An Open Letter to the Women I Have Been.

To you:

The poet, the scientist, the mischievous turd, the cynic, the painfully anxious, the mewlingly broken hearted, the activist, the daring, the fearful, the introvert, the extrovert, the girl who broke the rules, the girl who fumbled the important things and lost badly, the girl who couldn't lose, the dropout, the scholar, the giggling fool, the insecure, the certain, the drunk, the farmer, the builder, the actress, the nurse, the nanny, the server, the loner, the one who was crushed, and the one who stood up, the artist, the self-lover, and the self-loather, the couch potato, the mountain climber, the girl who hates pudding, the one is afraid of heights but won't miss the view, the girl who jumped in a frozen creek naked at the stroke of midnight in the woods with her best friends, the mother who will tell her son many of these stories.

There have been days when it feels as though to have been one of you is a betrayal to the ones who came before. A betrayal to the one who survived the lack of love, to have ever been the one who begged for it.

I watched the girl who wanted to be president lose her keys, her shoes, her dignity in the pursuit of fun.

Countless times, when craving flirtation and prettiness, I felt the scorn of the 8 year old girl who spent hours formatting and writing for her "Girl's Only Magazine" Her tiny blue eyes watched me put on too much blush, and then wash it off again.

I have crucified you for your incongruencies, for your inability to keep it together. For your inability to take only forward steps. But for all that, this one has that one's nose, and she of the peaceless days long slumbers has the eyelashes of she who faded reluctantly into rest with the stars dripping quicksilver meteors down all around her at nearly the breaking of morning. And bit by bit I can see the way her cheekbones are present thirty pounds in either direction. For all of my shame, I can and must claim you all.

I can see the same mouth that once spilled its pain as hate after having too long been told of its deficiencies has in it's time laid a kiss which brought a man to it's knees, a kiss which brought a mother peace, and gave a child rest.

I can see the family resemblance, that each of us has needed the other, will need the next, and generations of myself will have to push forth from this long and varied life and though they will take with them the hereditary "me," I can ask nothing of you who have been and will be but to be yourselves. To take the tiny cellular blocks of memory and happenstance and make what you can of them. You have all been so very resourceful.

So in the dark morning with the heater churning and the sweet shuffling morning sounds of the man I love murmuring through the house, I choked on my gratitude.

Because one morning soon, I will wake up and the air will have changed around me. Will have changed within me, and this season of uncertainty will be simply that; a season. One small lifetime to be lived out, without complaint or resistance, until I am restructured, resurrected by change.

So thank you.

In the Kitchen, the floor was covered in mud. Tiny brown pawprints, one on top of the other on top of the other, like a herd of cats had been disassembling my kitchen in perfectly decided upon chaos. Footprints on the counter. On the chairs. And earthworms, five of them, on the floor in front of the fridge. Stretched and vulnerable, without the strength of soil into which to recede to roil and boil in their hungry, patient way, there was something obscene about them. Spots of them hardening, sometimes entire sides exposed to the mean heat of my apartment crusted over, burnt. Burnt offerings to the great dark god which gives the milk, which rains downs tins of sweet kitten ambrosia. On this great day, the day which was to be the end of all things, my cats held sacrificed great gifts to Saint Frigidaire. They dressed themselves in soil-brown heathen warpaint and left for me a map of their wild early morning dance.

I picked up all the earthworms, wet them in the sink, and tossed them over the porch railing, back to the soil. We'll have none of that here.

The world won't be ending today.

On the bus today, after a midmorning crisis of faith in my own ability to get my shit together and see the beauty all around me, after an quiet outcry from the fevertangled sheets of my bed for something, anything to shake loose this funk which has made me oh so very tired, and oh so tired of myself, the universe answered. A man at the front with a band-aid on this chin announced his own insanity in the cruel, blunt, and searingly unfunny way of those in greatest need. "Just came from the psych doctor. Still crazy, but heavily medicated." followed by guffaws from his fellow passengers like blows from a blunt object.

He kept going, needing acknowledgement.  "Haven't killed anyone in at least six months," And I almost smiled. Here was this hooded, tired, ugly man, who had the nerve to get what he needed. To take from the world what he most craved. An exhibitionist is a survivalist genius without tact, he is tearing open his own wounds in public, hoping one of these witnesses to his infection will happen to have the cure. In return, he was hawking the opportunity to indict his own vulnerability. To laugh at the crazy fellow. It was a hell of a bargain.

The Bus driver said back, "And before that it wadn't your fault, right?"  The man next to me, in a long orange coat, a brown faux fur cap saw my discomfort and began to hum an exotic tune. Just loud enough for the two of us.

