the new house.

.

I do love words that mean more than one thing. I am in a new house, literally: I finally got to move in. I am starting to unfold, nest, settle in. Picking up the pieces of things that fell away over the last few months. And I am in a new house figuratively, too. My new website is up. Some of my favorite posts from here have been, and will be, reposted on the new site. Traffic will go from here to there, but not from there to here. There are things here that I want to keep mine, to keep ours. This space has been powerful for me, and necessary. I may come back here sometimes. A shift happens. And I feel a little melancholy for it, for the early words, for the kinship and connection I've had here. I made it through because of who I found here. Thank you.

You are all welcome to come over to the new house for its virtual house-warming: www.refugeingrief.com. I would love to have you.

Thank you. I love you.

xo


.

green river memorial

.

Day number 5 on the road. I'd hoped to be there by now. But the road has what the road will have.

Today, leaving western Nebraska, a late start. My planning mind was off a day, and what I'd thought was the short day was, in fact, not. But it's alright.

This land is beautiful. So clear, the geologic record: I always feel like I am in a submarine, a submersible, not an over-land car. I am driving in the ocean, driving under the ocean. Saw my first herd of pronghorn antelope just outside of Elk Mountain, Wyoming. I stopped at the same rest-stop we did back in 2006. It wasn't a hard day.

And then. And then, the soil began to change. From yellow and brown to streaks of red. The land changed from ocean bottom to sand cliffs. The mesas rose in the distance. I switched the stereo from dance music (to keep me awake) to Robbie Robertson, because it seemed appropriate. I am singing Ghost Dance, thinking of our trip, of how we talked about the history of this land, what it's seen, what happened out here. And then.

And then, before I realize I am this close, I am on top of Flaming Gorge. I am here, where we were, exactly where we were, and Robbie Robertson's "Golden Feather" comes on the stereo. I am crying. I hear. I hear the stones you picked up, all those years ago, the ones beside your box of ashes here on the passenger seat. I hear those stones begin to sing. They do. They sing to be so close to home.

I do not want to stop. I do not want to stop. But they are singing. I have to give them back. They want to go home, and I have to let them go. I pull off the exit, crying, resisting. I do not want to go. This is wrong. Wrong to be here. But I drive. Past the place where we got gas. Past the place where we ate Mexican food, grouchy from too long on the road. I pull over as I hear (yes, I hear) your ashes beside me begin to speak. Ask to be released here. The stones have kept on singing. Your ashes, what is left of you, an excited impulse. I open the passenger side door. The pot of my one houseplant falls out, cracks on the pavement. I remove the stones. I remove the small bag of your ashes, and shake you out into the palm of my hand. Shaking. Shaking. There are big pieces here, not dust.

The stones are singing. We have been here. This is where we turned off. Where we drove off down into the winding gorge, where we cried over slaughtered skinned coyotes, where you drove the car over too-steep embankments. Looking for a place to camp. Where you spent hours the next morning finding just the right stones, the two heavy, white stones we took home, another 4000 miles back, to sit on the bookshelf, holding words.

And now - they want to go back.

I scatter you. A small handful, here on the grass between road and sidewalk. I scatter. And then I place a stone. Oh.

Oh, I see now. This is a gravestone. A headstone, a marker you yourself picked out, painstakingly searched for, the last time we were here. It is right. It is right. To scatter you here beneath a stone you chose yourself.

The other stone - offers to stay. To stay with me. One with you, one for me. A pair of matched stones, broken, but connected.

As soon as the ashes are sent, the stone placed, I am fine again. Calm. I feel you. For the first time this trip, my love, I feel you. I know you here with me.

And I drive down through the mountains, as rain begins again, down a road we did not drive. A path we did not take. You are buried here, my love. And I continue on.


.

light brigade

.

today is 4 years and 2 months (by day).

By this time tomorrow (insh'allah), I will be loading two big cats into the van, clipping Boris into his palatial middle-seat bed, filling the cooler, leaving behind more of a mess than I'd probably like. Maybe somewhere around Wyoming, I will start to believe this is true: that I'm free.

It still feels overwhelming, and it still is overwhelming. Talking about it only makes me mad - only getting the stuff done will get it done.

There isn't anything to say, and there is everything to say.

