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.

The Hollow Woman

The hollow woman walks.

There's a cart of groceries. She reminds herself she's shopping. For food. Stuff. Things that make sense somewhere. She doesn't have a list. Lists are for people who make plans. She doesn't have plans. She doesn't want any more plans. Plans die.

The air moves around her. Parting like water for a boat. Not a big boat. Maybe a kayak. Solitary and insignificant and she can't tell if she's the kayak or the person in the kayak. Either way, she walks.

The hollow woman sighs.

More like she moves air with her body, or kayak, or whatever she is. Sighs carry significance and this breath has none. It's just air.

The hollow woman waits.

There are people moving more slowly than her. Than her. The Hollow Woman doesn't care about grammar. She's just waiting for those two ships full of cargo and noise to get out of her way. Decide on a queue. Move on. Out of her way.

The hollow woman is quiet.

Despite the small talk. Lips smile but face doesn't. Eyes fixed on the things that beep as they go by. She trades beeps for bags and parts more air. She feels it. The air. On skin that doesn't feel like her. Maybe she really is

Just a kayak.

On an ocean.

Parting air.

Locks

I lost her for a while in the shadows of my own wandering thoughts. She would peek out from behind a memory now and again, her wild hair framing her face like a blond cloud of determination. She has been waiting for too long for me to find her again. That smile she gets when she's on the hunt. The  way her eyes gleam. Hungry for a game to play. An adventure to have.

To be honest, I lost her because I locked some doors on her. She was free to roam in there, anywhere. Stalking memories, tending the ones I couldn't bear to relive because my present asked too much. Memories of her, and the games she'd play and the people she would find for me and throw at my feet as if to say, "Love him." And so many of them I loved, even when I was killing them, because that's how her story goes. It's about life and death and seizing control where none is really offered. Where it seems impossible. She always found a way. And the body count climbed while I just listened. Let her be her. God, how I missed her. That unapologetic control she had.

But body counts and stable children don't mix. So I had to lock her away in bits and pieces. The first time, she looked confused, so I drew my breath. Held it and closed my eyes.I locked the door while I made breakfast. A thousand of them. Another lock while I drove to ballet a thousand times. And gymnastics. And Girl Scouts. And swim lessons. And bedtimes.

And she became so used to the locks that she started using them herself...she locked me out of her secret places. Made sure I knew I didn't belong in her world any more, and my heart broke with each snick of the lock. Until what was left was pieces of me scattered around the last dooor she closed.

Once in a while, that door was opened, a hand slipped out. Snatched a piece. The door slammed. Locked. Piece by piece. She was always, always there collecting the pieces and parts. Doing what with them, I couldn't know.

Until one day, she stepped from behind the darkest clouds. With a reassemled Me in her hands. He smile was softer than it ever had been before all the doors and locks and angry dismissals. And the me she gave me was different, too.Still hungry. Still me. But ready this time.

And she was ready, too.

To be a partner.

To be me.

To let me tell her story without consuming me.

Writer's Constipation

I'm not sure I'd call it writer's block, so much as writer's constipation. It's all in there, just jammed up. Every once in a while, a thought breaks loose, and I can follow it for a short while, but never for long. Certainly not for long enough. But at least I have a full sized keyboard back. I had been without for far too long.

I missed it.

I miss writing. I miss falling in love with a time and place that's all my own, then sharing it because my mind isn't big enough to hold it all at once. I miss the feeling I get after I finish a piece...or a piece of a piece. The emotional exhaustion, combined with the high of just wanting more, of feeling more but more isn't left. More has to wait until I find my place again.

I miss the quiet. The kind that surrounds me like a cloud while my thoughts form and dissipate. The way the room sounds when it's full of thoughts that don't have words until my fingers find the right keys. The way I can relax into myself, no worries.

I miss this.

But I'm finding it again.

Piece by piece.

Peace by peace.

