Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere

It’s all comfort.

Intrinsic to my nature is food. My earliest memories are tied up in the recipes my mother would make, for others, never us. Ambrosia, with the tiny sweet oranges and marshmallows, poppy seed cake, with it’s secret recipe memorized, committed to my mother’s brain cells like an accident, and trapped there when she died.

We, her lowly family, only ever got to eat the burned ones. Only the newly married, families with brand new babies, the invalid ever tasted the lovely cakes, soft white on the inside, dusky brown on the crusted bundt.

My mother is the only person who ever caused me to eat liver. Coated in flour, fried in grease and onions, I would inhale it while friends gagged and choked at the table, toying with their potatoes.

In my memory, she is scent. She is the sweetness of spring in a box of cereal, the plastic of the toy, the cream in a popsicle. She is the heavy weight of stew on a wet winter night, feet cold from the walk home.

Each bite to my mouth-the comfort, it’s not the food. It’s not the taste. It’s my mother, the holy ghost itself, devoured.

***

I have only recently begun to distinguish between eating because I’m actually starving (like today, when my quest for protein ended in my scarfing a Lunchable) and me eating my feelings (like when I blindly grab chips because I’m bored). Coupled with a sudden surge in my movements, I can feel the slimming begin.

It’s not just about my weight.

It’s about giving up my mother. Or rather, giving up the links to her that keep me weighted, the ones that ties me to memory, and make it difficult, if not impossible to move past. It’s about giving up that false hope that tells me someday I will turn a corner and like a ghost made flesh she will be standing, grateful and fawning, waiting for me.

She isn’t though. She never was. All she’s left me is the negligible purpose that my life clings to, and an aching hole I can either line the sides of, or solemnly fill with time and love, and walk over.

***

I like radishes. New to me, I grab a dirty handful at the market, all red and glowing like new moons. Washed, I chop them into sections and enjoy their subtle fire, like a secret on my tongue, whispers only for me. No one else wants to eat them, ever.

I eat cherries now too. I refuse to let the memory of a dirty old man keep me from them. I inhale a bowl at a mad hatter’s house, surprising myself with how free and open my arms have suddenly become.

Memory it seems, has a shelf life after all.

“In the nightmare of the dark – All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate”

I toss and turn and toss some more. I feel my eyes pried open ala Clockwork Orange and I stare at the musty shadows dancing on the ceiling, the moonlight sparse, the odd reflection from a passing car. A dog barks, kids giggle past the house, timeless. I refuse to turn the clock so I don't realize just how slowly the night is going.

To sleep, perchance to die within.

For years I dreamed in blood. I dreamed in death, in fear. Angry, frightening men, huge men would chase me from building to room to basement, my life on their fingertips, my name on their lips, my pain wrapped in their desire. I could do nothing more than run, frantic, my own fingers trembling on a trigger I could never aim and pull, my legs pumping and straining to disappear away from them. I would hide, feel my lungs labor, and my body scream for release and shortly before waking, he would loom large and I would bellow and rouse myself from my slumber.

For years, fear chased me at night, growing worse and more painful as time went on. With children came awful dreams of watching their death, pictures that I can never erase from my mind, the helplessness which I could taste once I woke, the sheer terror of not being able to stop it.

Wound me. I can take it. I've taken worse. But my children? My small people, my incidental tourists in this life-even in dream, I cannot harbor their pain.

Some nights I stay awake, trying to chase down these dreams, keep them at bay before they begin. I'm blessed with fewer and fewer as I age, my brain wiping itself clean, fixing connections, finding peace. But there are days when I can feel it coming, when there's a shadow behind the wall I can barely smell, when I hear his footsteps following me, his hands on the shoulders of my daughters….and I stare into the stucco void to stun him into insensibility.

I know why he followed me for so long. I know my fears have been swallowed by the snake which is age, which is growth and settling and finding my own two feet on this precarious orb. I know I've made him smaller, weaker, and never again will he shoot me with my own gun, standing over me with a grin as he slowly squeezes the trigger as he grows harder. I know my guns are larger, my voice is louder and I can run faster than ever before.

But that he exists at all….that keeps me staring.

“If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it”

I flip through my facebook pictures, the comments. Memory staggers by, sometimes clear, other times faded and foggy. Sighs in the past, senses I can almost touch, dancing just outside of my reach.

Everyone has a piece of a puzzle I can hardly remember.

When I look back in my life, in 30 some odd crumbling, magical years, I remember what I can, and in some cases, what I want. Some memories lost, some delayed, some detoured and confused.

