Today, I have two things.
a) I have found solace since my last post. In this
Yes, we all make mistakes, even if we are Kevin Smith's version of God. Poor , Alanis. She went on to bigger and better things, like cussing out Uncle Joey in this gem Which is further proof that I am redeemable. Ish.
b)
This is a phase of renewal. Of taking all the things that broke me before, looking them in the eyes and saying, you scare the crap out of me, but even if you beat me before, I'm going to try again. Because before I didn't know things about myself, like how to know the difference between betrayal and paranoia. I didn't know how to take care of me, and therefore be someone who could be taken in, and treasured. I didn't know so many things about myself. But now that I know, now that I have perspective, I want to try them again.
That includes Harry. No, that's not his name, but for our purposes here, it is. Harry and I stomped all over each other. We got scared, and in our circular stampede, endlessly carouselling between the shelter of each other, the (unpiercing, shallow, and therefore safe) refuge of our endless backup plans, and the assurance of the exit, we trampled each other. Until, in November, we found ourselves flattened and dirty, the sorry refuse left for the streetsweepers at the end of the parade's reveries. Our injuries to one another are the pi of numbered indiscretions. Not infinite, but far too close to list. And so I will round it up. We assailed each other with 3.14 units of insult and blasphemy against the very name of that love which we claimed strung us together. And pi is the key to the angry circle. The numbered faults are the equation by which we find the circumference of our grudgery. Towards the end, we were conjoined by the pain. Made siamese twins by the constraining ligaments of our mutual anger. It held us together and forced the endless stepping-on-toes sloppy foxtrot of those who cannot seem to love each other in step.
Our trespassed are ours alone, and not to be shared with any web aside from the one woven between us. But in spite of having watched all the anguish heaped and gathered like the garbage of one infamous Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout, we found ourselves in need of one another. For he is the only man, aside from my mother and the lawyers who knows the words that ended the world, and he's the one whose hair I cut, and who knows exactly what I'm talking about when I start singing the lyrics to songs from The Goofy Movie. He knows I hate underwear and when I demand romance, he gives me the flamethrower in Zombie Apocalypse.
And when I stay the night, and wake up with terrible breath, I sunlight against red eyelashes, and the strangest mix of blue and brown in wide open eyes, who haven't yet remembered to be afraid of me.
It's not perfect. It still hurts. I ask 800 masochistic questions a day, and catch myself looking for proof that I'm failing. Everything feels like a clue, but I am no detached Sherlock Holmes, and I am making clues to fit theories, and not the other way around.
But I want to try. Some part of me has to know that I did my best to hold on to the man who knows all my shame and secrets, even if he doesn't remember them. Because even if it isn't movie perfect, when someone lets you have the flamethrower, you don't walk away from that lightly. So maybe I'll lose, but you never know, I've got the flamethrower now.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Saturday, April 17, 2010
because my tears were full of eyes
Today, I am cleaning up wreckage from hurricane Rachel; today, and tomorrow, and for quite some time. Slowly, always, and daily.
There's an e.e. cummings poem that google, for all it's omniscience, is unacquainted with.
It's about an organgrinder and a fortune telling cockatoo whose tidings make all of New York's 14th Avenue disappear. He interrupts the word disappear to elaborate, in true Ed style. Like this:
dis(because my tears were full of eyes)appeared.
And that's what it's like. That one line encompasses everything I'm trying to say today. I'm trying to say that sometimes I can't even finish the word. I have to stop saying what I'm saying and being who I am just to feel it all. I am my own arrhythmia. I am the girl who gets so wrapped up in exactly what I'm feeling that I forget to look around.
The world disappears because my eyes are bobbing uselessly in the vat of my emotion. I miss the opportunity to improve, and I cannot see the ground in front of my feet. My vision drowns in a sea of strangely intense feeling. In the times of great travesty, I stumble, and become more tear than eye and the life I am making falls away.
But not this time. In the still following each of the storms of my life, I find myself prostrate and breathless before the fact that irrevocably, my life is mine.
And this time, I will be more eyes than tears.
There's an e.e. cummings poem that google, for all it's omniscience, is unacquainted with.
It's about an organgrinder and a fortune telling cockatoo whose tidings make all of New York's 14th Avenue disappear. He interrupts the word disappear to elaborate, in true Ed style. Like this:
dis(because my tears were full of eyes)appeared.
And that's what it's like. That one line encompasses everything I'm trying to say today. I'm trying to say that sometimes I can't even finish the word. I have to stop saying what I'm saying and being who I am just to feel it all. I am my own arrhythmia. I am the girl who gets so wrapped up in exactly what I'm feeling that I forget to look around.
