Love Potion

The way they loved each other was like a drug to those who watched. You found yourself entirely consumed by the exchanges taking place in their eyes, the conversation transpiring through body language, the sheer throbbing of their presences pressing up against one another. Many nights, when I returned home from an evening with them, I would fall into a chair and slowly let my breath expire. Whooshing outward, slow and soft, from every muscle and bone as if I’d been holding it in all night long. Their love wasn’t beautiful. No, that isn’t the word. It was… so straightforward, so unfeigned. It risked everything in its authenticity. It only knew how to be one way, come hell or high water, which often it did. I didn’t covet a love like that for myself. I just wanted to be near it. Like a drug, you know.

And then, he was gone. She’d come around and it was as if you could see this empty space beside her, inside her. Her sorrow trailed her in a way that seemed to unsettle even the sidewalk in her wake. It was in watching her walk away from me one day, as my eyes traced the waves of grief rippling out from the soles of her shoes that I decided I would write her story. Their story. It wasn’t beautiful, it was better than that. In my drugged state of dependence, their story looked my deepest fears straight in the eye. Their story set me free.

Fourth Baby

Fourth baby. Fourth baby. Gonna carry a fourth baby, birth a fourth baby, raise a fourth baby. Gotta make room in our bedroom and room in our hearts for more love – the potent, changeless kind. More scared than with the first one. How do you love so many, watch so many, feed so many? Do I erase a little more of me each time? I already can’t imagine this world without you now. You are imprinted in my idea of things. I can’t even touch your soft skin yet and you are as concrete as this floor I sit on. How do I watch you all, protect you all, know you all? It takes me oh so long to count: one, two, three, four – like looking four ways before crossing the street and then stepping into oncoming traffic.

I tell him I’m pregnant and his face is empty… or scared. Empty or scared I can’t tell. Okay, he says. Okay, that is wonderful. I nod harder, faster. Yeah, and then I look down the hall at the 3-year old who is staring at me sly grin on his face. Baby at my feet whimpers. But he’s not the baby anymore.

Fragility

Truth, in all its beauty, deals itself in pain sometimes. How fragile the human body that bears such weight on its back! Weight that spreads beyond the conclaves of the human heart to the fingertips, to the toes that root her to that place and moment in time forever. Can one give words to the moment that tear the fabric of her existence not in half, but to pieces? To pieces. She moves to her chair beneath the bay window. Hidden by the curtain made of the boughs of maple trees outside she writes:

Oh created world! And I belong to this creation. Connected by the desperation of fragility, by the very air that fills my lungs. What gift is this life? Whispered or boomed into existence by the very voice of Love.

A crack of light, a string of pearls

To write you have to be introspective. You have to quiet yourself in this certain space enough to connect to the undercurrent of your mind and feelings. You must go beyond emotion and thought, furrowing into the folds and layers, until you reach the pulsing, beating truth of things.

For a long time, I have hesitated to go there. Instead, satisfying myself with riding the surfacy, turbulent waves of experience, letting myself be thrown about, equating experience with reaction. To write, you have to go to this internal place that is more appropriately described with words like “source” and “creation.” You see, writing means seeing past the busy humming of our minds or spill of words from our mouths. It means seeing the fleeting look of fear, of longing, in the face of another or in the reach of their hand in the mundane processes of life. It means going there. And I just haven’t wanted to recently. Or more appropriately, I haven’t wanted to for a few years now. Maybe even since those first months of college when my last remaining innocence was burned through like a wildfire – leaving deadness and the smell of resignation in its path. Little by little, I closed up; softly and discreetly with only sad eyes and a wildly beating heart as evidence.

I stopped looking, really. And looking is what writers do; that is how they see the story and feel compelled to tell it. I’ve only known the type of writing I’ve needed to put on paper. Where my hand hungered to give words to that pulsing, beating truth of things. So for these passing years when I haven’t looked, when I closed up so quietly I did not even notice, there has been nothing to compel me to write. And then I sit here wondering how to get back to a place where I knew how to explore myself and others. Where I would watch the boy in the airport all bent up inside himself, and tuck him into my memory so that I might write his story – this fleeting glimpse of his life – where for a moment he was known and seen. Where I would see love so thick between two people I would reach out my hand as if to scoop it up and let it squeeze through my fingers. I can’t quite figure out how to get back to that place, that kind of existence.

I can only measure my movement in writing, and that comes eeking out painfully and full of fear. And writing is not writing when it is poisoned with fear. Writing is beautiful for the very reason that it sets free truth. It brings release, because something more is known; something is expressed and therefore exists in place and time. Fear has no place in this organic rite of passage. Fear stifles, it suppresses; it deadens you until you become accustomed to its numbing effect and then stop… furrowing, connecting, going there. So you wait (and you don’t even know you are waiting) for this moment when there is a crack of light. When you get out – for just a breath – from underneath the suffocating weight of emptiness and see a fleeting glimpse of that freedom. Or in the normal hum of your day from nowhere comes this whiff of the past or electric bolt through your body that reminds you of when you weren’t so… closed up. The crack of light, you know. You wait then, for it all to come rushing back. The raw, exposed feeling of searching for that undercurrent. The rush of words that the scene before you floods into your mind. You wait for that moment to plunge back into the deep down truth that lies beneath the actions and experiences bubbling to the surface. But it doesn’t work that way. The passageways of introspection must be tread on softly, lightly, patiently.

I must ease back into myself so as not to extinguish the flickering flame that is left. And then slowly by slowly, string words together like little pearls of truth emerging from the gradual opening of a clammed up soul.