But here is this: if you are inclined, please join the light brigade. Any time between now and our projected arrival date (Sunday the 15th at the latest, Friday the 13th earliest) - please light a candle for our safe voyage, our excellent adventures of the good kind, smooth driving, safe roads, calm animals - whatever good wishes you have. If you pray or meditate, please pray and meditate for us. It's a whole big wave of love that carries us across; I am leaning in to that. U.S. east coast friends, release me, send us good winds. U.S. west coast friends, make that big ol' catcher's mitt of receiving - we are coming your way.


.

same road, new road

.


I have just realized my driving route is the same route matt and I drove cross-country in 2006. After about 90% of the same roads, same rest-stops, same campgrounds, I veer north where we'd gone south. Instead of south to california, I drive up through the place that was tops on his "life list" to hike and explore - a place he didn't get to go. Seeing the name of that area on the map as the first place I veer off our route - this is going to be alright.

.

countdown

.

So many countdowns.

It's been quiet here, in this space, largely because my internet connection is spotty here. But also, there is so much going on. So much of everything. And today, it is - a lot. Today, as I finished recording the run through of the audio program I'm making, exactly then, I realized it is one week, by day. One week by day, not by date, to the last time I saw you. That day. At the river. Four years ago, next week.

Four.

I have to check to be sure that is right.

I have made it through this whole last year without claiming that number. Without saying it out-loud. And now it is here, and I will have to answer, when I am asked: it has been four years now. Four years. And so much has changed. Is changing.

Within just a couple of months, I am leaving New England entirely. Leaving the places we lived, the places we explored, and I am so ready for that. I feel like I will be myself again, though differently. It is a weird broken-heartedness, to face this new adventure without you.

In just three weeks, I am heading to see my old friend from high school, to record for real. Headphones and microphones, business receipts and background music. He and I across the sound-board from each other, as we were way back when we were kids. Things move from gestation to creation to out inside the world.

With a new website, and new things I've created, this place is changing too. Feeling a little overwhelmed with it all right now, all the decisions and writing, all the designs and meetings. It's all good. It is all for love. It is a lot of change.

And for now, right now, I just need to be with that. With the nearest, soonest countdown. In just seven days from now, my love, we will have reached that four year mark. Four years.

I miss you.

I miss you here with me.

.


.

weepy beast

the way my father misses you
breaks my heart
how he says your name
out loud, to himself, as he is using your tools
as he thinks of how you worked
as he reconstructs things you designed
and I dismantled to move

how he tells me this morning
he can't wait to figure out
how to use your nail-gun

and I know there is so much more he doesn't say

because of how heartbroken he is for me
how protective

and I am a weepy, weepy beast today
having come back from the library
to use their internet
to find my dad gone
and boris under the trees
tail tucked over his nose
perfectly camouflaged

several minutes later, dad comes inside
a little frantic
saying he couldn't find the dog
and had been out searching
for 45 minutes,
and had he been with me all along?


and he isn't mad
just thankful
everyone is alright

I imagine
how panicked he was,
not just for boris,
but for me
for me, and what heartbreak he imagined

and it all comes flooding back
those first few days
of everybody's heartbreak
and my father's for me

it's heavy
and hard to see

we miss you, my love
we miss you.
and my heart is a weepy beast
what with all of this.

.

sunday the 12th

Comes around again, Sunday the 12th. 3 years and 10 months. It's been hitting me hard, but then - there has been so much lately. Of course it is hitting me hard. I left our house. Left it in stages, but still - the last look, the last moments there, were not my own. Sometimes I feel like I amassed an emotional debt I will need to pay later, leaving that way. Well, maybe I already did - leaving the house, swallowing the emotions, not a half hour later, I became car-sick, dizzy, ragingly nauseous. So there we go. The body always knows.

I did have my time there. A few days before, I wandered the rooms and touched walls. Said thank you. Did all the things I always do when I leave a place that has sheltered me. There was also the matter of bucket on bucket of heart rocks to do something with. My mother wants to sell them. Yes, I find this disturbing. Very, very disturbing. Instead, I wandered the yard with handfuls of rocks, casting them and placing them, wondering who would find them, if they would be found.

I stopped at the garden fence, between the blackberries and the chicken coop he built, stood there, stooped there, placing heart rocks amidst leaves and roots.