Death, as Public Domain

A white dude put a bag over her head. A white dude dumped her like so much trash on the side of a back road where we wouldn’t find her for two and a half years. Her father had to ID her teeth. Her teeth. They found her pelvis in a creek bed where it had washed down from seasons of melt and deluge.

We searched. Shoulder to shoulder. Heel to toe. I still don’t see a field for a peaceful place for a picnic. I see divots and slight mounds and wonder if those are shallow graves, like the ones I’d jab with a stick to see if it smelled like corpse in the blistering August heat. That shit changes how you look at everything.

And the inescapable mob of opinions and accusations. The heavily cliched angry townsfolk gathered on smart phones, thumbs perched over “send”. Armed with righteous indignation and a tv education based on bad crime series, they took pictures. Publicly speculated. Tried to befriend us so they could dig fists into our guts, our lives. Used that tv knowledge to build a world that fit their narrative.

They harassed the mourning.

Her name. Their cause. They tried to steal her identity away from her after she was gone. They dissected her fb page, analyzed each word for what it wasn’t. Nothing mattered to them but their insatiable hunger. No matter what we said, no matter who we were and had been for all of our lives...a flawed, but loving family, and she was part of us. Sharing merriment, food, drink and love. Always love. She was the Adored One.

It went national. Everyone had an opinion. We met people no one should ever have to. There was no privacy, though I could hide. Stay as quiet as I could, become a nonissue and provide a place to hide a while, where others in my family had no choice but to face the blinding camera lights. I learned a new kind of disgust when our lives intersected with Nancy Grace—May she never know peace.

It’s been seven years. I know this because I found out while I was searching that I was pregnant with my youngest. All I really have left of her are some private memories and some texts. I’m a better person for having her in my life, for the six short years she was here where we could hug.,br />

The silence

I flatlined here for a little while. Ok, a year. It's been a year of introspection and change, both inside and out. I've been writing, but mostly on-topic of some longer work I've been at for a couple years now. She is a character born of blood and stone. Forged by rage's own fire. She has been waiting for me to get it right before I go too far. But being mom and writing from that place don't always mix well. She's patient. And I've been playing with other, calmer points of view pieces. The post I just made was a good-bye to a girl I loved, who went missing one night. Parts of her were found much later by people who don't deserve those kinds of memories. It's taken 4 years to find those words I said to her one afternoon. She was a jewel of the Millennial Generation. All of you are. Shine on.

She Said

She said: I suppose I am the color blue.

I said: No, you're the color yellow.

She said: It's because of my yellow eyeshadow in that picture, isn't it?

I said: No. You're the yellow of daffodils who defiantly stare down the sweeping, gray skies that want so much to cling to winter. You're the yellow that chases the smear of clouds so the sun can bring us spring again. And then. And then she was gone. And her daffodils still bloom.

Only Half

Half a pill waits for me. I stare at it for a while. 57 is all that's left of the identification code. The ragged edge where I broke it. Took the other half a while ago but I can't feel it anymore. Half doesn't last like it used to. I've been here before; staring at the half of a pill. I know its voice. The way it sounds in my head, my chest, my legs. I've been here before at the end of a bottle wondering how 160 half-a-pills go so fast. The first few--twenty, maybe--slow and steady. Only when it hurts. Promising myself this time will be different. Promising myself I will ignore the voice that starts with a whisper I can barely hear. But the whisper becomes a shout and soon I can feel my arms twitch, just a little at first. That voice whispers "it's just a half a pill". Half. Not whole. That would be too much.  One would lead to two then five and more and thy would be addiction. 

This is not addiction. 

It's just a half a pill. 

A Taste (cnf)

She's come and gone a thousand times. In like a lovers whisper. Gone again like a tornado had passed through the place, but that's what always sucked me in. Knowing the wind behind that whisper.

I stared down into those confused, beautiful eyes that once filled me with such excitement and hope, and said goodbye. I didn't want to. I don't like leaving. Losing. Departures that are chosen; especially the ones I have to choose. But sometimes that's all that's left. 