In memory of my actions, in memory of my inabilities, i find myself questioning my goodness, my worthiness.

Often.

***

An old friend drunkenly online tells me I was formative, I was meaningful, that I mattered.

Did I? Do I? Have I? When my bones break down and one of you throws me to the memory of trade winds and agony, will there be anything more left in the world than I started it with? Children sure, but will their legacy matter? Will they conquer or destroy? Or will they just be, as so many of us have, the magic possibility of childhood distilled down to the quiet realization that we are all just us, and no more?

Will I matter? Have I mattered?

Will any of us?

I wonder why I think it remains, this urge at immortality, this need to have affected someone, somewhere, to have nudged the fates in directions they weren't otherwise given. Why the drive for remembrance, when even I sometimes forget where I've been?

Why do I need to know?

***

I will last. I will be forever, for awhile. My mother lives through me, in sparse stories I can hardly remember, the womb which bore me manifests in my eyebrows and the cheekbones my daughters carry. My body will break apart and become others, flowers, thunderstorms, tears.

But I won't be. And suddenly, that matters.

Brass

The air is musky and golden.

I peddle into the shining brass of evening, my feet pumping, my legs straining their new muscles against the cold metal of my bike, shimmering against the crossbar. Mud has dried in places against my calves, pieces of greenery flailing against the wind I have generated.

Against my skin, my growling aging self the air leaves a trail, the last of a late summer day, the warmth simmered to a dull glimmer against me. I pull my bike to a stop behind the old RCA building, and just stop.

There is nothing but the breeze in my ears, the sigh of trees heavy with sun and rain, the sleepy cries of robins, the settling of a day. I fall completely into myself, present in this second. The world incandescent.

Right then, in that smoldering light, everything made every bit of sense. The planet shifted and stood, ever so briefly, a little bit straighter, a little more fair.

Until the sun collapsed into tomorrow, and I set my feet back to pedals.

Today I am blogsitting…

and I am HERE today, with yet another uplifting post about my childhood, naked.

Hope is the dream of a soul awake.

I spend the weekend laughing from my belly, and wonder what the phantom is that lurks at the side of my eyes. I feel buoyant and translucent, words aflutter.  sniff at the air, curious, shading myself with my heavy hands as I stare into the sun.

Such random forgotten feelings fill my chest that I find myself stunted, without words by the moment. I remember to breathe, and as I do, like dust I’d sweep from a shelf, I find the title.

Hope.

If you were wondering, it tastes rather like sun ripe berries and wine, blessed.

***

Watching an old episode of Six Feet Under, (the one show that will make me weepy and introspective regardless of anything else), it strikes me that once, years back, I consciously made a decision to guard my heart, to batten the hatches, and stop hoping. For good. For change. For love or affection or beauty. I stopped considering myself worthy of goodness and joy. I stopped believing it possible in my world, it instead vacant and stuffed with the gray monotony of life without edges.

I just stopped believing. In many things, but least of all, my own capacity and worth.

Then lo, these past few months, like that slow cypher of a butterfly crysalis I’ll someday soon have morphing up my leg, I’ve listened in awe to my own heart sunning itself, allowed myself to be open to possibility and wonder again, to laughter, to the sheer blindness of happiness. The moment where you stop and realize all you can feel is the broad grin across your face.

And then, you feel it like a terrible rumble, this hope, this gorgeous thing of paths and roads and turns that stretch before you into some sort of immortal sunset, and you realize

I have so very much to do.

***

It’s not more green this year. The flowers, they aren’t more beautiful, my skin isn’t that much softer, my eyes not more golden.

It’s the lightness of my soul that lifts it all up, the dream, the twinkle. The sweetness I recognize from years ago, finally swimming it’s way back to me, gluing back together what was broken so very long ago.

Hope does float.

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.

She tells me she’s moving.

I ask why, brightly, curious. “This a good move? A happy move?”

She pauses, one of those pregnant ones that make me mentally scurry into a corner in preparation. You never know what might come at you, abuse or death or sadness or just plain old nothing.

“Well. It’s kinda both.” And from her mouth it all tumbles. “Well, my daughter died of cancer years ago and left my grandson (he was only 8, he’s 14 now, nearly) and his father has a new job and travels and he needs me, he really really needs me and I’ve been back and forth so much and I decided well…he asked me, Nana, why don’t you stay? and he needs me. He really needs me.”

I felt the tears rolling down my cheeks before I realized I was crying, as I stumbled around my tongue the “I’m sorry” that couldn’t possibly convey the depth of my apology, the volume of my understanding as those terrible years flickered past in my mind, my father diving into work, then drink, cold for self preservation, the loneliness in a house of broken people, the itching wound that grief becomes.

