“Why are we scared to die? Do any of us remember being scared when we were born?”

Fear is a funny thing. We run from the idea of it, hiding behind pretense, lies. We sit sedately in our armchairs, in our pods, cornered by inertia. We surround ourselves with things, stuff, blinkers and tweeters, invisible things, words on screens, whispers across airwaves. We pretend at fear.

We manufacture horrors. Drama. If we should breastfeed. If the kids should walk to school. Epidurals.  Peanuts. Weed. Small terrors, things that once would have worried us in passing that now engulf us. Inside we become shrunken, slivers and shadows of who we should be. Of what we could be, wrapped up as we are in HFCS or local produce.

Who would we be, before? If we were explorers, or hunters, dancers or willful neglect in the air-who would we be? What would we have discovered before we lulled ourselves into half measures, drooling children of a forgetful world?

Who would we be?

***

This weekend, with some gentle prodding, and slightly too much information, my lover took me for my first motorcycle ride.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. I tried to pretend I wasn’t, but he looked in my eyes and softly said “You’re scared.” I was. I was freaking terrified. Heart in my throat freaking out, distracting myself with instructions and the necessary clothing. My fingers scrabbled against my palms and I became quiet. Unnaturally so.

But I swung my leg over the beast. I settled myself on the back of that bike, clutched at his back, and swallowed hard. Slapped down the visor and breathed again.

And we were off.

I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t nearly puke my ever loving guts inside that helmet. I’d be lying if I didn’t spend the short ride reminding myself to relax, that I was safe, that I trusted him and that he would never ever put me in danger. I’d be lying if I said my eyes were always open.

When he asked if I was ok, and I said I wasn’t, we returned home right then. No questions, just a straight line on a bike under his gentle hands, and my unsteady breathing. I climbed off the bike, wavering between wanting to be sick and wanting to cry, so great was my fear. And he was there, to tell me it was ok, that he was proud that I climbed up despite my fear, that I tried.

How I wanted to just sit and cry right then, from my fear, the emotion racing through my veins, the terror, the calm that it was, as expected, ok. How new, and unexpected, this physical fear, the gut jerk as it streamed through me.

I was fine in a bit, as I processed the input. But for a few minutes, maybe 20, I was quiet again, overwhelmed. I had faced my dragon. The dragon didn’t win, and somehow, I felt all the stronger for it.

***

He pushes me, this lover of mine.  Not only did I climb on back of his bike, but I sat in the driver’s seat of his 4WD truck and drove, however briefly. (I was fine until he pointed out not one, but TWO ditches. At that point the fear took over and I freaked out a bit. There may have been some girl screaming involved.)

The main thing here-a few years ago, just sitting in a car as a passenger made me want to cry and be sick all at once, anxiety from no where for no good reason. A few years ago, hell, this time last year, I wouldn’t have even contemplated driving anything. The fear held me like a dancing partner, cheek against mine, caressed me as I stood alone and unwilling, letting it lead.

But my hand on the gear shift told me better. Tightly gripping the wheel, or his back, either way, I had won. The fear didn’t own me anymore, even if I shrieked and refused to drive farther than 30 feet, even if I may have gibbered “get it off me! get it off me! when some strange catepillar landed on me in the woods.

I swallowed fear. And then I danced it outside.

***

Who would I be, if I hadn’t been so fucking scared for so many years?

***

He tells me to put my boots on, come outside, come see. I rouse myself from the fire he has stoked for me, and clomp out into the night. My gasp echoes across the fields and empty roads.

The dark sky, alight with thousands of someone else’s suns. The milky way, stretching like a cat. My eyes brim with grateful tears as awe and wonder fill me, and I reach for him.

There are no words to thank with, not for this. Not for beauty, not for strength. And so we stand staring into the past as it glows at us, and I murmur.

When we release our fear, when we stand open, all manner of things are possible.

there,

Last First Day

And we’re here.

I found myself staring at both of you this morning, as we brushed hair and washed cheeks. Over your heads I stared, eyes slightly damp, at the picture that has sat on the fridge since Rosalyn was a baby. In it, Vivian, you stare intently at 2 day old Rosalyn, curious like a dog, nose barely an inch away from Rosalyn’s red cheeks, her tightly wound reddened hands.

