Life's Illusions

But now it’s just another show, you leave them laughing when you go and if you care, don’t let them know. Don’t give yourself away… 

 Sometimes I wonder how I will die. 

It isn’t a fantasy so much as a prophecy I’m driven to fulfill. Drifting away with old age has never felt right. The universe has tagged me to be the last one standing as I’ve watched so many others fall. Hard as it is on me, I see my dad, the oldest of 11, methodically losing his siblings, and his son just months ago, his wife some weeks later, and friends upon friends upon friends. He appears to take I in stride but he’s a quiet type mostly, not one to carry on about losing any fight. Keep on keepin’ on is his philosophy. It wasn’t until this past year that his cracks have shown. 

It’s been said that our birthdays aren’t measured by the years, but by the events that fall between them. My life is a different one than a year ago. Sure, we change all the time before we realize it, and we wonder how that extra candle got there on the cake in just one day, but it wasn’t a day; it was an entire trip around a giant blazing ball. 

 

Time is a conundrum, isn’t it? 

It was only last December that I had to tell him that his son, the best of his friends, was gone. It was as if I’d punched him right in the pit of his belly. Just eight months but so long ago. I took that responsibility from the officers because they didn’t know him, or any of us. My brother was dead, a bullet from his own gun on that drizzled morning. I couldn’t let strangers have that moment, it belonged to us.

Sonny took control of his end. I don’t have it in me, though there’ve been days I’ve pleaded with the universe to take me out of the game, but those stars have other plans and no amount of begging brings a bargain. They like to toss me over a cliff but with some sort of cosmic bungee cord that pulls me back with a heavy snap. 

I once asked the question, “What is it like to live inside of a birthday cake? Does glitter tumble to the floor like a million little rainbows? Would horns blare at me each time I walked in?” Now I am compelled to ask what happens when the party’s over? Is there a heaven, and is it billows and clouds, or glitter and confetti? Are there ice cream castles and feather canyons everywhere? Does gravity not exist in such places? Because in my world, confetti falls to the ground just like our memories and hopes and expectations do. Glitter is nothing in the darkness. When we go, it’s ashes or it’s a box, and if we are fortunate, we leave behind some sort of proof that we lived. 

By all indications of my life, I’m inclined to believe I’ll meet my end in a fiery fashion, perhaps rumbling down the road, faster than I should be, and Death will blindside me. These are the themes of my story; lots of drama to make headlines. Mostly, I wonder what song will be my last. Sometimes I set aside songs in my head, like I’m creating a playlist. The ultimate and final mix tape. 

Such thoughts are lonely ones. I don’t know what was in my brother’s head when he pulled that trigger. I’d give anything to know because one last thought could give so many answers, It’s why I’m always writing mine down, so nobody will ever have to wonder. He is an event that happened between my birthdays, one I can’t let go of despite our differences and distances. He lingers like a lone candle in all of our lives. Dad turned 82 last week, my turn to age arrives in just 9 minutes. I’ll be a year older by the time I’ve written the last word of this and a day older than that when I read it to you. Like a festive cake with one slice missing, there is a palpable dissonance in the air. 

I could say that Sonny’s death was the most important thing, but it isn’t. Despite all of the madness with the obliteration of my family, I’ve at last found freedom, and I’ve learned that being free always comes at the cost of others. I’ve wished fervently to die before my husband, and even befpre my dad. Selfish, yes, but the thought of such loss haunts me. My brother took my wish to his grave, because now I have to hold on. I will not reach for that freedom at the cost of my father’s heart. 

Lessons never cut deep enough until we’ve seen both sides of them. 

The thing about confetti and clouds is that in the drifting time, they carry the best of us; our memories and our hopes. It’s the expectations that fall, and that’s okay because without expectation, it’s harder to fail. We need to cling to the mist and move forward until our moment comes to rest. 

My life is a different one than just a year ago.

The Timeless Flight

I think it’s going to be a long, long time til touchdown brings me ‘round again to find I’m not the girl they think I am at home…

Time is not a luxury.  It is the most expendable asset there is for humankind.  We spend our minutes quickly and without regard.

I have made peace with leaving some things unlived.  I have no need to chase a silly old bucket of adventures because focusing on the big things makes it easier to miss the little bits along the way.  The smaller pieces are the essence of us.

My little bits have been harder to find as of late.  Is it because I’m dwindling in the eyes of the world or am I too afraid to let the world see me anymore?  What’s left of me.  My life has become so viewable that there’s nothing left for myself.  I feel like an empty well – pennies landing at the bottom of my soul with a dull thump.  I’ve become so used to having these conversations with myself, I’ve forgotten to need other voices.

We tend to talk to ourselves when there’s nobody around to listen.