“I’m crying. ” I told her. “I’m so sorry…I lost my Mom young, I know I know…how amazing you are to be there for him.”

And then she broke, and the shuddering horror of her loss, of seeing the eyes of her lost daughter in her lost grandson, of being helpless before the frivolity and randomness of life, and the sobs escaped and I could feel the coldness in her own space, enveloping and rigid, protective.

“How he does need you.” I echoed, wanting to make it better, wanting to tell her she would make it better for him, being there, filling that sinkhole of a heart with something more than a gravesite and dead flowers. Trying to convey she would make him whole again.

I placed her on hold. She disconnected, off again into the ether.

***

I think I’m over it. I think, “1989, that’s FOREVER ago and I’m not a kid anymore and it doesn’t hurt, not really.” and then I speak with someone and the pain is brushed with steel wool and opened, a reminder, a visceral emotion bleeding. I can feel it again, that 11 year old girlwoman who stood next to a corpse and said “I love you.” The girl in her room, heaving at the idea of losing her other parent, of being totally, irrevocably alone in the world, and the walls she brought up around her tattered heart.

It will never be over. I will always feel a stab and a twitch where she was, that spot my mother occupied. I will always feel that fresh hell when someone else tells my story in their words, their life. It will always return, even when I’m on my own death bed, sated with life and content to leave be. She will still be gone, torn too quickly.

And I still won’t have the words, even then.

9pm, sunset pink

Spun, gentle as sugar on

this cone you hold between fingers like

daggers, this sky sits.

As the first breath of any newborn squalling

must color it is alight

glowing.

I can taste the hover on my lips

the dance of honey a touch

of lavender on the wind to calm. Soothe.

Deceive in wisdom and perhaps

baths in a radiance we can’t

replace with words.

If laughter became gumdrops. If

tears became the endless, aching blue.

If the air grew wings and nested

restlessly, upon my silvered tongue.

Then I could make it seen, this glory this

rapture in ourselves.

This place we call home.

“Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that is where I renew my springs that never dry up.”

I am free.

Squinting, I can make out the road of my life, bending and turning here and there. Ruts in the road in places, some where the sides fall off and you’d slip off into the nothing if you weren’t careful. Some flat stretches of road, the ones you coast on with your arms in the air on a warm August night, with nothing on your skin but the buffer of the wind and the goosebumps you feel rising up your back.

I have ridden it, I have been made nauseous by the steep climb and abrupt falls. I have marveled at the glory which stood beside me, the new lives, the smiling hearts. I have stood motionless as the world fell before me, waiting. All I had to do was reach out and pick it up.

This road was mine once, with it’s chaos and it’s absolution. I left a child there, a girl, a near woman, parked near a tree with low hanging branches, heavy with fruit.

I have found a corner.

***

I was riding the bus home tonight, my forehead leaning slightly on the window as I stared at the setting sun. It lit the clouds until I could imagine they were bands of silver reaching in supplication to a dying sun, penance paid. They glowed around the edges, diamond saws. I smiled to myself, wondering if anyone else was watching the ordinary magic play out before them.

I feel both ordinary and magical.

I was broken, and yet now, can barely remember how it felt. The aches and agony of a few years past have faded, and I smile again. I laugh once more. I laugh because it feels good, and right. My dreams are coming back-and not the terrifying dreams of death as they’ve always been, but pedestrian ones, the ones you maybe should have, where you fly, instead of someone chasing you around a skyscraper with a gun in their hand, bullets painted with your name.

I realize then, what I have wasted. How much of me I have wasted, how much time has slipped past me while I was busy contemplating  my ache. And I realize how much sweeter the day tastes when you grace it with a smile, a laugh and a shrug, content to race the morning.

***

I feel radiant. I feel centered and whole and hopeful. I growl at the walls in my bathroom and shake my fist in warning. I start heaving doors from hinges, leaving the sander close to terrify the wood into submission. I buy curtains for what may certainly be the first time in my life. I write lists and make plans and think of all the wonderful things I’ve yet to do, and can do, if I will it.

The radiance comes from the surety that I am truly whole now. The shy smirk-that comes from having to lose almost everything to find me.

Hot damn it’s good to be back.

“The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it”

The sun sets behind me like candy floss, pulled like so much nothingness by a child across the sky. I pause to watch the leaves waver in the air, the sheets of grass softly wave, a tiny bird dart across the trail ahead of me, the dull red of it’s feathers faintly visible until they’re not.