I remember that day. I remember it was too hot for the heavy sleeper we put you in Rosalyn, the cute one already packed away for nostalgia. I laid a homemade blanket on the kitchen floor as I gently laid you down, Vivian circling and wanting to see. Her sister. Sisters, the two of you.

Two of you. All grown up. Your hair it tangles, and weaves itself. Vivian you yell and curse and scream until I hand over the hairbrush, ever so insistent on doing it yourself. Much the same as you did at 2. You both let me tie your hair back today, feeling distinctly grown up and old as I wrap the hair tie around the thick hair. 4 brown eyes stare intently, my daughters, flesh of my flesh, and I feel a slight sigh flutter out of my belly.

It’s like I’ve escaped something, or exceeded a goal or just…crossed a line. Suddenly you both feel and seem so awfully grown up and old, that is until Rosalyn starts rattling on about Ren and Stimy or Vivian, you start telling me it’s ok to kill ants because no one likes them anyway. While you’re both silent, you seem ageless. Short, but simply without time. Yet then I feel so old, as minutes and hours march by me in your eyes, and I feel the wind change.

The wind carries your womanhood on it, your growth, the days ahead. Lunches, pencils broken, hearts and flowers. Futures.

But for now ladies, I’m good with both of you out of the house each day.

Thirtieth Day of the Eighth Month of your Fifth year

028

Originally uploaded by thordora

I gasp in recognition when I see her. I, adopted, always loved, always cherished but always….just slightly more alone for the blindness my providence brought me. I dreamed of seeing my own eyes reflected, my strong legs built from someone who was connected by blood and not will.

Cast out almost, surrounded on all sides by those with the security of knowing exactly where they came from. I spent hours gazing at myself in mirrors, dusty windows, puddles, waiting for wisdom and belonging.

And when I did see myself reflected, when my eyes were finally swallowed by the blood I had craved, there was a sating, a measure of quiet that overcame.

But nothing like staring into the eyes of my second born, and seeing myself, squared by the universe. Seeing my wide eyes, darker. taking after her father, but delicate and lovely. The steel behind them, my stubbornness, tangled in her own charm and wit. Nothing has been like catching her stride out of the side of my eyesight and seeing my own muscles bending and pulling, legs which could settle a nation and wrap a lover tight.

Nothing like hearing a laugh full of candy glass, and knowing it’s more like yours than you’ve ever known.

She’s 5 1/2, and I stop her movements in the setting sun and plead, stop Ros, please, let me catch you in the light like a dragonfly and she sighs and smiles politely, the forced smile I can never make real ever.

Two of us who should never play poker. Two of us, transparent for all of our masks and putty.

Inside a somber self cradles a book, and sighs satisfied.

The moon, she lies in wind you know.

The air is heavy and moist as I speed home, the lights glittering in the new night. I can smell the ocean, it’s shores stolen from me by kilometre, by time and tree. But I can feel it, sinking beside me, absorbed to my skin like so much velcro or kelp, floating.

It is all shifting, this life. These lives.

I walk in my door, stumble more like it, across a dark gravel and potty lawn, and up the steps to my old wood deck. I tangle with cats as I open the door, hear the silence of rest down the hall, my children safe dreamers in the corner room. The sea carries to them too, monsters, adventures, memories they’ve yet to birth. The lights glimmer against the ink sky as the moon sets, a dull orange candy widened, and a whisper is made, a promise I spoke aloud once, years before.

I do not recall it, not in words. But it had wings, and petals. Shone silver in the light of a wet road.

Fall comes. Fall opens her woolen coat, stretching her arms peaceful through it’s sleeves, readying herself. The twilight calm a penance she’s paid, a held moment before the pricking months descend. Her breath is dusty like a new lover, and mewing, only a thought on the wind yet.

Yet.

She grasps this moon, this snake which gnaws itself, the scent like ribbons on the breeze which captures my eyesight. She holds it still for us to gasp aware for, suddenly children again, suddenly wanting and misty with the echo in our lungs.

