4/17: I don’t know what words to reach for today. Is expression a breakfast buffet or an early appointment? Is expression still how I get dressed when I don’t feel like myself? Is expression an exhale in the sun? It’s true, I need help comforting myself. I dress in soft grays (in solidarity w/ my gray boy). It’s true, I need help assuring myself. I make inconsequential missteps and ask a lot of questions at the front desk. It’s true that when I am worry, I am not much else. I rearranged the silver on my fingers so I could stick them between the grates of the cat carrier to feel closeness, one hand on the wheel driving us down and around, River protesting on the passenger seat.
It’s moments like this morning when I feel right not choosing parenthood but it doesn’t take the sadness away. My worry is a pole at the center of me, head to toe, through the heart and unmoving, no matter how hard the wind blows off of the ocean. I sit now, closest to the sun while it streams through the banana leaves, grand windows in a grand hotel in my city. I sit in my little corner, all dramatic. Dayjob starts soon and River will be anesthetized soon after. His teeth. Then, it’s discovery, payment upfront, next steps, calls to the insurance company, keep ‘em apart keep ‘em apart, and something that I’m all too familiar w/, something like fear of growing up, something like shame. I turn to the corner, away from every possible sweetness.
I believe I am 29. I believe my boy will be OK. I believe my sensitivities are surely swelling but they’re here, they’re here, what am I supposed to do but feel them? I’m just going to have tears in my eyes today and that’s OK. I am going to look at my life as it forms its own kind of poetry, twisting and ringing me out while I look for some scraps of bread, some scraps of home, scraps of love. I don’t need anything perfect. If I find trust to rest on, life will be a dream.
A dream, a dream, I wonder if it already is. Death is a kind of waking up, isn't it? This week, I haven’t been able to surrender to dreaming, my body clenching and forcing what it thinks strength is. And the soft parts, my sensitivities, tender like fruit overripe - how skin blushes and bursts.
They anesthetize River to get into his mouth, to dig at and examine and clean, to find where the pain is, where the cracks are. Otherwise, he would fight and fight, never bite but fend off and clamp down. When they’re done, I’ll get a call and he’ll be in some reality he doesn’t need to trust to live in, all a dream to him now. After, he will look only for sun and soft things and I will be next to him, doing the same, in dream, a stoned dream, making an easy night out of a difficult day.
✺
I am at that age where I can talk to everyone like they’re my friend. Customers coming and going, communities in and out of my own, the vet, the tech, the insurance guy on the phone, the Earth, my mother, myself.
I call my mother after picking up the boy and I remember people are electricity, making contact and charging up. I was thinking of empty pockets pulled out and pliers on bone. I was thinking stillness, stillness, falling in the dark. She rode the waves w/ me, like she always will, keeping me company while I’m lost at sea (always, always).
I graze while I talk on the phone. I think better in motion, on my feet, on my feet, you remember. The power of movement alone charges me. You move me - I move you. The sun is in my yard and I can walk and talk out here again, here where I swallow the sun.
The magnolia is waking up. All wound up and green. Soft to the touch. Teeming w/ life and keeping it warm in the honest gasp of Spring. It’s here that I get to OK, w/ my mother on the other line.
I’ve just told her. She’s as upset as I’ve been all day and we talk each other through. Soon, it is me lying on my back in gray like my gray boy in the house behind me. I’m lying on my back in the sun stretching out my hips and saying, Things take the time they take and I’m glad it’s not worse.
My morning, unmoored in the wet and drying now. My day dries into some kind of statue made of clay. I have carved this tunnel out so far but it’s time to start digging in another direction. I start right where I am. My mother is here and I understand now. You can bring your problems to the ones you love. They will care because they care about you, just like you do. That’s the love thing.
ASKING FOR HELP IS A PART OF LOVE.
A page I dog-eared from my Nightmares & Morning Pages series ~ thank you for reading