And in the front of the bus, a woman: "Hey man, what's your name."  "Today's Mick, depends on which personality is drivin the boat though," said the man with the band aid, and from the bus driver, "But not who's driving the bus." And louder next to me, the exotic hum became a song. Each word flowed into the next. The words water, tripping over one another, upon collision breaking the tension between the two, molecules colliding, becoming one body, dripping down and pooling into the next and each pool became bigger than the last, louder. and each sound became simultaneously more foreign and familiar.

The laughter and the boasts from the front of the bus became raucous. Each question to the man bleeding out bad humors. The music on the stereo, the refugee man singing next to me, the cars outside, and the too hard beating of my own tremulous heart under my own quiet laughter. They all collided, became waves crashing against one another. The deep rhythmic rush of the African song the great undertow, pulling everything out and down. Drowning the disjointed disharmony of separate need. And then, I recognized a single word in the song. Nakupenda. It is the nearest direct translation of the phrase "I love you," in the swahili tongue. And then a phone rang. The man singing in Swahili answered it. The greater song froze, fell, crashed, and shattered again into noise. Into the smaller shards of lonely it receded.

The front of the bus lost interest, the band-aided man tried to bring them back, "Ain't had to kill any exes, they're tryin' to take care of that on their own," but lost out in the end to the great exodus at the transit station. Each person filing out through the doors with his or her belongings, not noticing what had been left behind in the silence of the bus.

When I stepped out on to the sidewalk, I couldn't remember where I was going. I just kept looking around, feeling disoriented by the buildings and the traffic until a driver asked me if I was lost. Was I waiting for a particular transfer? They busses were leaving. Was I okay?

I thanked him and said I'd have to let him know

you oughtta hear the mirror in my house

She's got a foul ass mouth. And the other day, when I was getting ready, I tried on 7 outfits. And that tall Sasquatch of mine, he came to the door, and he peered his beardy face around it, and stood there all swoony, looking like no one had ever been more comfortable in his own skin. He saw that I was in outfit number seven and said, "You know we are throwing this party, right?"  I huffed and mumbled my way out of #7, and into #8.

He went back to the living room, and I could hear him stand up, sit down, stand up again. And I shouted, "I'm sorry, it's just that self-loathing makes all my clothes fit weird." But the truth is, self-loathing has been shrinking my clothes for way. too. long.

And that mouthy little mirror, she's the mean girl at the party. So, about a year ago, I started giving myself these creepy little video pep talks. Things sucked. I sucked. It was a way to confront my endless distaste with my over emotive facial expressions, while circumventing the idea of participating in actual self-talk. I imagined having a conversation with a friend I loved dearly. I imagined being confronted with my own set of problems from an outside source, and then gave myself the best, most loving advice I could.

Then, I watched it back. Paused once in the middle to yak, because, seriously? And then watched it again. And again.  I watched the way I spoke. The way I raised my eyebrows, the sweetness I'd allowed for this person that I loved. I almost didn't believe it was me. But then, who else could it be?

I grew up hating my body. I despised the way pants that didn't want my wearing them, strained against my skin and left red marks. These were a sign of rejection. I hated the squeak of my voice, the perpetual optimism.

But now? I'm twenty three years old for christ's sake. I've lived a thousand lives. Kicked cervical cancer and blindness in the face. I graduated high school when I was sixteen. I'm a talented writer, a good friend, and sometimes I even smell nice. And I still let that mirror talk to me like I'm the dowdy vanilla ice cream sidekick in a 90's rom-com.
I could hand you forty freudian reasons for this gross over-analysis of the feud between my stomach and the elastic waistband of my minnie mouse skirts, but body-hate is body hate. I have both a physical aversion to and a morbid fascination with vanity and most of the time, I cringe at the idea of posing for a camera, of playing in front of it.

Yet this once removed courtesy, this gift of myself to myself, it started to change things. I started recording myself doing things I loved. Practicing monologues. Telling bad jokes. Watching a clip that I love and giggling to the point of hysterics.

And when it's me, when I remember that I'm watching Rachel, sometimes she has no top lip, and her gums are showing, and that is too much breast showing, and why doesn't her hair ever look put together? And heels, Rach? Really? That giant scar on your foot from when you got hit by the car? Well, it doesn't do your beefy calves any favors.

But when it's someone else, when I can forget for a second that that's me? I want to be that girl. She looks so damn happy.


And yeah, that's a lot of cleave. And yeah, a guy once told me that I'd be damn near perfect if I had a top lip, and yeah, sometimes, my catty mirror sounds an awfully lot like him. But I sometimes get so wrapped up in the magic of my own life, that I forget my entire body. And that girl is a disembodied golden light against the plain white walls of whatever rental she happens to be living in. And she's more than a wrinkled nose, she is the joy that wrinkled it.

And she doesn't let self-loathing borrow her clothes.

too much

"No,"

"Write a blog."

"No." I said, standing in the sagging seat of my old red reading chair, my arms around his shoulders, my eyes a half inch above his. "I'm bigger than you, for once, and I said no." I leaned in and knocked my forehead against his.

