A crack of light, a string of pearls

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2009-08-29T15:15:00.000-07:00

We wake up in the morning, make our beds, move through time because it won’t wait for us. We vacuum the carpet before the inlaws come over for dinner. We sweep out the garage on Saturday morning. All the while circling and circling that cold hard fact, planted in our front yard for all the world to see.

From where I sit I can just glimpse the sign, slightly bending to the wind’s strong will as it stakes its ground. It waves back and forth. The sharp red letters blinking in the corner of my vision: FORECLOSED, FORECLOSED, FORECLOSED.

When I married you, you didn’t promise this. You made me laugh and tilted your head just so, then and there creating the only criteria for my love. I watch the fading sun spread fingers of light across the bare floors. It doesn’t seem like love is enough anymore.

I'll Eat You Up!

2009-08-24T18:58:00.000-07:00

My friend posted today: Inside all of us is a Wild Thing.

How did he know?

How to be inspired.

2009-03-12T18:03:00.000-07:00

How to be inspired?

How to be inspired, when your day is padding back and forth to the copier.
When your to do list reinvents itself with every passing hour
When your email inbox announces the crises of the day, and you wonder if there are really people on the other end
or if you only answer to a machine.

How to be inspired, when you want to make it home in time
to fit in a run
and did you remember to take a frozen assembly meal from the freezer
so there is something to eat tonight?

How to be inspired, when you crawl into bed
and you wonder if you really looked someone in the eye that day
or did you just do your job so that tomorrow there will be a
roof
and food, and
even cable tv

Punctuation Lesson

2009-02-24T21:36:00.000-08:00

“He burned up, they say.”

My brain doesn’t register what I’m hearing through the phone. “The house caught on fire, middle of the night. Damn kerosene heaters. Ms. Lacey pulled Marquis from bed, but when they got to the doors they were melted shut. They went for the windows, busted the glass, but they have the bars on them. It wasn’t any use. They say they just huddled together and waited to die.”

Waited to die… waited to die. Somehow that part gets through to me. All I can see is his face. Marquis grinning guilty as a cat with a canary in the cafeteria after school. Marquis huddling with his grandmother waiting to die. “Okay,” I reply weakly. “Yeah, okay, right.” Michelle’s strong voice comes through on the other end buoying me to the earth. “Prayer service is all set for tomorrow at the school. I’ll meet you.” We hang up. I’m sitting in my car with the engine running. Just a moment ago I was annoyed, waiting for red lights, waiting for grocery lines, waiting for perscriptions. Marquis, yeah, he was waiting to die.

I get home and throw my keys on the counter. Scout looks up. “Marquis died today." I walk through the living room to the bedroom. I lay down on the cool sheets and press my face into mattress to get my bearings. There was this gigantic rip in time just a few minutes ago yet I find myself in my house, time moving forward still. I don’t get it. Scout comes in and sits on the bed. I’m thankful he knows not to say anything. I don’t get why I think I should be comforted. Why I have a right in this moment to think about myself. Here one of my students dies at the age of six and not ten minutes later I’m already about myself. Is our selfishness part of our survival instinct? He’s gone, now you must survive, says your body. Breathe the next breath; make a way.

It hit me as soon as Michelle said it, but I only now feel the fury rise up. Marquis would not be dead had he not been poor.There would have been no kerosene heater, no bars on the windows to hold him in. How do you make sense of a world like that?We aren’t really free, I think. Any of us. We think we are, some of us are fooled more than others.For Marquis, the truth just snuffed him out.Fury turns to ache. “It hurts,” I tell him.

The kids line up on the damp, green grass. They stare at the adults who somberly look into space. Their faces say: we should be sad. “Marquis died,” James tells me, waiting for my reaction. Like he’s getting to share the latest news. “Yeah, he did,” I reply. If I can’t process this, how would a six year old? Michelle walks among the school staff and parents. Her presence holds it all together it seems. Like some magnet that keeps us all from floating away. Later, when the art therapist comes the kids draw pictures. James writes in big block letters: WHY DID HE HAVE TO DIE? I trace the question mark with my finger. We were just working on punctuation last week, and here is James learning better than I could teach him how to put a question mark when you don’t know the answer.

I look hard at each of my kids. I want so badly to believe there is choice out there for them. For a moment I picture bars on the classroom windows and suddenly I shoot up from my chair. “What is it Mrs. Jackson?” asks Kayla. What is freedom, anyway?

Bedtime story

2009-02-06T21:31:00.000-08:00

When I was a little girl, I would sit beneath my window and hum stories into the air. I would write words in a melody that floated away on my breath, freed from the swirling, ruminating trap of my mind. I had no concept of audience, no fleeting fear of how my story might be received. It was just a simple truth that the story must be told; the walls of my bedroom layered with the joys and tragedies of a ten-year old imagination.