The world disappears because my eyes are bobbing uselessly in the vat of my emotion. I miss the opportunity to improve, and I cannot see the ground in front of my feet. My vision drowns in a sea of strangely intense feeling. In the times of great travesty, I stumble, and become more tear than eye and the life I am making falls away.
But not this time. In the still following each of the storms of my life, I find myself prostrate and breathless before the fact that irrevocably, my life is mine.
And this time, I will be more eyes than tears.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
the injustice of un-learning
Read carefully. I am opening a gate. Because I cannot see how else to make you understand, I am going to tell you a story.
When I was three I was placed in a foster home. The minutes of my life before about sixth grade are only Polaroids. I have an silent album of my days that are merely a glance and a feeling; nothing more. The first is of a cabinet in the laundry room of my mother's house. It is filled and overrun by canned goods. I see in my mind the concentric rings atop a can. Then a snap inside of me and a feeling of doom. I feel apocalypse and holocaust and the end of days in an instant. I feel the world finishing it's last revolution but somehow, the green beans at my feet survive. But all I see are yawning cabinet doors; corn, green beans, and the end of all things.
The second is a twin to the other; they are born of and fed by the same action. Flesh of the instant in which I shattered the universe and all of the pieces ran off into the ether in a squabbling line and chased each other from then until now. The pieces have run one behind the other and formed my days from that instant to this.
I am three years old, just as in the first, but I am alone. I am in a big, soft bed. It is so much bigger than me and the infinite dark of the bedroom in the first of my foster homes stretches out around me. There is a door that is too far away. It is hell. I know this as surely as I know I brought myself here. As surely as I know God hates liars. The mental Polaroid is filled with the sort of shame one could only feel in the deep hateful echelons of hell reserved for conniving little girls. I think if there is a hell and I find my way there it will be a blackened room with a perfect bed in which I cannot sleep; into which the wrong person tucks me every incalculable night; in which I lay alone, with only my shame to sing me goodnight until Satan has brought upon me the vengeance which I deserve.
These Polaroids belong to each other in the way the dawn belongs to the night. One must follow the other in the perdurable loop of my story. They must and will and always have because in my tiny fluttering heart rested the conviction that I deserved the temperate inferno of that farmhouse bedroom. I could not fathom a world in which something could happen that I did not deserve.
And so, my opinion was formed, and the dominoes fell. For 16 years, they fell and threatened to fall for another hundred. The how is not so important to our tale, nor is the when, or the why; but one day, the ripples stopped. I had shaped a life around a faulty idea of what I deserved and what was to be had. I was wrong.
One of life's most poignant tragedies and one of it's greatest opportunities for redemption is that each of us alone are that which determines what we deserve. Through what we are shown of the world and ourselves, we create bounds for our own worthiness. This is who I thought I was for most of my life. A liar. A coward. A destroyer of worlds. And I will spend the rest of my life unraveling the grim tapestry of myself.
We settle. We seek the love, the life, and the future we think we deserve and immutably, we find it. Even when it is so much less than we are. While drowning in the consumptive hatred of our personal hells, we reject the redemptive oxygen of higher hopes. We hear nothing over the roaring congress of our consciences lobbying in favor of our preconceptions, and we are deafened to the unquenchable potential of our humanity.
What I am trying to say, ever so endlessly is this: you are more. Stop. I don't care what conviction holds you prisoner to your current state. It is lying to you. Any part of yourself that denies you the flight of sanguine self-reverie is not your friend. The cruel cry of your ignominy is fallacy. Your imperfection, your humanity, makes you no less sacred; it makes you no less able to be accepted and rejoiced or washed clean in the teary salt-bath of your repentance.
Can a three year old lie? Can she bring down the sky? I don't know. I may never know what I did in the instant of the cupboard or see the endless strings of damage I did, whether by my troth or my lie. But that cannot be the sum of me. The narrow damaged line of my sight through all those years cannot have taken in the totality of my possibility. Something in me tells me that it matters so much less than what happens now. I may have been the toddler messenger of Armageddon, but I am worthy of this life.
I have been unlearning and unwinding the endless threads of my assumed destiny for 3 years, and I have only in the last month seen how beautiful a job I did with what I was given, how beautiful I always was, even as the incarnation of havoc, and it has made me love what I can be all the more.The terrible injustice is this: I was told for years that I deserved more and I never heard it. You will not hear me, and it breaks my heart. You will have to unlearn on your own, and when you do, we'll be waiting.
Please, trust me. I know things. Remember, I've been to hell.
P.S. This didn't say what I wanted it to say.It's for all of us, and I would scream it if I thought a single one would really hear.
