

Sophie will be okay.  She will grow into a poised young lady.  But more importantly, so will you.

This sickness deep in your gut will be replaced with a warm rich soil where thick life will grow.
You will be surrounded by a school of bright birds which will rise you up to the sun.

And Jeff will be okay.  He really will.  He will become a firefighter.  His 5'7" frame will rise tall in his uniform.  He will run 100 mile races through the mountains on his antelope legs.  He will have control of his world, and it will make sense, as he needs it to.  He will not always hate you.

Sophie will never fade. She will stand on her rock with cheeks lifted to the sun.  The hard muscles of a gymnast will form under her dark skin.  But she will soften to you during early morning drives to school.  Remember to drive her to school.  It is important.  She will cry when she needs to.

She will have siblings, a brother and a sister.  She will not grow up without this bond as I know you worry she will.  Her heart will reach for them and their roots will become entwined, immovable.  She will read them books at night and snuggle with her sister.  They will have the same wild hair tangled together in knowing.  They will ride bikes in the driveway and make pancakes.  At Christmas she will not wake up to an empty house.

She will not wonder if her Mom loves her, if her Dad loves her, or if they ever loved each other.

You can't know any of this now, and you must make the decision anyway.
This will be your Grace.  You will learn to make the honest choice regardless of the outcome.
You will walk free knowing your peace is not contingent upon circumstances.
The rich soil of your gut will ground you, and the birds of your heart will make you light.

But for now, dear girl - cry...just cry.
Get all the tears out so they do not poison you later.

Love,

The self who knows.