"Not much bigger." and he smiled that whole wheat smile and turned his greenhouse gaze on me. I felt myself blossom a little as he tilted his chin up to kiss me, raised his heels just slightly off the ground, and was once again the big to my little. "Just write something, please"

"Nothing doing." He kissed me again. And again. If our mouths in these last few weeks have been scrawling out the story of what we will be, our kisses have been the spaces between words. Sighs as verbs. Shoulder nibbles forming hour long inquiries into what it means to love. Me, chewing my lips as he talks, as he teaches without ever trying, saying with my bad habits: I hear you. I know you. And in the spaces between each silent conjugation of "to learn you," "to see you," a kiss to breathe. To pause it all.

I watched him turn to walk down the stairs, looping the half wall between my living room and I watched his sway, his comfort in his own body. I jumped from the seat of my reading chair, put one foot on the arm of it, cleared the gap between the half wall and the chair, and stood, leaning imperiously over him. My head touched the ceiling, and he was a half story below me. I needed five more seconds of the direct sunlight of his smile. I needed to feel myself expanding under it's light. So I stretched out over the stairs, to the teeter totter tipping point of my girlchild balance, told him it simply wasn't going to happen, and kissed him again.

These have been my mornings. These, and the longest cups of coffee known to man, pulling length from the rubber band moments that threaten to snap back and pull me headlong and stinging into the runaway glory of fuller days.

I have sat dreamily in front of this blog-love of mine. In front of this first illicit kiss of overshare tiny celebrity, and wondered what I would tell you. What is too much?

There is the line, always the line, between saying too much and saying too little. There is the foggy breath-now vapor-now finger drawn mirror note's difference between giving too much to the invisible interweb-world and not being able to give at all.

There are so many things I'd love to say, about the things growing inside of me. About the things I suddenly find germinating from seeds I already possessed under the watchful eyes of hope, of happening.

But there is not a breath of my truth which has not traveled through every part of me, which has not taken refuge from cynical eyes in my most intimate places. So I said "No, nothing doing." when all I meant was "Yes, let's tell it all, and tell it bold, and tell it loud."

Sometimes I'll be sitting perfectly still, or reading, or talking nine miles per second and I'll feel my heartbeat in my fingers, in the backs of my knees, in the tender places behind my ears, and that vigilant always waking place behind my eyes. I can feel my pulse the very mitochondria of my cells and I'm almost certain that I am nothing but one big beating heart. I feel with utter certainty that these limbs are arteries and that I am a mass of ventricles and this squeezing, sloshing, fluttering sinew of a human being will at any moment be shocked into life or death by the merest electric hope.

So how do I bare just enough, when any bit of me is all of me? How do I only say his name, and not blush. How do I only tell the philosophy without the truth? How do I tell of the fullness, without detailing the very chemical compostion of all those things which have brought me near to bursting.

I think I won't. I think, before the curtain falls, I'll have said it all.

nothing is wasted

Women who grew up in the midwest in the dust bowl days buy their broth now. Swanson cans. They wait stacked neatly on the store shelves, bleating their fluorescent convenience at the passing coupon holders. But I know by the way my grandmother counts the potatoes out that it was not always this way. She'll stand in the kitchen, this woman who whistles through her teeth, who got a shotgun for Mother's Day the year she turned 81, who was the first woman in the state of Kansas to coach a winning little league baseball team, and for all her certainty, she still counts the potatoes.

In her head, after all these years, one is for Annie, two is for Cass, three is for Al Junior, four is for Jerry, five is for Dan, six is for Mark, seven is for Nick, eight is for Becky, nine is for Dad, ten is for Mom, plus one, always one extra, for creaming, and just in case. And even when the numbers grew or shrank, and she wondered, are Dan's coming to dinner tonight? With 23 Grandchildren, forty odd greats. An army of well fed and well loved progeny to bring her all the potatoes she could dream of, and she counts.

In the summertime, my grubby little bitten nails, and little bowl cut bowed in concentration, learning to peel with paring knife, scolded for taking away too much of the white with the gritty brown, on the back porch swing, swaying lightly over the garbage can. "Rachel, did you count? One for each of us, plus one. Count them out, honey. Remember, Dad's coming in tonight."  Because nothing could be wasted.

Even the minutes. Eight in the morning was far too late. I'd wake up in on of my daddy's old t-shirts, down to my six-seven-eight year old knees, in the room he and his four brothers slept in all together until the girls started leaving home, and Grandma would sing up the stairs to the attic that still held the sweet-dirt smell of a little girl's summertime night sweat. Because even the morning was too much for her to waste. There were sparrows to catch. Cheerios to eat. Trees to climb. Stories to tell. Books needed reading, Gardens needed tending. Treehouse picnics needed preparing.

