Unpacking Someday

I’m a someday girl. I want to buy a kayak some day. I want to travel someday. I want to visit someday. Meet up someday. Catch up someday.

And I’ve learned that “Someday” is the dream on the other side of the barriers. Not just time and expense, but all the barriers that ADHD gives me as an added bonus.

To realize  “Someday” requires a plan. Book tickets. Arrange overnights. Rent a car. Figure out food. Find where the grocery is. Reserve…stuff. 

But there’s a soft barricade in place. The one that tells me I will stay too long, ask too much, get in the way, assume things I shouldn’t. It tells me that I’m not really wanted, but that I’m imposing myself on someone else’s time…And those are important things to keep in mind, but for me, they shut me down. They keep me from booking those flights and buying that kayak and traveling to that place and visiting family and friends–who have always said “You’re always welcome” but being who I am, I will find the one week in their lives that they are unavailable, or that it’s just inconvenient. And I can't always accurately read between those lines. Then I spend entirely too much energy trying to read the people I am with to make sure I”m not approaching the Enough Line and they need a damn break because I know I can be a lot. Part of what makes me a lot is the fact that I spend so much energy trying to read people around me..and the reassurances I sometimes need.

Maybe it’s my way of floating an idea to see how it’s received. Or maybe it’s a request for an invite. Or maybe it’s just the beginning of a dream, that I’ve spoken into the universe to set it in motion. Maybe it’s all of those things from a kid who never quite fit in. 

And maybe it’s because I know life is too damn fickle, and if I marry myself to a someday, the world will change and my dream will die on the vine. I was booking flights for a lifetime dream trip with my family on March 10, 2020. The next day the world shut down for the pandemic. Guess what I was doing February 23, 2022…the day before Putin invaded Ukraine? 

I wish I could just strip all that worry, but so many times that I have, it was the wrong move. 

So if I tell you “Someday” I just need to know you feel that, too.

Pieces of a Whole

10:48 am

No rhyme or reason, your eyes. Lips on my neck just below my ear. A smile. A sigh. It’s not sex…with you it never is. It’s peace. Immersion.

I feel your eyes on me. You let me meet your gaze, and maybe that’s part of what got me in the first place. You leave doors open, unattended. Invitations without assumption. Gazes without expectation. I gently run a finger down your bare chest, pushing a pool of shadow on your skin. We both laugh. I rest my head on your shoulder. 

You are sunlight and bright flowers dancing on a windswept field. And I don’t know why I can feel you. I swore off your kind a long time ago, but. Here I am. Drowning in the essence of you, both loving and hating every part of it. .

The world doesn’t exist here. It’s a place I made for us, because that’s what I can do. I can create as I destroy, and sometimes I think I’m just a conduit to a different time or place or dimension in the multiverse. Maybe all of them, and maybe what I feel is the me in all of those, loving, living, learning, creating. 

Destroying.

I’ve destroyed so much. Laid waste, burned and salted the earth because of men who would try to tame the wild in me. Chain me to their expectations. Stuff me in cages made of their own needs. My rage knew no bounds, and I was made of fire. I walked to that volcano to meet myself, and I was humbled by her. Power. Might. Utter violence. 

You met me in The Quiet. The place that words forgot. Where words don’t belong. I was hungry and tired, and dusty from the road and you never asked me to speak, but you let me. If I wanted to. 

Maybe that why…right here.

Right now.

It’s you. 

Blink

Where are you in this great big world. A whisper that was once a shout just louder than my thoughts but not so loud I couldn’t hear you. Your eyes the sea and the sky, your hair the windswept plains.

Your words the mountains.

My thoughts the sea throwing itself against the shore as it fights the wind for purchase on a violent beach of stone.

Your smile, the calm in me.  The rose of my cheeks. The warm in my chest.

I look for you in the quiet corners where dreams like to hide. Where mist and shadows like to blend and play taunt nightmares toward the light. Sometimes I think I see you there, quiet as you ever were. Suggestion of a smile, question in those perfect eyes.