Her hands cradle my cheeks,  her fingers just the edge of chill, eyes the color of deep water and death. From her skin rises the earth and water scent of melancoly and unattended, a pale wounding in how she misses something she can no longer name.

A kiss she gives. Before the light moves off the milky world, off my daggered arms. A gentle nudge before she casts off, windless.

Her voice a memory, a mere falsehood in time.

I’m tired of talking to you.

I talk all day long for a living.

It’s not a permanent situation by any means. But it’s the one that (sorta) pays the bills and allows me to eat right now. And frankly, I’m pretty good at it when I want to be. Or rather, when people are douchebags.

I’m the person at the end of the phone when you want to call and bitch about your bill. I’m the person you whine to when you think you pay too much, even with a discount. I’m the person you curse at when, like a pouting 12 year old, you’re angry because you didn’t get your way.

I know that my mother always warned me about people, but they just really do NOT get it. You catch more flies with sugar than shit. Period. Sure, I’m supposed to be all friendly and professional, but when the words “YOU PEOPLE” are muttered with contempt 30 times in 5 minutes, how do you think I feel? When you say the words like something you stepped it, and make it clear that you think I’m an idiot before I’ve said a word, how helpful do you think I might be? How helpful would YOU be?

When you say the services suck. When you complain you pay too much, despite being a short term customer who already has the best possible “sale”. When you are unwilling to pay more, yet want everything, your entitlement oozing from your tongue. When the word “LIKE” crosses your lips more than you breathe, and you expect me to roll over like your mother does every.single.day.

These things annoy me, and will basically prevent me from doing anything more than the bare minimum.

I’m not an asshole. I don’t go out of my way to not be helpful. When someone calls in and is polite and mentions a tight budget and have been a good customer for 20 years, I will bend like a pretzel to help. When you call in after years of never paying on time, and demand to know why, after being cut off for not paying for months, you can’t have your TV-I will at the very least mute while I snigger.

Entitlement will get you no where. Mentioning how important you are will get you nowhere. Screaming at me and using profanity will only amuse me. Being a general, snide arsehole will make me twitchy and get you nowhere.

I’m inherently a nice person. I want to help. I want to fix your problem-you are paying for something after all.

But I want something from you as well. I want you to step back and remember that I am just like you. Maybe a little lazier so I’m stuck in a shit job. I want you to realize that on the other end of the phone is an actual person. I know it isn’t in vogue to keep this in mind, to remember that just like everyone else, I have a job to do, and rules to follow and that I like feeding my children, and will not compromise that ability just so you can watch a little porn for free.

I want you to think how you’d feel if someone spoke to your child the way I’ve been spoken to. I want you to think about how insane you’d get if someone talked to your wife like that.

I want you to realize that despite the fact that you look down your nose at me, at my job and lack of education, you need me.  You need the chick in tech support who will patiently explain that if the power is out, nothing works, least of all your internet. You need me to add that channel so you can watch the fucking Bachelor or whatever piece of crap you’re destroying brain cells with this year.

I want you to realize that someday, you could be me too. And you won’t like any of this either.

inside a small voice answers

(where have you been? I’ve been

waiting so long!)

and a thump in my chest reminds me

-sweetness, like new grass in the sun-rain

on a tin roof on lazy mornings-

that we make our own luck and sometimes

amid all the chatter and

chaos

the universe truly does owe us one.

(a favour. just this one.)

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

I am a hopeful girl.

I’ve discovered this, after years of believing otherwise, years of expecting a new hurt, a new pain, discarding hope for apathy, acceptance. Inside I’ve blossomed into a woman who says things like “It will work out.” or “I’m blessed, even with my wonky floors and overdrawn accounts.”

Hope is a flower which blossoms in a soil of bullshit, the ability to hold our anger and our pain in our hands, draw in a long white breath, and blow it into the wind. Hope is the soul which burns brightly.

Hope is the sun through leaves on a broad Sunday morning.

***

It’s like the memories are leaving me now, at the speed of light they drop from me.

Hands blindly groping when I couldn’t say no.