And in a flash, perhaps a slow flash, I remembered I scattered ashes here, that day J. dropped the jar and I found a small pile of what was you on the street beside my parking spot. That day, I scooped up handfuls of body and bone, stuffed them in my pockets. I released them into the air, scattered them in the soil. Let you feed blackberries and echinacea, let you feed multiflora rose and bittersweet and mint.

So there, at the garden fence two days before I left, placing heart rocks, I realize, well - this makes sense. It is a burial ground, in a way. It is sacred space. You are, in part, buried here. We both are, in a sense. We both are.


--------------

Phase one of this move is complete. For a few months, I will be in phase two, the middle place, the neither here nor there. Phase three, the adventure, comes soon after the 4 year mark. For now, I am perched here, in a place you should be if I am, a place I wouldn't be if you were.

---------------

before I forget...

Ah, before I forget. When I leave here (so soon!), I will leave behind some physical memory prompts. Each morning, Boris chooses which direction we walk. When he chooses to walk up the hill past the church, I remember the whale story. And each time we walk by, I think - I should write that whale story here, before we leave, before the landscape doesn't prompt it anymore. And so, before I forget, here it is.

To get the real meaning and sense of this story, you really do need a little background. I tried to make it easier on you, to find a way to put the text right here, but all I could find was this and it won't let me copy and paste. You will need to pop over and read it. Just this brief little story of the whale, from Andrew Harvey's Hidden Journey. Read it, then come on back.

...

So one early morning, maybe last winter I think, Boris and I were out for a walk. I was railing at the universe, annoyed at how not clear things are. That if I were Loved, as is sometimes suggested, then it needs to be more obvious and constant, not this fickle garbage, not this obtuse sideways love.

You want to show me you love me? Give me a whale, then. Allegedly, you have done these kinds of things before. You have the universe do crazy things, beautiful waves of love via whale. So where's MY whale? You Love me? Then where's my whale? Where is my whale?

And you know what? It needs to be a CLEAR whale. Not some vague, yeah, I guess that maybe sort of is a vaguely whale shaped rock or cloud formation. You're out there? You love me? Fine. You show me my whale. A bumper-sticker shaped like a whale that says something like "Megan's whale" or "the whale of mmd" would be awesome. Clear and direct.

So I am wandering down the street like this, demanding my whale. You know where this is going, right?

...

Boris and I are passing the Polish Catholic church. Next to the church is a small garden where a statue of the BVM stands, her arms outstretched. ("BVM" - that's blessed virgin mary). I often nod at her as I walk by. From the opposite side of the street, I nod at the mama, direct a "you show me my whale" thought at her, and turn back to the sidewalk ahead. My eye catches something just beyond us, scooting around the corner.

It's a bird. A quite larger than song-bird bird. Boris and I approach the intersection here, just past the church and the garden, and I stand for a moment watching the bird scratch at a bare spot of grass. It's not a bird you'd see in downtown portland. Not a bird you'd see here at all, especially not in late winter, roaming around the sidewalk just after dawn. Upland ground birds just don't live around here.

I keep walking. Two steps, maybe three. And then I stand there, mouth open, eyes wide.

It's a quail. You gave me a quail. A q-whale.

...

I asked. No, I demanded. And three steps later, there is a quail. Love, plus comedic timing, plus a little play on words.

...

I saw that bird only one more time, though I have looked for it since. It was perched high in the eaves of the rectory, within the gates of the church and garden, tucked in and puffed up against the cold. Each time Boris directs our walk this way, I look up at the eaves, and I snort a little laugh at the BVM. Good morning mama. Thanks for the qwhale. Before I forget, thank you for the qwhale.


...

clean slate

You'd think I'd know my own process by now. I do, I mean, I am just surprised that it applied to this moving thing. Here is how I work: first, something is presented. I am adamant that I will not ever do this thing. Hours, days, weeks later, I think, well, okay, maybe it's possible. Not likely, but possible. This stage is followed by the I must do this thing right now.