But I blink and then you're gone.

She and Me and a Crappy Porch Couch

Me and you and a bottle of beer. Thick scent of cloves and leather and bright autumn days.

I never look at you when you can see me. Maybe I don’t want to become real. Maybe I don’t want you to become real. Be a dream, the kind that never wakes up. Silhouettes and cigarettes, a cherry flare in the dark as you take a long drag and change the subject like you always do when I’m about to say too much. 

“You ever wonder”  

I always wonder

“What if”

The world is made of ifs and buts and sentences that never get finished 

“Things were different”

Always

“If we”

Yes.

You don’t even need to finish that this and I think you know this because you just stop talking.

I let that hang in the air mixed with smoke and dreams.

I should have kissed you. I should have closed that space between us…but. There's that but, There’s always that but.

Real people disappoint. They leave. They move on.

And I wanted to feel like that forever.

You. And me. And that crappy porch couch.

Photograph

There’s a picture of me looking at you. You took it at my request, and I didn’t tell you why at the time...it wasn’t about the grand background or the sea or sky or anything, It was about me looking at you. I wanted to remember how this feels inside. That wide-eyed wanderer who falls in love in a breath, and leaves just as quickly before anything can become real.

I had tried to leave that wanderer’s soul behind. Fill her full of responsibilities and work and told her she had

to grow up. I thought I was saving myself, but it turns out I was only drowning the me I needed to be all along.Life’s march of tragedies stripped all manner of pretense so I got on a plane and ran away for a while. 

I climbed, explored, discovered and felt. The ocean. A glacier. Lava running like a river.

Then you. I don’t know how or why, but inside, I heard you. Quiet at first. A whisper that felt like “I see you” followed by a cascade of you I never expected because I thought those parts of me were gone with the wanderer...I closed my eyes and let that feeling wash over me. Bathed in it a while, and I don’t think it’s anything you did, but who you are. What you bring to yourself and the world you’ve built around you. The picture of you you paint. You curate. 

There’s beauty there. Real beauty. A quiet eternity, waiting for something. A voice in the dark, maybe. A whisper between your thoughts. Like me.

But I wasn’t built to stay. 

I can still hear you now and again. More distant and a little harder to hear, but you're here. And I want you to stay. Not with promise or expectation, or the kinds of things that overturn lives. Just the quiet of you with the quiet of me.

When The Shoe No Longer Fits

 It’s ok if the favorite shoe doesn’t fit any more. The arch crushed, the heel worn from age. The soul tired from walking, and the laces long broken. They don’t hug your feet like they used to, or compliment your gait. Goodbye isn’t always so simple as throwing them away. They’re companions from a different life. All the paths and trails and mountains and puddles and rocks. They hold your secrets and are part of what made you...you. The very grit and sweat and blood and tears of you.

 But the shoes aren’t you.

And you can let them go.

It’s okay.

Thank You Iceland

 Clearly I am not very good at writing every day. Well, I write, but I don't always blog. I tried keeping a diary of days when the pandemic started, and I did great for about a month. But with kids home from school, and life soldiering on, I really didn't keep up very well. 

I did take pictures, though. Some selfies to chronicle mood, some of all the hiking we did--and we did quite a lot. I just returned from a solo trip to Iceland, and there's a lot more story there than I can fit into a single post. 

I found my words again in an AirBnB that creaked with every footstep, and felt like a home. Sitting on a  mountain, staring out over the land, the river and the sea, the words came flooding in like a dam broke, and I submitted to their will. I sat at the kitchen table and wrote until my hands hurt, slept and wrote some more. I will share the fractured pieces of what came out as time goes by--fiction, mostly. But fiction is like a painting and the words are my colors. 

I fell in love with that place. Like I was always meant to stay there. But "staying" was not what this trip was about. Another trip, another time. 

But as I said, more on all that later. For now, I'm just happy the words are back. 

So Thank you, Iceland. I love you for what you've given back to me.