The beeping of fake lungs, the drone. The silence that replaced it.

The shock of being on the floor, anticipating the kick and yet feeling helpless to stop it.

The moist palms, the dry empty eyes.

Voices yelling, whimpering, whispering how useless I am.

Urine softly dripping down my bedroom door, the smell.

The yelling. All the fucking yelling.

Like a switch has been pulled, a tie removed, a barrier defeated, I feel all of this, these past lives, drop behind me. Baggage left at another door, a station, in a dump.

I am free of it. All of it.

***

I have few wishes in life, really. I wish for healthy children. I wish for happy children.

But above all, I wish for children who never know a touch unwanted, a voice raised in anger, a fist in their face, slurring insults. I wish for children who only know love, and kindness and beauty.

A tall order. But I am after all,  a hopeful girl.

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. Yet that will be the beginning.

We walk to the park so the girls can play in the new splash pad, relief from the late August heat, a change, something not the inside of the house.

Vivian insists on walking “Lizzie”-her pretend pet…lizard on my old dog chain, remnant of a youth I haven’t seen in forever. I smiled when I found it, remembering my friend Pierre wrapping it around my neck when I was 14 or so, closing the padlock. I grimaced, remembering the largest pair of bolt cutters I have ever seen closing in on my throat two years later, long after I had lost the keys.

The chain felt like a weight when it was locked on me, and yet I missed it when it was gone. Never enough to put it back. But enough to mourn it’s absence.

We walk and I can hear the chain clinking against the pavement, and I marvel at it’s reincarnation as a toy, years and moments away from the 14 year old I was, the messed up little girl. We walk and I imagine Vivian in a few more years-today she lost her first tooth, a linear progression from the first one she ever had. Tomorrow, soon, she will be 14 as well, more woman than girl, and I shall be tormented, wondering what secrets and pain she hides from me.

But that’s a thought for another day.

***

We walk home after much whining, cajoling and promising. Too close to the dinner witching hour, I don’t want to be caught with crying children too, so we hoof it home, balancing acts on the curbs as we go, popsicles (which cost far more than they ever did when I was their age, causing “old lady Dora” to kick in and secretly rant in her head how when SHE was a girl, popsicles were only 10 cents…) in hand.

As we walk, Rosalyn asks what an apartment building is, and I answer, adding “someday we might live in one. Man I hope not.” and it hits me that it’s highly likely we will, despite my hatred for them. It hits me that I will likely lose my house and all that bonuses that go with it, that I will let this dream of mine slip through my fingers.

It also occurs to me then, that the side effect of loss is a good night sleep, and the ability to just live for now, and dream bigger. The sun is shining, the grass is green, and my children tiring as we walk, their bellies wanting for their dinner, their skin dusky from the sun and the dirt and the day.

When we lose things, we make room for the better ones we truly deserve. We just have to keep looking.

Sometimes there’s no poison like a dream.

I stare at my backyard, the hole where the pool was, cluttered with toys, old plastic things half buried. I wonder how much fill will cost, how much it will cost to take down the old fence to get the fill in, put up a new fence. I see my garden, in the future, the garden I most likely will never have.

I turn into my house, see the peeling paint, the flooring coming up at the seams, the holes in the walls, the doors that don’t close.

It’s as if a dream slowly became a nightmare. Difference being, this was my dream, and I’ve never been able to keep it alive. Now, I barely skim the surface, and vainly hope I’ll make back what we spent 6 years ago.

My dream was a home with a porch, many windows, warm corners to read in through winter. Fresh squash and flowers. Sunlight.

I’m feeling it slip through my fingers, and frankly, all I find myself wanting to do is curl up and cry.

Another failure. Another something I can’t fix.

***

I’ve quite nearly given up. A friend was here and her husband, bless him, did all the man tasks he could in a few days, and was angered by the sheer negligence involved. That a husband would do nothing, just let the house fall down around, fall to pieces. I felt helpless and humiliated in the face of this, knowing I’ve been trying but not trying hard enough, not focused on my home, not focused on the things I need to get done.