And that is where I am. The scales have tipped. Realizing that it will cost nearly four thousand dollars to send my furniture, books, and belongings cross-country made it really impractical to hold on to things. That, and some powerful, emotional discussions with my widowed people, and a few unintentionally well-placed words from my neighborhood butcher tipped the balance even more. As hard as it was to think of letting go of things his hands have made, I suddenly realized that what Matt would want for me is beauty. He would want beauty in my life. There is only one thing he made for me that he would acknowledge is beautiful, and it will fit in my car. The other things are rough and functional. The furniture we own together, the family things from both of our respective lines - they are beautiful, yes. But I did not choose them. With the money I am not spending on ridiculous shipping fees, I can hunt for new things. I can choose them. I can see what this new life requests, and what it calls for, on its own.

So - in my flip-flop, adamant both ways nature, I have been on a sell-off, give-away rampage. Not much is left. The family pieces will be stored in my folks' barn. My car is small enough that there is a clear breaking point: bringing anything more than what fits means at least a few grand in costs. Maybe at some point in the future (oh widowness, you have me add "if there is a future"), maybe at some point in the future, I will have a pod of things - books and art, mostly, the bed platform we built together - shipped off to me. But for now, it has come down to what will fit in and on my car, and a few boxes of things light enough to send by post.

It is fear of losing more, losing evidence of us, that holds me back, that has held me back. I don't want to live that way, choosing out of fear. I want to choose from beauty, if I can. Show up beautifully as Cassie wrote on WV yesterday, which helped immensely too. So there is that. Clean slate.

.

travel light

Even as a person with comparatively not much stuff, I have a lot of stuff. Books, mostly. Kitchen things. But now that 3/4 of it is in boxes, I can't even think of what is in there. I have visions, beginning yesterday, of just lifting off with next to nothing. What would fit in my small car: matt's ashes. His hat, his journal, a few of his shirts, small evidences. Photographs of us. My violin - though I never play it, he played it Then, and I like to have it around. If I could replace everything, I would take just two pairs of shoes, a backpack of clothes, the tea press, and the kettle. I would take my journals of this After, and a few pieces of art. And then, I would leave. Lift off.

But what about but what about -

So I revise. What if I lift off with my small car and these things here above, plus a moving van. Not a truck, just a regular sized van. Take one or two pieces of small furniture that would be expensive - literally, emotionally - to replace. Leave the rest. Leave the rest. The books we've read and want to read. Most of the kitchen, with plates and bowls and cups. Leave the recliner I remember searching for, how psyched you were to find it. The bookshelves you built, even. The evidence of life we lived, I lived. Leave the kitchen table and the chairs, things I brought into our life together, things with their own history for me. Leave even things I like, because there is a freedom in it.

It wouldn't be as bad as it sounds. It could be like training wheels - I can store all that furniture at my folks'. No big deal. I will be a country away from it, but able to go back and truck it over if it feels connected to me. Anti-climactic in a way, then. Okay. So, writing it out, this seems like the logical idea. Pare down. Travel light. See how it goes.

So bizarre, all this. To be considering my new life, what comes, what goes, what waits. Weighing things out, over and over - what is the cost of this versus this, my heart and my wallet and my mind. What holds me back and what is freeing me. Tumultuous times with eyes on the prize. Weird. Weird life.

.

stunners.

Um.

I just gave notice to my landlords. After 8 years of living here, I will be packing up and clearing out. 8 weeks from now, this place will be empty and cleaned, and I will close the door on the place we lived. Your ashes are scattered in the garden. The chicken coop you built has been empty now for a couple of years. Things are changing. Things have been changing.

I have lived in this house longer than I have lived anywhere this whole life. Crazy. I left this house on a bright sunny day in July of 2009 and came home several hours later as a completely different person, with a completely different life. This house held our life, and it held that new life too. The walls and the floors have absorbed screaming and crying and vomiting. I have dragged myself across these floors, hauled myself up, leaned on the counters. I have stood in the shower, sobbing, remembering you there. I have laid in this living room, retching and convulsing. I have screamed where no one could hear me. We lived here. And it is time to go.

As great as it is - no. As hard as this is, as insane and stunning and painful - as hard as it is, the new life is calling. It won't let me do it gradually now. Heck, I've had a LOT of "gradual." Just that now, it's real. Now, packing begins. Not just for hoping I'll get out of here sometime soon, but because it is now.

Deeeeeeeeep breath.


