To Lube, Or Not to Lube-Review

Yet again, we’ve arrived at one of “those” posts. Here lies your escape valve.

For those of you along for the ride, we’re gonna talk about lube today. Yay!

“A happy family is but an earlier heaven.”

The night is damp outside the windows of the car, all blurred forest and road, the sparseness of a highway on Christmas Eve. The hush.

Past small town I see the warmed houses, their lights, the trees, the tucked in beds and waiting, the cursing parents, assembling, or peaceful around hot rum and love. The waiting, the held breath of the night before, the culmination of weeks of waiting and hoping, blessing. House after house we speed by, their jolly lights, the candy canes and sleighs, candles holding vigils.

I hold it in as long as I can, swallowing hard the lump that begins in my tummy and rises like bread to my mouth. I hold in the anger and the sadness that this year, my children were not with me, that never again would their parents pile presents under a tree lit together. I gulp down the helplessness of being unable to stop, or fix any of it, and the insane rage at losing what seemed so simple, and I took so much for granted, that sense of family, as false as I created it.

But I can’t hold it in forever, and after far too many monosyllabic answers to my love as he tries to draw me out, the tears rush away from me and I can’t keep it inside, not anymore. And I find myself wanting to screech my anger across the fields and laneways, wanting to pour my sadness into a vial and toss it from the car. I want to stop mourning what I never had to begin with, that peace, that togetherness.

Slowly, I accept my new normal, wipe my face as he pulls off the highway to hold me. Fantasy evaporates as reality chides me, reminds me that it won’t always feel so ruined, so broken off.  That what I imagine, and what is aren’t ever the same.

****

I spend Christmas with his family, and see what I’ve never seen before, a family who loves and cherishes each other, who acknowledge each other’s weaknesses and yet still just…exists together in a way I’ve never had. Even on the fringes I feel the warmth and love radiating from all of them, the silly joy in their faces and laughter.

And I know, clearly, that it exists, this love, a place where everything is ok, and someone waves from the window as you drive off.  A righting of a life, a glimpse into normal, what normal can be and should be. A confirmation that normal is something I can have, if I want it.

***

How we can ever live without love I’ll never fathom. But then, I didn’t notice I was thirsty for it until I started to drink it in.

“Youth is easily deceived, because it is quick to hope.”

Remember then, the days that were? the golden light, spilling from ears and mouths and lips you couldn’t reach to touch but dammit the vodka could and the spins, the world spun out from under your feet as you caught your breath on dew spit grass and laughed and laughed until the moon rose and everyone became quiet-

quiet because they knew the secret, that secret, this one.

It’s never forever.

that slip of a minute which sits coyly in your hands as you feel time skim past you, as the words tumble free of you, that tiny moment, the breeze on your back, the light that grows in your eyes when you look past each other, when “fuck” sneaks out and with a gasp you remember a future you haven’t lived

you’re 17. Your shoes hang loose over the river water, black like greasy coal, your hair streams in the wind and your cigarette pretends it’s not yours as the smoke whirls into the night. It all has meaning. It all means something.

We’re gonna do something. We’re gonna be someone. Just wait. You’ll see.

Exhale. Inhale. Quiet holds.

It’s never truth. It’s all truth.

2 blocks become forever underfoot, as tomorrow accelerates towards you, legs growing to adulthood, heart shrinking in fear and anger, apathy closing. Decisions, thoughts, meaning.

You sit on her porch and wonder. You stare at the lights across the river and see yourself, lifetimes, with children, with no one, with cats, with treasure, in the heavens. All possible worlds, like fossils, stagnant against a step.

and again, you spin through a park, rictus like face as the drugs embrace, drill your veins with joy as a fire like sunrise covers your aching skin and you all swear that nothing, nothing, not one thing will ever be as beautiful as this moment, right now.

It’s a truth, finally.

You stumble home drunk on Earth and the coffee shop is still brown and your dreams are still smothered and you’re almost hungover but your heart screams….

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I’ve been writing about the end of the world for months now, in fits and starts, redo’s, edits, charts on the wall, memories I cannot grab in the air, a past unwritten.

I finally get the opening right, and I feel spent, worn already.

Her black boots against the pavement mark, the slow heave of her gait. One foot, left foot, this foot, right foot. Footfalls against the buildings, ratcheting between. Breath ragged, steady. Measured.

Crows cascade from the branches of a maple, her eyes follow as they scream across the grey sky. She sniffs at the air. Snow, soon. The leaves have turned to gold, nearly grey with cold.

“It’s October.” harsh, like nails, a voice unused. She looks to the crows circling. “October.”

It’s a fucking STORY. It’s not nuclear medicine, it’s not childbirth, it’s a story and a woman (one of three, three stories trying to be told in separate places) I cannot get out from under my fingernails and into the light. This is as close as her voice has come, as close as her stained hands can get to daylight, out from under my lungs and disappointment.

I think her name is Molly, but I’m not sure. Her other selves were too weak, too brash, too echoed. She will search for home, for love, for peace. She won’t know why, or how, but she will search.

If I can wash her from me.

***

I am so fucking clogged.

I can write the fiction. I know I can. But it gets stuck, or the clock shows 1am and I’m tired or there’s yet another question from a kid or a job to be done, laundry to fold, something to clean, and the simple pleasure of coloring in the world in my head? It doesn’t pay the bills or feed anyone and so Molly gets crammed into the back to wait. When the time comes, when I have 5 minutes to dash together, or an hour, she pouts like a fucker in the corner and refuses to talk to me, to tell me why she needs to travel across country to find her likely dead, or why she’d only wear heavy leather boots and refuse to cut her hair despite lice and filth. She won’t talk to me, like a petulant child, all wiry, flashing eyes and a bit of pudge which won’t last forever, not if she needs to walk and survive.

She will not move.

She has a daughter, and a lover, gone, a silvery whisper in air grown clean again. She has a ring on a finger and marks on her belly to prove they were, and a voice she can no longer sing with.

She will not speak.

Her hands will become calloused, her hand formed to the knives she will find she needs to carry. Her heart will grow over, five times, covered in moss and stone.

She will not let me be.

She will not leave me.

****

How do you then, writers? How do you find these people, in the silences of minutes, in a world of so much noise-how do you give them space? I find myself breathing her in all day and when I sit to let her loose, I cannot shake her from me.

How?