But it’s so big. And I’m so alone with this, and while I can make my lists and start little projects, I feel like I’m pissing into the wind trying to stay dry. I couldn’t sell the place right now and make back what we need, but I can’t afford to do all the things that I need, not correctly. How I dream of just walking away from it all, leaving it behind, this dream, the quiet home I wanted, the one I still want but just cannot carry on my back alone.

I’m just not strong enough to do this by myself, not with kids and a job and my own needs and desires. I’m not strong enough to feel so fucking poor and unable.

I’m not strong enough to be the woman I know I need to be with this. Not right now.

***

Everything else in my life is heady and wonderful and scary, like a rollercoaster in all the best ways. I have a lover who makes me smile to my toes while my brain works overtime to keep up. I have two incredible kids who stop what they’re doing to tackle me with hugs, just when I’m at my wits end. I have family and friends who are always there when I need them.

But this one thing, this albatross on my neck, this house…it drains me. There are moments when I think “I can do this on my own!” and for a second, I really believe it.

But then I remember the toilet leaks and the pipe needs to be cut and replaced which means tearing up the bathroom floor to get at the pipe and I don’t have the money to gut the room like I want to and I worry that the floor will just fall through some day and I realize, I just can’t.

Sometimes, the hardest part of a dream is realizing you just aren’t ready for it yet.

Toy Review: Tommy Gunn Realistic Dildo

This is a review of the Tommy Gunn Dildo, generously provided by Eden Fantasy for review. As per usual, I am providing an escape valve for you-this post may veer on the TMI for some eyes, so feel free to run away and hang out HERE for a little while.

You’ve been warned.

Seven

I catch my breath when I catch her in profile, her dusky brown hair swinging in the sunlight, the chocolate of her eyes like saucers as she watches, then jumps, feet first, into her life.

This is my daughter. This is my firstborn. This is the first true love of my life.

***

Sometimes, I think she saved me.

With my daughter has come a certainty, a settled ideal of who I am in this world, a reason, a hope. A light in the darkness, a lighthouse lit for me alone, a beacon I could follow out of the chaos and shuttered isolation I had grown into. I may have stared dumbfounded at her in my arms, squirrely and angry after birth, but there was a switch triggered, a change. Perhaps it was small, and the earth didn’t shift as much as I felt it move. But my insides reordered, and my heart, before two sizes two stunted, began to beat and grow once more.

I know she saved me. I know that when I ate that bottle of pills, when I stared into the abyss I thought so black and empty, she stared back at me, Vivian and her sister, wordless but pointed. There was no more empty.

And now we’re here, and she’s 7 and sprouting out as girls are known to do, the slow but far too hurried process of turning to woman. She lengthens, her voice blossoms in depth, her eyes gain a soul only age can provide. Now we’re here and I feel myself scrambling for time, to stuff it back in a bag and be back at those harried terrifying months when she was just a new pure creature in my arms who smiled and eased my fears. We’re here and 13 is much too close and my usual joke of “You can do X when you bleed monthly.” isn’t so much as a joke as a threat to myself.

Your baby girl is growing up Momma, and there ain’t nothing you can do about it.

***

I worry, the common fears of motherhood. Am I doing it right? Am I raising a good, smart woman? Is she strong enough for this world? Can I protect her from this world while letting her fly off?

Last night I let her run back, out of sight, into the raspberry bushes on the trail behind the house, with a friend and her sister. I would hear the odd yelp and giggle and bubble of joy come through the trees, and I realized, bittersweet, that the ache in my chest and the bliss from her lungs, they were intertwined, and would be forever.

They really do take a little piece of your heart with them as they take that first breath.

***

Happy Birthday my sweet.

Go home. I’m trying. But I’ve been misled.

Today I nearly cried at work again.

Lina called Lina wanted a TV in her room, at the foot of her bed, on the dresser I imagine. She was sick she told me, The Cancer, in her brain, her kidneys.

My mother’s was in her kidneys before, before it was done.

Lina talked of her life to me, of the sores from the radiation, the weakness from the chemo, how all she wished she had done years before was just enjoy being able to walk outside into the daily sunshine without thought. How she wished her body would operate with out fear or pain.