.

without holding

Going through some old files, looking for something. What I find is this  - some passages I had written the night of your memorial, and the day after it. I'd forgotten now, who was there, what was said, who I was. I'm afraid of the things I have forgotten, the things that would be so useful and important now. I feel like I'm at a crossroads, though a long and slow one: there are important and powerful, real and true things back there in all those words, all those things that happened and were felt. I live without them now. Until they come back, circling back sometimes. What did I write for me, and is it important to go back and look? Or am I supposed to walk on from it, to hear what gets written now.

This poem here below, I had forgotten. Joan read it at your memorial; I read this in my notes. This is where I am these days, this is where I live - the knife sharp and dull, and a long clenched fist unfurling.

To Have Without Holding
Marge Piercy

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

.

weddings

My it has been a long day.

I revealed my marital status to a new friend. It had become so awkward, all those silences, the gaps from my side of the conversation. The last couple of times we've talked, it's sounded like I'm divorced, so that was weird. Not saying something was awkward. Saying something also felt awkward - not exactly a small-talk comment to just drop in casually. Revealing something like this can go so badly, can divert even the most normal of conversations into strained territory. But today, the awkward scale tipped, and I went with the awkwardness of saying "my husband died" rather than just feel like an idiot. If a relationship is going to continue, I can't keep evading such a large part of who I am. At some point, things get stuck and can go no further without feeling false. So there was that.

I told my new friend about my marital status because we were discussing my upcoming delivery of wedding cupcakes to city hall this evening, in honor of the equal marriage legislation that went into effect at 12:01 on the 29th. City Hall was open for marriage licenses and weddings. Some friends of mine were giving out free boutonnieres. I, of course, made cupcakes.

Not just any cupcakes. I baked for a few days, and C. and I spent the afternoon frosting. 10 dozen pretty wedding cupcakes, infused with the blessings of widows. It's late and I'm tired, but I really like the blessing of widows, and I got to silently give it a bunch of times tonight. I got to say it out  loud once when asked why I was there. The blessing of widows is a little like the 13th guest in a fairy tale, the guest who wants to give an uncomfortable beauty:

 

Tonight, we're bringing wedding cupcakes to honor your wedding.

We hope you have a very long life together.

And when one of you does die, we are so glad

that you will be legally honored as widowed.

Because to be widowed is hard enough.

To be widowed and given no legal or social

 acknowledgment is unconscionable.

 

Congratulations. Sorry it took so long.

We wish you long life and good deaths,

with the ones you love beside you.

 

 

 

 

Not wanting to be a downer on other peoples' wedding day, I didn't wander around repeating the whole blessing out loud. The closest I came (except for the time I was asked) was when I offered cupcakes to a couple who asked what they could give me in return:

                          You can have a long, happy life together. A very long life.

 

 

 

 

.

 

And on that note, I need to get to sleep. It is way, way past my bedtime.

 

.

 







semantics

.

I don't suppose we can have a moratorium on the
words "drown" and "drowning" can we?
Seems a large percentage of posts and things I have read in the last month
have used those words to describe - well, you know - the things
"drowning" is so found of describing. Just - I am ever so tired of
seeing the words again and again, and saying outloud again and again -
stop it. Stop it. Stop it. You have NO IDEA what those words mean.

That is all. Word tired.



.

pie

The other night, I dreamed my friend Jim died of a heart attack before I could bring him his pie. In awake life, we'd been trying to find a time that would work with their schedules and mine, and it hasn't happened. When I had the dream, I decided I would make his over-due birthday pie and just show up with it. Wednesday seemed the day meant for delivery.

I started the process last night, failed twice, started again. I woke up after a long night of intermittent nightmares, wakefulness, stress. Woke up with money shortages on my mind, time shortages, needing to write and accomplish and fit in two hours of driving to deliver a pie I hadn't finished making yet, which needs to be done and cooled and ready before I have to leave. And what about all those self-care things, the yoga I needed today, the time to process the image of Matt in my dreams last night, the TIME to do anything. grouch grouch grouch. I decided this was no way to make a pie, or to deliver a pie, and put it on the schedule for tomorrow. Ah. A bit more ease. Then I went for a pre-dawn walk with the dog, light rain, singing Gaelic prayers out-loud because it stops my grouchy mind.