I find perfect purple flowers, a cluster of fantasy on the edge of the gravel, and steal a bunch, twirling in my fingers as I walk along, eyes wide, skin damp and alive. I slow to a stop, the light like gold through my hair, those shining moments late in the day which fill my heart.

It hits me then, how long it’s been since I’ve felt joy, and how sorely I have missed giving myself permission to do so.

The flowers are lovely. But the smile, it stays longer.

***

I could blame any number of things. The weather, my mother dying, the things people have done to me, the things I’ve done to them, genetics, Fuck, I could blame chaos theory if I wanted really. If I wanted something to blame. I could blame falling in love too young with the wrong person, or falling out of love.

But I don’t. Oddly, I find myself feeling newly washed and free of it all, released from the expectation that I would be a helpless mess, or I would fall apart. How grueling the memories we imprint ourselves with, the needs and wishes we fulfill even as we rail against them, even if we nearly destroy ourselves in the process.

It’s like being born, or how I imagine it would feel, the new world opened to my eyes, the sense of self returning, the laugh in my belly, like fire and willing. A sense of adventure, of humour, of pleasure, returning like the blood rushing to your feet after you’ve sat far too long, waiting.

Returning.  Or becoming. Either way, as days pass, and I recall how easily I once felt happiness, joy and love, and I grow farther from that place which threatened, I walk taller, and I smile easier. I am easier.

***

How? I find myself asking. How did I ever survive with so little wonder?

Toy Review-Juli Ashton’s Pink Pocket Rocket

The following is a review of Juli Ashton’s Pink Pocket Rocket, courtesy of Eden Fantasys. As per usual, for the sake of the sanity of the people who know and claim to like me in real life, I offer this escape valve if you wish to run away-just make sure you aren’t eating as you read, as I cannot guarantee that there won’t be choking.  (Take that for what you will.)

Slivers

I meet someone and he makes me smile but he doesn’t make me laugh, not the way you used to, when the laugh would burble up from my toes and break across me like spun candy glass.

I meet someone else and they almost get it, the joke that plays around my lips but then I notice, they don’t, not really, and they don’t catch my eye to smirk and maybe chuckle a little.

Their hand down my back catches the soft spot at the bottom of my neck, but forgets that little place behind my ears.

Goddammit, they aren’t you. But, neither are you, anymore. And I just don’t know how to grieve a ghost that was, but isn’t.

***

My SIL, or ex-SIL or whatever the hell I call her now was married today. I’ve never met the man, but in their pictures they look delirious with each other, blessed with that commonality that is love, stars in the eyes, a future paved before them. I envy them this, I envy her this thing I could never quite have with her brother-a future, a tomorrow. There were never plans, and that I’ve come to realize, is what I truly wanted. Goals, dreams, a blueprint for a future together. I may miss the 20 year old who could make me smile, or the 25 year old who clung so tightly to his daughter, but we never had this momentum, content somehow to just mosey along like a summer day in a canoe.

Until we weren’t. Until we both got itchy for something different, for a tomorrow we wouldn’t see together.

I want to stop wishing it was different. I want to stop wishing I could go back and change who I was, who we were. I need the answers to stop appearing now, all the ways I could have changed, all the things we could have stopped 10 years ago, 5, 2 even.

It’s over, and I don’t see that changing, no matter what happens. Time, combed over like ashes on a dying fire, can’t be brought back.

***

Somedays the sweetness of my memories sustains me, remembering that once we were golden, and did indeed love each other fiercely. Other times, like tonight, when all I can do is remember his voice in my ear, or his arms around me as I drifted off to sleep, I want to erase it all.

It would be less like slivers in my heart.

Skies

Today, last year, was the first set of fireworks my girls ever sat through. We took the long way to get to a nearby hill, close to home, good view, less chaos. As a family we walked, the girls chattering along, their father and I commenting on the homes we walked past.

Such a nice night it was, in my memory.

The mosquitos ate us alive, Vivian squealed with one of her friends as Ros ran circles around them, and their eyes opened like saucers when the colors and the sounds rang across the sky. Such pure bliss on their faces I thought I’d cry.

Tonight, I block the sounds out with Crystal Castles, toss my memories into a bag I’ll leave at the curb later, and sob silently to myself.

I know it will be better. I know I should have forced myself out the door with friends, surrounded myself with strangers, created newness. But I couldn’t pull myself away from here today, couldn’t trust myself. I know that someday, this will be memory, that I will no longer stumble across boxes full of things saved from our first years together, things with meaning kept like secrets hidden away.

But it’s not someday just yet, and my heart hurts tonight. I expected so many more nice nights under Technicolor skies.