My bedroom was my kingdom, my hiding place. My bed had been passed down to me by my mother from her days in college. I liked to picture it in her dorm room, pressed up against the corner where she would curl up, biting into her pencil as she wrote a term paper or crying into the pillow after an argument with her boyfriend. She told me once in passing that my grandfather had built the bed for her as a going away gift for college. This precious slip of information sent me scurrying to my room where I traced the finished, painted wood with new eyes and memorized the moldings with my fingertips. What thrill to know that I possessed this overt display of my grandfather’s love for his child. A rare, subtle surfacing of expression for a man who owned my heart utterly.

I liked to imagine why he chose to build the bed. What inspired him to give her a bookshelf instead of a headboard to lay benath each night? Did he think that books might bring her comfort when she felt far from home? Did he imagine that his granddaughter might one day run her fingers along the spines of her favorite novels to soothe her in the dark when she couldn’t sleep? Did he build this bed to cradle her each night while she sang stories into the folds of her sheets?

Choose me.

2009-01-10T20:44:00.000-08:00

Pregnancy takes my body hostage. My body given over to another being and there’s nothing I control. The thought is fleeting; I just want you. Sam has put the children to bed.

“Do you really want this life with me?” he asks.

We are sitting side by side on the front porch steps watching evening settle like a blanket over the neighborhood.

“ Of course I do,” I reply.

We sit silently for a few minutes and then he speaks into the dusk:

“I mean, if we could go back and start it all over again would you have chosen this? Now that you know what its like, would you have?”

I lean forward and wrap my arms around my knees.

“I don’t think that way,” I tell him. “You are so wrapped up in me now – there’s no extracting it.”

Even as I look at him loneliness shoots through my body. I think we need to feel lonely like we need food and water. Like we gulp air.

The Mother's Club

2009-01-10T20:22:00.000-08:00

I’m mad because I feel like I have nothing of interest to offer you unless I am a mother. I’m mad because you just disappeared emotionally. I’m mad because you are in another orbit now – a beautiful orbit – but I’m not worthy of it. I’m mad because I feel like I have to have a baby for you to be interested in relating again. I’m mad because I know you have felt lonely among our friends and I don’t know what to do about it. I’m mad because you are absent – you aren’t fully there. I’m mad. I’m mad and it is selfish and wrong; I know. I’m mad and I shouldn’t be. It is silly. It is not worth it. You deserve better.

I don’t want to be like you. I always did, and now I don’t. I miss you so much, but I don’t see you anymore. Even when I see you, I don’t see you. I feel like I did something wrong. Not having kids when you did. Not wanting to talk about baby stuff all day. You are a fantastic mother – perfect, really. And I know I’m going to be messing it up something fierce when I get there. I am quite positive that I don’t know what you experience. I know you can’t understand it until you’ve been there. Until you have carried a baby nine months in your swollen belly, birthed a brand new person knit together in your own womb, of your own flesh and blood.

I just… I don’t want to be a mother like you. Perfect as you are. Attentive and patient and selfless as you are. I can’t do it. I’m so mad at you and it is so wrong of me. I just want to yell and cry because I miss you. You just left! You disappeared! You fell off the face of this earth and have never come back. We speak two different languages now, we are deaf to one anothers whispers. I can write this freely because you will never see it. I will regret it because the emotions are all wrong. I am all wrong. You don’t deserve this tirade. It is my own failings, my own insecurities, my own neediness that drives these words from my soul onto paper. There is no reason to be angry or even resentful. There is only reason to be kind, to show and receive grace, to be thankful for one another. There is only reason to believe that we are all doing the best we can and that is good enough.

Shapeshifter

2008-12-05T16:17:00.000-08:00

Tommy Bracken is fire and ice. His words spit at me searing blame, blame, blame across my forehead. Then in a moment he transforms. Cooling to a frozen, solid block of resentment. My words slip-sliding off his skin. How does someone whose face you could trace by heart suddenly become a stranger? Yet there is that flicker in the depth of his dark, foreign eyes; I think I recognize something. Or maybe it’s just my reflection. Tonight I climb the stairs; I choose again. I slip under the covers and shape myself against him into a space that we can share. The heat from his familiar back radiates towards me; I get chills.

Tyler Elizabeth

2008-12-03T22:49:00.000-08:00

You sat in the dark and you waited.
You were hidden from the world, but not from my heart.
The sounds you heard were foreign and harsh;
Can a noise feel cold?

Gone, the soft humming of your hiding place.
Gone, the safe walls of my skin, the crook of my arm.
I wept and you waited;
Can home be a person not a place?

I wore a path into the floorboards by your bedside – sacred ground now.
I touch new wrinkles near my eyes;
Precious signs of your existence.
Should that joy be the scars left from suffering?

Blood of my blood.
The very physicality of love is its trademark.
Marking its territory all over us.
What gift is this life?

Whispered or boomed into existence by the very voice of Love.

Love Potion

2008-11-14T15:54:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-09T19:09:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-08T17:16:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-08T17:06:00.000-08:00

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.