Coming back home, I stopped to check the mail. Inside, a check from the woman I garden and herd-sit for, an expected check for a few honey sales. Every little bit helps. My mind is already starting to tick as I open the envelope - right then: yoga, tea, write, study, break at ten.... the envelope is thicker than it should be. A card, maybe.

A card with a hundred dollar bill in it, a card with "thank you for all your work this year. A little something extra to show my appreciation of you."

I am instantly on my knees, thrown to the floor - this time with such powerful knowledge that I am cared for. I am always, always cared for. So intensely. So perfectly. Every.single.month since I left that job that was destroying my body and mind, money has shown up. Not a lot. But enough. Every single time. Usually right at the last possible moment. I am loved. I am cared for. All the time. It stuns me every single time.

Darn right the very first thing I did getting up off that floor was begin again with pie. Expansion. Goodness. There is time for everything today. There is certainly time to be my point of love in this world, to randomly show someone else that they are cared for. All the time. Always, always cared for.



.

evidence and odd bits

So last week. Second week of a rather large cold. Coming off of travel and challenges particular to that. Blah blah. Anyway. Tired and missing and sore, I left home to do some errands. Along the way, I asked for evidence: show me it's really you, okay? Parking outside the library, thinking this again - actual evidence would be nice. Inside the library, I picked up a book I had ordered. The library attendant brought me two books: the one I ordered, plus one I ordered and meant to cancel, because it wasn't the one I meant to order. Surprise book number two, at the hold desk that morning?

Proof of Heaven.

I stood there at the check-out counter, giggling. Nice one, babe. Just as I started to dismiss it as "a stretch," I walked outside and found a discarded tissue on the sidewalk, clearly in the shape of a large heart. A big tissue heart on the sidewalk next to - Matt's truck. Not the same truck (though it is in town sometimes), but the same model and uncommon color. Ha.

Back in the car now, heading to the post office, I am chuckling at this "evidence," wondering if it really is evidence, or if I am searching. Thinking how frequently these things happened so soon After, how I never questioned them: their random precision so precise. Parking the car, getting out, walking to the post office, I am thinking these things, wondering, asking in my mind - where are you now babe? Is there a you here? Can you even give me evidence from where and when you are?

I got the mail from my box. On the counter is a current copy of Harper's magazine, left behind by someone. I glanced at it. Start to laugh again. On the cover, a male face is filled with galaxies, stars and planets. On his finger rests another man, a small human. The star-man peers at the human on his fingertip. The two titles in bold-face beneath this illustration are:



 

Our place in the universe

I am your conscious, I am love.

 

 

That was a really nice trifecta.

 

Even with the slightly odd grammar up there - I just looked up "conscious," to see if it can ever make sense with that usage. Not really, no. But the definition of "conscious" is really lovely here, too. You are in my sense of myself. You are in my sense and sensing of this world. Our place in this Universe is love, is sense, is awareness. Our place is conscious.

 

Well now I am crying, and hadn't meant to be. But there it is.

I will take this. I will take this as evidence

and carry it around with me.

I carry your heart with me.

Conscious.

 

.

 

 



 





ahhhh

.

A better day. Thank goodness. Ever.so.tired.of.contraction. Just acknowledging the truth of what was "up" helped a lot, as did a low-key day of rest, reading, being out in the woods with the dog. Have been up since 4 today, reading, writing. Good. About to go for a run and then hit the road to parts north, hoping to hold the intention of ~less reactive, more skillful~.

For those acknowledging/enduring/celebrating a holiday today, and for everyone else acknowledging/celebrating/enduring a regular day of life - I wish you some goodness, some peace, and a welling up of love right underneath you, where you are.

.

a complete sentence

I do not like this season.
Am not, and have never been, a fan of enforced holidays.
Without Matt, there is no buffer, no back-up, no acceptable-to-others reason why I am not attending events that are not fun for me. Excruciating in their not-fun-ness. I remind myself of the last holiday season Before. How awkward and difficult, navigating on my own, with Matt off playing poker, and my step-son with his mom. Just this full-on crucible of strain. I had them to go home to. I had him to talk with about it, all the awkwardness and dissonance. I had my own family who knew me and loved me, who came from the same orienting part of the world, inside and out. I had a crazy-check. I had a self-check.