She told me about how even through the pain of her weakened body, nearly deadened from this fight, she held her daughter’s hand as her beautiful grandson squeezed and shouted his way into our world. Nothing she said, nothing was as incredible or as inspiring as watching him breathe our air for the first time. Maybe not even the day his mother was born.

The doctors told her they got the tumours in her brain. But she was down to one kidney, and unspoken still was my knowledge that at the last, The Cancer came for those very organs, until my mother at least, was wasted and pale on a hospital bed, a fragment, a figment.

I didn’t mention this to Lina. I wished her luck, and said good bye forever instead.

***

I dream of home.

Not the home as in picket fences and manicured lawns, lemonade in summer, hot chocolate and blankets on a damp winter afternoon, but the home that sets your heart at ease. The home filled with people who are touched by you, people who love you without words, who will hold you up and on if you need to lean into them. Home is a static creature, in flux as we move and shift, the only constant the light in our eyes and hearts.

I miss this. I miss that soft place to land, the feel a part of something. I miss the mental warmth I can still see and feel when I think back, years ago, forever ago, a memory that may not even be at this point it’s travelled so far. I can feel the late afternoon sun pouring in the side window, the light glinting around the swollen face of my mother, the sterness and sparkle in her eyes, the mischievious woman there.

I never questioned, not once that she loved me. That they loved me. We were a unit, a home, and a golden thread wrapped around our bodies, an entity unto ourselves. My home was safety and heft, the old wooden walls heavy with time and wisdom. The air was always silvery, and prone to glitter.

All things to dust turn, and like a vacuum or a black hole, as she died, she took home with her, turning that warm safe place to a cold grey torn rift in my time. So very cold.

I stopped believing home was possible. Replaced the very word with “house” when I could. Mourned a life in which the puzzle was completed, and whole. I thought I’d stay safely from it forever.

Yet I talk to Lina, I hear her voice and I hear my mother and I mumble how in awe I am of their bravery and she stutters and tells me of her beautiful walking grandson and I realize home is something we carry with us to hold us up. And how desperately I want that again, the magic protection of a voice in the kitchen, the smile late at night, the sense of somewhere to belong. The space with no words, guarded.

Go home. I’d like to.

Amen to that.

I’m sweating at the kitchen table as the temperature, or at least the humidity rises. In my bemused, tired, not feeling too terribly terrific mood, I lean on my arm as I stare at the clock, watching the minutes tick slowly by while my daughters, mysteriously, occupy themselves together for hours.

This time last year…this time, this very day, things were so very very different. And like a dream, I find myself shaking my head to clear the fog, so distinct and foreign it seems now, to live in that prison, that empty soulless place I fought for month after month. Maybe it was no one’s fault, maybe it was all mine. But looking back, I gasp at how lonely and angry and sad I was, and how I let myself stay that way.

I cannot imagine it now, as I breathe freely, and could never counsel living as I did, as we did. The destruction of the soul it seems starts with three simple words.

***

This changing life, this year of turning and roads and myths, this 2010 which I’ll remember forever as “that” year I believe, it’s so far been one which makes me question myself, face myself. It’s been a year that placed who I am on a platter and whispered

you aren’t broken darling. Far from it.

and this is the year I started to believe it.

I’ve begun surrounding myself with a life which wants me-which is eager to hear my voice, eager to touch my body, cradle the soul. Friends and lovers who light to be with me, who laugh like the mad with me, who hold me through the bad nights. People who deserve me.

I had come to believe I wasn’t worthy of love, or caring, or delicacy. That beauty wasn’t a gift I was welcome to, or attention or kindness.

How wonderful is it to realize how absolutely wrong I have been, how deluded.

***

I have been happy lately, in a surprising way, one that’s caught me off guard like a ghost, shuttering my mouth in some ways, making me treasure each day and word. Like Aqua Vitae I drain each moment, conscious that nothing lasts forever, scared by such luck.

But I won’t chase it from me. I will sit back and let myself be happy. I will live in a moment which makes me smile from my toes and makes me feel so simply understood. For the first time, I will just be, and watch where life takes me.

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.