And so I've carried these things with me, like moth holes in a shirt, paint splatters on my "night gowns". I earned the knowledge she woke up inside me like the scars on my knees from the locally quarried gravel on the road where I learned to ride a bike. I live marked by the knowledge that to waste anything is to give away a days worth of sunflowers growing in the ditches. It's to give away yourself. I know this the way a tadpole knows it will be a frog. She gave that to me. She counted every potato.

And still, some days, I cannot write the story. I cannot tell the tale, run the miles, paint the treehouse. The bed is too comfortable. The wind is too cold. I've spent years squandering the moments, forgetting to count my potatoes. The long walks down rusted railroad tracks halfway to Jamestown and the carrot peelings boiling for hours with the chicken bones for stock seem faraway. Those things are lessons taught to a different girl; someone made of sterner stuff, of endless gumption and cans of worms. These days I wake up with feet long separated from the bark of a cottonwood tucked deep inside a featherbed and it is so hard to believe that these are same freckles given to me by those prairie summers in my thrift store bathing suit.

And I waste the days. And it becomes harder to love this girl who stares back in the mirror.

I walked home tonight under a moon bloated with the dripping golden light of the spring equinox. It looked edible, like the dazzling over-ripe fruit of the Tree of Ignorance. I wanted to burst this whole fermented globe of flaxen forgetfulness on my tongue and let it burn away these things I don't want to know about myself.

It looked as if it could be taken down and tossed, a great sagging balloon filled to bursting with the light of moments slipped past without having to be counted. I wanted it to splat on the icy cement and for my laughter to bounce of the silent walls of my neighbor's houses. I wanted to pour out this lunar delirium and across the carrot peeling days I'd been dropping to the bottom of my sink and make them shine.

I stopped short at the sight of my front gate. These days are not wasted. Nothing is wasted. I can use these stutter steps, these celery leaf afternoons. These are the dregs. But they must be put into something better. The coffee grounds must go to compost, the old paint on the new treehouse door. These days must be milked for their fattened spring moons. For laughing out loud into the cold nights. The sadness, the loneliness, stewed into something to warm myself by, when my fingers, and nights are cold.

Nothing can be wasted.

We drove into Wednesday. In raucous and self -percussion, drumming our excitement into one another. Singing reckless songs into an icy snow-less night.

But when the rest stopped to chat on the trail, I ran ahead. I wanted the quiet; to prepare myself I wanted to feel my body fight the cold. The heat in my calves forcing retreat from the air as they burned straight up the mountainside. I'd stop every few hundred feet, every few switchbacks, and turn off my headlamp and wait for the cold to come back.

It'd be near morning before we would see any meteors. Above the Payette, silver spilled-milk cloudy and splashdyed blue near the green-black midnight mountain was a swollen midwinter moon. The cloud conduit carried her glow in an arc across the river basin, and from ridgeline to ridgeline the sky pulsed brightly enough to make the icy rushing river as perfectly contrasted as a black and white photo.

So I walked alone to feel my skin prickle at the shy proposition the cold made it. The 20 degree wind with it's entreaty to tremble; coaxing shivers from exposed skin. The trail which steepened, and legs which answered, pushing up.

I reached the top and took my time undressing. Waited long enough for friends to catch up. The noise, the excitement returning. The freedom of near-strangers, and the best of friends changing in the night a white arm here, a stumbling foot here. White wine being unloaded, bodies unburdened bare to the sky, and then recloaked for modesty, for shamefacedness.

I thought I'd be lonely. I always am at the hot springs. The water heated in the gut of the ancient earth, spilled forth as what? a gift? the excrement of a sleeping earth? I find baptism in the joy, and am nearly always silenced by it, humbled and quieted. But I wasn't lonely.

When we climbed back down it was 5 AM and the moon had refused to set. The boulders in the river were still onyx shining with near frozen moisture and the river was a thousand shades of blazing white, and brighter than the moon in it's return of her light. And 5 of us snuggled up in the back of the truck.

My friends, talking in two's beside me until the the clouds started to clear, and the meteors came. Insisting on being seen, on outshining both the bloated moon and river. And we were children, squealing with delight.

Fat meteors dripping down molten through a sky. Me, silent in the middle. Alone, and entirely unlonely.

And I think maybe when we drove back at 8 AM, all of us humbled, exhausted, content, listening to Elephant Revival, I was looking for something bigger.

The rest of the world was getting up, and dressing for their day, for hump day. Coming over the top of things and cresting the hard times, escaping their bottoms, their darkness. I'm not. I'm at the bottom of a great big canyon, and climbing up, just to climb back down, and fighting the cold just to feel it tug at my skin all the better. And there is so much to be done, so much to push through, and Wednesday is just another day.

Yup, I'm at the bottom. But there's no darkness here. So I think I've got it right