first condition for equilibrium

I always wonder if the nattering got to my mother.

Perhaps I wasn’t as persistant…or loud, or whiny however I doubt that. Alone, singular and by default quieter. But there were days when her eyes rolled back until she could see her own ass and she thought “dear lord, if this child does not remove herself from my sight I will send.her.back with postage and chips.”

She thought that, right? This woman who wanted me, desperately, or if not desperate, at least enough to wait 7 years for the phone call to come, for the news that another babe in wool, a girl was ready for her barrenness to rear.

I’ve always found it unfair that I of all people were given two daughters like a summer sunrise, while so many good people go without children, cast into a life of second best, of want and need so heavy it lingers in the air between them like dice thrown at craps. What have I done to deserve such beauty, such wonder? Was it a gift of surrender, the universe shrugging and saying “well bitch, maybe this time it’s ok?” Was it a lesson, wrapped in sadness and joy and absolute chaos that life is what links us, that new starts are what bring smiles to the faces of old men, broken long before we could think to salve it.

I do not deserve the security of continuance, do not possess the ego necessary to thrust my genes into the wilds. And yet here I sit, daughters of my womb snoring gently (or not so gently) in the room beneath this ragged wood floor. I, their mother, shaking her head in stark confusion.

To an action a reaction. A spark burns the forest to our heels. Love begets love which leads to hate and boredom. I meet a boy when I’m 15 and fall in lust/love and years later I bloom like a tulip, twice, and bring forth awe. Gravity. Centripetal force, unending, their center in my center, heart of their heart, the beating drum heard on a table and then, in a tiny chest fluttering like a bird in giant hands.

And then to natter, incessant, to tell me the laws of birds and men, the vague ties of rain and mettle. It would be horrible if I lost my voice she crowed.

Horrible, not my exact adjective. But a fluttering heartbeat in my teeth, a moment lost beneath the daily trudge, a reward. A pause. A denial, life thrown into the darkness, hostile baring teeth.

Impelled toward a center, circling.

***

Mid afternoon this time of year, the light turns hollow and brittle, a clear yellow which breathes melancholy and memory. It falls through the yellow and blood-red leaves, dapples my eyes with her face, my mother at the kitchen sink, clearheaded in the late day sunlight.

I am at her feet, humming a toy car along the carpet lines, and feel her gaze upon my head like a benediction every few minutes. Around and above me the adult world, the secret monotonies in the cupboards, the sharps and dips she stood before, brave.

She glows in the light, then, and now, time a shutter, and I the center.

She smiles, I grin.

Not the center. The starting point after all.

“Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”

They page through Christmas toy catalogs, eyes bright and wanting, yelping I want this Mummy and Maybe I could get this? Can I have this?

I snap at them to stop with the asking. I cannot hear it anymore.

I haven’t the money. I fret about Christmas, wondering about points and freebies, hoarding small things in the closet, warning that this year won’t be as rich as I’m told about how their father has made promises of this and that. I’m sure it’s nothing more than the vague whispers I give them sometimes, but it hurts all the same.

I know that things won’t bring them happiness, that it’s all just stuff and they are no less for not having it. But I stifle tears each time I feel the knife dig into my chest with the ask.

I cannot provide.

***

Growing up in a household where my mother stayed home, where one meagre income supported four of us, I did not lack. There was love where money stopped, and things weren’t horribly missed. But I remember that sense of want, the swallowing of the question since you knew somethings would just never ever happen.

I never wanted this for my children. I never wanted them to know they couldn’t have something because I could not give it to them. I should be able to give them anything, or at the very least more than I had.

I could not give them a family. And now, I cannot even give them things and somedays, it feels like my love is the impossible goal even, wrung out and tired of them as I am. I cannot provide to them on any level, and the chorus of wants for Lego is slowly, irrevocably, eating my heart to ribbons.

I am their mother. I shall provide. Yet the basket is empty, only full with the tears I shed in anger for my shortfalls.

***

It’s the accusation from a 7 year old, the eyes that tell me “you’re failing” when we walk past decorated houses and petulantly I’m asked “Why are we the only house without decorations” and despite reminding her the decorated homes are the anomoly, I still feel raw and frigid inside, incapable, lessened.