She said she didn't understand, which made it all make sense. She said it wasn't about me; I knew as much. I could read her like I read myself. I closed my eyes and slipped myself into that beautiful, chaotic mind of hers on a wisp of cherry blossom and basked for a moment--one last moment--in the glow that she always became. 

When I opened my eyes, and looked at her again, hers were closed. I don't know if she saw what I was doing in there. Rummaging in some memories, finding my little space there. I left a little ivory box on a table in a room in her world and maybe she would find it some day when she thought of me. Maybe she would open it. Maybe she would just tuck it away and never want the truth. 

But before she opened her eyes again, I was gone. The scent of me was all I left behind; sweet jasmine and honeysuckle. 

It was freedom she needed. And freedom I gave willingly. I may never see her again, and I have to be okay with that. 

I feel no anger. 

I feel peace. 

The Go-Away Girl

It's what she called herself as she walked away from the group of boys that had just shown up. Mark had punched her in the jaw for effect this time, but it didn't bother her. Philbert was in from the service and was the meanest bastard she knew. He was a Marine, and at nine years old all that meant to her was "asshole". Every time he came home, the temperature of the neighborhood changed.

She climbed her tree as high as she could get, and felt the summer breeze sway her gently. She listened. The boys all played war games and Philbert told wonderful and horrific stories that those boys believed. She didn't. But that didn't matter. None of it did, really. This wasn't new.

She closed her eyes and made impossible wishes, just like she always did when she was told to go away. Not once was she asked to stay but she wasn't bitter. She just accepted it as life. Unhappiness never occurred to her, not even as she rubbed her jaw.

It would pass. Philbert would go away. The rest of the boys would go home and she would be a part again. It wasn't that she didn't fit in, or that she wasn't the toughest kid around, or that she could throw and hit a baseball farther than the rest, or that her hair was just as short. It's that she was a girl. And she turned that hatred inwards, at her gender.

She could cut her hair, she could wear her bother's hand-me-downs, and would never correct anyone who called her a boy, or son. Sonny. It felt good. Like she belonged somewhere. But she could never change what God gave her.

Regardless, the boys were her best friends. Singly and sometimes in groups, but there were always hidden places she was never allowed. Not ever. Go away, girl. Boy stuff happening.

Understanding and acceptance would come much later (long after her body betrayed her and did what girls' bodies do), but in that tree with a sore jaw, she knew she had to wait til it was safe to come back again. Eddie would come looking for her, and they'd dig in the dirt and have rock fights, and play cars and blow up Barbie dolls with firecrackers again. Eddie was her favorite; he knew when to defend her and when to back off. And that nothing would buy him a rain of her fists like protecting her.

Besides, she knew when it was time to go away.

Lockdown

It's where she goes when the world gets to be too much. When too much outside gets in, stretching tendrils around her insides, squeezing until the slow burn rises in her chest and in her throat.

She shuts them all down and out, closes open doors so she can sort the wheat from chaff. Self from Other. She grants menial tidings--now and again. A promise that the distance will close again. Eventually. When the grip loosens and she can draw a breath...any breath at all beyond the shallow pant of survival.

She feels the searching. Reaching. Seeking. But she coats herself in an oily cocoon that lets them slip past; faint wonder where she went rather than confusion as to why she's gone.

Eventually they will learn.

They have to.

Some pieces are meant to remain in the darkness, where she hides in this lockdown place. Pieces that broke off long ago, edges worn by time and nervous caresses of fumbling fingers...and eventually care. Love, even because darkness grants contrast, shade and shadow. The greys, where all the interesting stuff lives.

She flirts with that grey. Walking the razors edge, balancing the Darkness and the Light. Hips swaying gently side to side as she moves in sensual rhythms, never so far she falls. But close. So close. Sometimes too close.

And just before the fall.

She locks herself inside again.

Stay the Night

Hold on as tight as you can. Enjoy my taste and scent. Wonder if this is real and dance that line between. Feel the moments as though they are true; me reaching so deep you wonder if that heat beside you is mine.