I notice how angry I am lately. How tired. To go or to not go, either way is stress. And then I think I am a monster. That I am mean and hard and brittle. That I cannot lighten up. That none of this is as bad or difficult as I make it out to be. This is unwinnable. I can't look at myself with love on this one, because to do that is to say No, and No would have to be said so many times. And also, to question, to quote something I don't recall, to question if I'm the a*hole here. Am I jerk? I no longer know. I no longer know what is the effect of actual real dissonance and truth, and what is just me being a crab without grace. I have no external crazy-check from my love, and my own self-crazy check is absolutely unreliable these days.

I read other things on-line about the collective grudge and drudgery of holidays, and I wonder why anyone does it. I wonder if anyone actually loves it. I may or may not be the bad guy here, the monster, the graceless one, if there is a graceless one. There is also the fact that I brace for the baseball bat to the gut - Matt built a lot of their house. His hands, our life, are everywhere. I am routinely doubled over from the blow, the many incessant blows, and then arrive at the table as though everything is fine. I would just like this season to be over, now, thank you.  I'm so very tired of assessing my own level of monster-ness just because "No" is not accepted as a complete sentence in these parts. And, I want my family back.


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little boy birthdays

You would think I'm nuts.
You know how I am. With cake. With food. With anything.
Even if, for the second year in a row, I am irked that
I get less than a week's notice for such a cake request -
you know I can't not do it. I can't not take the creative challenge.

I almost didn't. Ro is not so little anymore.
Not the little boy
sitting on the steps with you,
while you were on a lunch break.
Not the little boy who was an only child then,
his sister barely formed
inside their mama.
He certainly wasn't this little boy,
the one who has two little ones
he is now big brother to.
The one who still tackles me with such great force as I come up the stairs
The one who has lost the baby-fat cheeks
and retains his great exuberance.

I'm not sure if he remembers you
If he knows why I am still in his life
If he knows why I look at the empty space on the floor
where you and I ate dinner one late work-night
Before they all lived there,
before the couch and the toys
and the empty space filled in

In the end, I had to make this cake -
there are so few times to really play,
to touch that pure fruitcake goofiness,
the intense crazed joy that is a little boy
telling me all about this "new star wars thing."

You would think I'm nuts.

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times and changes

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Haven't written here for a bit. That's not true. I have written here, I just haven't posted anything.

.

I feel a million miles away, and I do not like where I am. Like our life never happened, I repeat it as though it's a fiction. I read things I wrote in those first months and feel nothing, until I do. And then it is a freight train. This happened to me.

.

I close up the garden I started that year Before. I touch soil I turned when he was here, when life was what it Was. I don't want this garden anymore - like so many things, it has stopped being fun. It has stopped being good. And to leave it feels strange, letting go of one other home, one other place in my life that was life. To let go of what was ordinary and normal, knowing it no longer fits.

.

Watching election season via facebook has shown me a lot of things that no longer fit. That I no longer want to find a place to fit. Tangential friendships ended, not simply because their political views are vastly different than mine, but because I see how their political views are used as a weapon of hate. Ending friendships even when our political views are the same, because I see the same seething hatred underneath their emphatic shouting about love. I don't want these lies in my life. The vast gulf between what you actually live and what you shout about. Ugliness is ugliness, no matter what ideals you're voting for.

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Four years ago, this whole life was different. The poll lines were a party. Matt brought me a thermos of tea, and we all hung out in the parking lot, waiting our turn to go vote. There was hope and fun and silliness. We were one big neighborhood. At home, we stayed up late to watch the election results. We watched and listened and heard. It was good.

This year, I talk out loud to you, inside the polling booth. And then I remember that other people can hear me, standing just behind the canvas flaps. I stand there muttering and weeping that you should be here with me. Goofing around as we did the last time we voted - just a week or two Before. We voted for a friend of yours, running in a local election for who-knows-what. After we voted, we walked through the park, naming all the trees we could name. All of this I brought with me into that little canvas booth, filling in ovals, talking out loud, wishing you were there. There was no party in the parking lot. There was no sense of one big happy neighborhood. There was only me, in the car, parked and texting about the difference between four years ago and now.

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