We scrape hand to mouth. We buy secondhand things, we use others until they fall to pieces, all things of which I am proud. And yet when she stares at me with sad eyes because all she ever hears is no, I lose sight and have another vision of poorer us, a trap I cannot escape from or evade.

And I just don’t know what to do anymore.

A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

Left arm, upper. That fleshy bit just underneath the tattoo of a cicada, memory from a faint sweaty September.

If you pay attention, if you look hard enough, there's faint lines, the pathway of a year of chaos, of discovery, of change. Of being 17.

Anyone who has never cut will never understand the release it brings. I never did it after that day, scared perhaps by the flighty pleasure it brought me, or maybe the indelible mark it left on me, on my body, rapt. You should have seen me then, fishnets, black dress so short I blush to think of it, clinging to a body I either never had, or I had in disbelief. My rough black boots, tight against the callouses that replaced the blisters I had walked through. Hard cropped black hair against my head.

Twas all about the black that year, if I remember correctly. A year to shed, to mourn, to release. It was so entirely predictable-girl loses mother. Girl gets on a bus and run away. It felt like running away, boarding a bus to somewhere, knowing that somehow, life would detour and you'd find someone standing in your sun outside a northern town as you waited for the next part of the route.

And it did, and months later, I found myself dancing around the cluttered room I rented with a friend's parents, listening to black metal and slicing my arm in tiny slivers. The blood would bead around the blade as I pressed it further in, until I could feel entirely that little pop, the moment of exposure, and I could feel again.

If you had asked me then I would have told you I scarred myself purposefully, leaving a lasting reminder of where I had been, of a moment in time, the chipped white paint on a tall dresser, the small closet my life was crammed into, the stash of hash on the windowsill next to Bob the spider plant. I would have said it was a legacy, a time capsule.

Maybe it was. Maybe it was a release, the slow leak of ache.

Or could be, I was 17, and high, and just slicing open my skin because I could.

***

It's almost gone, this scar, blending in finely with the ruddiness of my skin, the tan left fading from a scorched summer. You'd have to squint to see it.

The past in a rear view, receding.

The Break Up

I do believe I broke up with a friend tonight.

Let me preface this by saying I don’t do friends well. I really never have. Maybe it’s a touch of something wrong with my brain, maybe I’ve just got a short where my heart should be, maybe I really am a fucking cunt. I don’t quite know. All I know is that those hallmark-esqe loving relationships some women seem to have? I never have them.

I don’t much care too either.

I mean, there’s the occasional wonder about what the big deal is, and what I might be missing, but it all just seems like a lot of fucking work. Hurt feelings. Careful balancing of time for them versus time for other people. Lying-lying about how good that dress looks, if that purse is worth the 500.00 or if the recent boyfriend is good looking.

Sweet hell, it tires me out just thinking about it.

I don’t as a rule make friends with women, because I will inevitably disappoint them. I don’t remember birthdays. I cancel plans. I answer honestly if asked what I think of those shoes. I am an asshole.

But, in a moment of weakness, I made a friend last year. A friend I would hang out with fairly frequently, who was there for me and who I was there for, all that good stuff I suppose. I kept my mouth shut as I watched her basically chase her boyfriend away with neediness. I pushed myself to go out with her and her friends, despite my inability to socialize with anyone 25 or younger. I dealt with the weirdness.

But then, I fell in love.

I’m not good at balancing people. I’m not good at splitting my focus. I never have been-ask my oldest friend and she’ll roll her eyes and nod and bitch about how I’m just never consistent and she won’t hear from me for months.

I get…distracted.

And frankly, I’ve been fucking happy, feel like I’ve finally found a partner who meets me on equal ground, instead of me on theirs or them on mine. And I’m enamored and sparkly and fluttery and all those wonderful things, while at the same time stressed out about my mortgage and what to do with custody and figuring out what I truly truly want in my life. While working full time, and trying to have a little time for me.