When I was three I was placed in a foster home. The minutes of my life before about sixth grade are only Polaroids. I have an silent album of my days that are merely a glance and a feeling; nothing more. The first is of a cabinet in the laundry room of my mother's house. It is filled and overrun by canned goods. I see in my mind the concentric rings atop a can. Then a snap inside of me and a feeling of doom. I feel apocalypse and holocaust and the end of days in an instant. I feel the world finishing it's last revolution but somehow, the green beans at my feet survive. But all I see are yawning cabinet doors; corn, green beans, and the end of all things.
The second is a twin to the other; they are born of and fed by the same action. Flesh of the instant in which I shattered the universe and all of the pieces ran off into the ether in a squabbling line and chased each other from then until now. The pieces have run one behind the other and formed my days from that instant to this.
I am three years old, just as in the first, but I am alone. I am in a big, soft bed. It is so much bigger than me and the infinite dark of the bedroom in the first of my foster homes stretches out around me. There is a door that is too far away. It is hell. I know this as surely as I know I brought myself here. As surely as I know God hates liars. The mental Polaroid is filled with the sort of shame one could only feel in the deep hateful echelons of hell reserved for conniving little girls. I think if there is a hell and I find my way there it will be a blackened room with a perfect bed in which I cannot sleep; into which the wrong person tucks me every incalculable night; in which I lay alone, with only my shame to sing me goodnight until Satan has brought upon me the vengeance which I deserve.
These Polaroids belong to each other in the way the dawn belongs to the night. One must follow the other in the perdurable loop of my story. They must and will and always have because in my tiny fluttering heart rested the conviction that I deserved the temperate inferno of that farmhouse bedroom. I could not fathom a world in which something could happen that I did not deserve.
And so, my opinion was formed, and the dominoes fell. For 16 years, they fell and threatened to fall for another hundred. The how is not so important to our tale, nor is the when, or the why; but one day, the ripples stopped. I had shaped a life around a faulty idea of what I deserved and what was to be had. I was wrong.
One of life's most poignant tragedies and one of it's greatest opportunities for redemption is that each of us alone are that which determines what we deserve. Through what we are shown of the world and ourselves, we create bounds for our own worthiness. This is who I thought I was for most of my life. A liar. A coward. A destroyer of worlds. And I will spend the rest of my life unraveling the grim tapestry of myself.
We settle. We seek the love, the life, and the future we think we deserve and immutably, we find it. Even when it is so much less than we are. While drowning in the consumptive hatred of our personal hells, we reject the redemptive oxygen of higher hopes. We hear nothing over the roaring congress of our consciences lobbying in favor of our preconceptions, and we are deafened to the unquenchable potential of our humanity.
What I am trying to say, ever so endlessly is this: you are more. Stop. I don't care what conviction holds you prisoner to your current state. It is lying to you. Any part of yourself that denies you the flight of sanguine self-reverie is not your friend. The cruel cry of your ignominy is fallacy. Your imperfection, your humanity, makes you no less sacred; it makes you no less able to be accepted and rejoiced or washed clean in the teary salt-bath of your repentance.
Can a three year old lie? Can she bring down the sky? I don't know. I may never know what I did in the instant of the cupboard or see the endless strings of damage I did, whether by my troth or my lie. But that cannot be the sum of me. The narrow damaged line of my sight through all those years cannot have taken in the totality of my possibility. Something in me tells me that it matters so much less than what happens now. I may have been the toddler messenger of Armageddon, but I am worthy of this life.
I have been unlearning and unwinding the endless threads of my assumed destiny for 3 years, and I have only in the last month seen how beautiful a job I did with what I was given, how beautiful I always was, even as the incarnation of havoc, and it has made me love what I can be all the more.The terrible injustice is this: I was told for years that I deserved more and I never heard it. You will not hear me, and it breaks my heart. You will have to unlearn on your own, and when you do, we'll be waiting.
Please, trust me. I know things. Remember, I've been to hell.
P.S. This didn't say what I wanted it to say.It's for all of us, and I would scream it if I thought a single one would really hear.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
oh my.
what such thing
could deliver this hope?
this rising trembling hope
on which i am poised
high above my simple days
and waiting for a
fall.
the throat of such a thing
could from it's humid blackness
hum sweet nothings
into my ears
making my long blue veins
course lightning
standing all my greatest fears
on end.
such a thing could make each part of me
in turn
blaze with a cold fire of anticipation
and buzz with vibrating
happiness.
each in turn, but not
all at once.
that would be too much.
it would
all
be too much.
entirely too much to bear.
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