I whisper the promises you hold in your heart and they feel so real in your chest, that I can distort your reality; make you create love where there once was none. Make hate where there was love. Ambiguity, my enemy.

Then.

Sit up in a halo of morning. Wonder. Feel what I leave behind; heat on your face, weight on your chest, those promises that taste like the sweet nectar of a lover's kiss.

But I am gone. Air once silver burned away with sunlight and those empty promises I will never keep. Soon enough you will forget me, like a fist loses water.

I am, after all, just a dream.

Where The Secrets Live

The grid of streets was laid out like a vast net that trapped the city between shades of watery gray; the ever-raining sky, cement and pavement. Pinned all it touched to the ground, cutting deep into the undulations of hills, severing everything in its path. Chopping all the wilderness into tidy squares and rectangles to be covered with more gray 'til it disappeared into the gray above.

Sometimes the sun would shine, cast shadows that seemed to have a life of their own as they marked time. Moving, ever moving as the sun traced a golden arc across a jewel-toned sky, and on those days the earth showed off her emeralds. Children played chase with those shadows. But those days were few and far between.

Mostly, it was a heavy, oppressive gray that weighed on the shoulders of those who ventured out. Sluggish feet and stilled thoughts. When he looked out his windows, walked along that grid, it was all he saw. Laden minds, shoulders slumped to the weather, rivers rushing down streets, washing away all the colors of the place.

But he never went beyond. Beyond the restrictive net of the city, beyond the crown of hills where the colors hid themselves under layers of legends and lore. Deep into the hollows, where water spent centuries carving its way to the sea, beginning with the glaciers, and continuing through the footprints of man. The valleys filled with ghosts and goblins that captured the imagination, played with the heart and touched the soul. It wasn't his fault that he didn't know this place like she did.

She wished he had. She wished he had run away with her into those secret places with her, laughing in sunlight, filling lungs with the sweetness of spring. Watching a sun set over the crest of an autumn-smeared horizon from atop one of her hills. Refilling his palette with a whole new spectrum of what that place could be. The hollows where creativity lived. Thrived. She'd have taken his hand, soft in hers, and led him through the whispers of leaves, and secrets that the rocks kept; the kinds of secrets the soul longs to hear. She'd have stood forehead to forehead, eyes closed to teach him how to listen. How to see with his ears. To reach out while his hands remained still. To let it all in and to learn how to feel with his soul.

Instead, she sat quietly on her hill, watched the sun set, and whispered her secrets to the wind, and let him go. Because he had to. Because she had to. Because a closed fist holds no sunlight.

Muses for Coffee

Meet me for coffee. That tiny place up the street with that welcoming fireplace, and the soft, incandescent lights. I'll sit at a table for two, make sure there's room for just me. I'll be reading Camus when you get there, for no other reason than it seems like the right flavor at the time. My coffee will be black, because Camus always makes me think of thick, black coffee and the way it grabs hold of the senses. Immersion in a world just this side of a dream.

You will sit somewhere I can almost see you. But not quite. Another table across the room, but not too far. You'll have to pass me to get there. So close. I'll catch your scent, and smile; musk and mystery. I will keep reading; letting my eyes pass along the words, really just caressing the page as my attention is caught up in the essence of you, just beyond my senses.

Stolen glances, maybe a smile. But that is all. No words to tame silence, no awkward pauses that need to be relieved by anything but my fingertips, dancing on keys. Later. Much later after my coffee is gone and my ruse of reading done. After I've filled those gaps, that silence, that place with conversations we never had, words we never exchanged.

You will leave first. Because you have to. Because I won't. Because I can't. Because I'm holding my breath behind that book so I don't. So I don't. So I don't. Wreck the perfection that is this dream. That is this muse. That is this soul I can't and won't catch, but will only see once before you are gone to me forever. Out of reach. Blessedly out of reach, standing on a beach somewhere far away.

Maybe someday a breeze will catch you just right, and you'll think of me. But I'm not the important one. I am not the muse. You are. And you are perfect.

So I don't.