I don’t have the fucking time or headspace to listen to someone without any responsibilities complain that they hate their life, while they do nothing to improve their life or lot. I don’t have the fucking time to explain, for the zillonth time that I don’t return calls cause I hate the phone, and that most of the time, it’s on silent and in another room and I don’t freaking even know someone called.

I don’t have the time to pretend anymore, because life has come to a roaring head, and most of all, I don’t have the time to pretend that I can’t tell that she hopes my relationship fails, and is jealous and bitter or…SOMETHING about the entire thing.

I don’t have it in me to have a friend who can’t understand the following is all so very true:

Your best friend falls in love
and her brain turns to water.
You can watch her lips move,
making the customary sounds,
but you can see they’re merely
words, flimsy as bubbles rising
from some golden sea where she
swims sleek and exotic as a mermaid.

It’s always like that.
You stop for lunch in a crowded
restaurant and the waitress floats
toward you. You can tell she doesn’t care
whether you have the baked or french-fried
and you wonder if your voice comes
in bubbles too.

It’s not women either. Or love
for that matter. The old man
across from you on the bus holds
a young child on his knee; he is singing
to her and his voice is a small boy
turning somersaults in the green
country of his blood.
It’s only when the driver calls his stop
that he emerges into this puzzle
of brick and tiny hedges. Only then
you notice his shaking hands, his need
of the child to guide him home.

All over the city
you move in your own seasons
through the seasons of others: old women faces
clawed by weather you can’t feel
clack dry tongues at passersby
while adolescente seethe
in their glassy atmospheres of anger.

In parks, the children
are alien life-forms, rooted
in the galaxies they’re grown through
to get here. Their games weave
the interface and their laughter
tickles that part of your brain where smells
are hidden and the nuzzling textures of things.

It’s a wonder that anything gets done
at all: a mechanic flails
at the muffler of your car
through whatever storm he’s trapped inside
and the mailman stares at numbers
from the haze of a distant summer.

Yet somehow letters arrive and buses
remember their routes. Banks balance.
Mangoes ripen on the supermarket shelves.
Everyone manages. You gulp the thin air
of this planet as if it were the only
one you knew. Even the earth you’re
standing on seems solid enough.
It’s always the chance word, unthinking
gesture that unlocks the face before you.
Reveals intricate countries
deep within the eyes. The hidden
lives, like sudden miracles,
that breathe there.

(Common Magic-Bronwen Wallace)

***

Emails were exchanged, and as usual, I am the asshole. Because I don’t try. Because I’m “basically dumping her for a guy”-because, I don’t know. Because I have said “this is who I am, and is who I have always been. Maybe I changed for a little bit, but I can only pretend for so long. This is me.”

I can accept that I’m an asshole. But then, I don’t get bloody excited when people in my life get distracted and fall off the earth for a little while either.

Someday, I question my vagina I really do.

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.

I’m deeply dreaming about my brick house, it’s mortar and mortals, and I’ve dug up the floor, through layers of wood and laminate, carpets and come upon a door. Battered, sealed with boards against the opening we tear through it, he and I, this new love, our hands firm and strong against the pine and rusted nails until we dislodge the blockage and walk within.

A new basement to an old place, full with, of all things, lingerie and washing machines, the kind you find in dingy laundromats, shit brown and begging for quarters. We wander through, the walls shabby and unfinished, bare wood, the floors gleaming so i can nearly see myself, the light bright yet unkind.

I hold him near as I turn in amazement at the crannies I have never seen, the newness that envelops me in a haze of brilliant light, the kind which wakes you early on a September morning, clean.

***

There’s something to be said to feeling like your life is a new book you just opened. Or rather, feeling like your life is an old book you get to start all over with.

***

Quiet. In some places, you can try and imagine what it must have been like so many years ago, before all the this.

The sky gets so big you feel like it might just swallow you up, the air carries cedar, pine, birch to you, and if you’re lucky, the geese take a chorus up before you as your muscles relax into movements oddly familiar. The silence teems and try as you might, you wonder when the last time it was that you felt this completely sure of yourself, and your place within everything.

A new door. A highway to a new world, one which stood right next to the old one, scratching it’s head and asking, puzzled, what you were waiting for.

What are you waiting for?