What I forget – besides everything – is that most people are often afraid to be heard.  Silence is easier.  When my voice becomes an echo, it carries my fears as it comes back around.  I become afraid that others no longer want to hear what I have to say.  Perhaps this is a consequence of the times; everyone has a platform, it’s common to feel obsolete.  Their silence, however, left me quite alone in a time I needed least to be.  

Something has been gnawing inside of me like a gutter rat trying to escape daylight.  It scuttles in futility until it dies, leaving the foul odor of a neglected death.  The cause of death:  loneliness.  I have this great fear that the events of this past year – my two near physical deaths eclipsing my metaphorical one - have burrowed into my marriage and left us staring at each other across the grave.  Inherently, I think we’re going to be okay – that we just need some space to process it all – but it’s still frightening.  Love never really dies, but it can change, and we all know I don’t do well with change. He has taken on the roles vacated by others, because they failed to show up. This has changed our dynamics a bit.

Yesterday, I had this amazing conversation with someone.  It was 32 years ago that I first heard Bob talking to me from the television.  I was 16 years old; angry, imprisoned, mired in eating disorders and wanting to hide in the darkest places of the universe.  I was sometimes able to lose myself in funny things, and stand-up comedy became a haven for me.  They were the bravest people I ever saw, standing there all alone talking to us about very real things.  Bob was different.  He wanted us to think.  Every word he slung was a challenge.  His sarcasm was an art form, his disdain of humanity had an odd allure, and it penetrated at a time I was unreachable.  When I look back at how I came to harness my inner power – my darkness, my questioning (even questionable) nature, my dry wit and penetrating pause – I can trace it back to someone who never knew his role.

So, I got to sit down and have a conversation with Bob.  Being awkwardly me, I didn’t know at first what to do with that.  I’ve become this person who has no filter whatsoever, so there’s a fear in what I’m capable of saying.  As we talked about anything and all, there was a sense of being understood for the first time in a very long while.  I didn’t have to defend my oddities.  I could simply and unabashedly be me.  It’s not a secret me, but it was a me who’d been cut out and amputated too.  So there I was talking to this stranger, only he’d been in my life forever.  At one point I expressed my fear of seeming like some crazed groupie, but Bob seemed okay with it.  It wasn’t that I was star-struck.  It was connecting with someone from my past.  Someone who never knew that he knew me. 

Then I found my bravery.  “You helped shape who I am today.”  That’s a thought I have occasionally expressed in my writing to very few, but have never said out loud to anyone.

Life is meant to be lived out loud.

Someone penetrated at a time that I’ve been unreachable.  I have allowed my loneliness to become a wall.  I miss me.  And I miss who I was when I trusted others.  I came away feeling unafraid to sit down and have this conversation with myself.  It isn’t a magic that dropped out of the sky.  It’s going to take time and some work to trust again.  Bob may forget our conversation as something insignificant though I hope it was a pleasant way to spend an hour.  I will likely forget everything said because it’s what I’m prone to do.  In writing this letter to myself, I’m adding to my collection of little bits that are gathered in notes and essays and books and sometimes in the memory of others. 

I am afraid that my trust in others was a delusion; that I wanted so badly to not die a neglected death that I believed something that never was.  I have learned to share the deepest, dirtiest parts of me to anyone from a distance, but now can’t trust anyone within a stone’s throw. 

My minutes are being tossed into that empty well and landing with a dull thump.  I don’t know how to come back from where I am.  I’ve done it before but I was another me then.   My unwanted survivalist instinct is shadowing me.  It’s telling me that this isn’t how I want to go. 

And my biggest fear is not being ready to go.

I miss the earth so much, I miss my life.  It’s lonely out in space on such a timeless flight…

Lyrics:  Rocket Man / Elton John

A Hundred Tears Away

Go ahead and cry now, just give in to the madness.  The only way to feel your joy is first to feel the sadness…

It’s that time of year again.  The first page on the calendar that prompts us to climb our unresolved mountains before we come sliding back down at our self-imposed December deadline.  I’ve never been into resolutions, yet never work well without a finite date to loom over me.

Having stumbled past the ultimate deadline that I thought Destiny had placed on me, I’m in a bit of a free fall at the moment.  We’ve all been posed the philosophical question “How would you spend your time if you knew when you were going to die?”  Been there, spent the time as wisely as I thought best.  I lived every emotion; joy, sadness, laughter and melancholy.  I’ve cried a hundred tears, a hundred thousand times.  It turned out to be some sort of twisted cosmic joke when I didn’t die as prophesized.  Either I had misread the roadmap or Destiny moved the finish line on me.

Am I to find the answer at the top of my mountain?  Because here at ground level, the question remained – where do I go from here?

I felt that death would be a gift; an ending to a life that had gone on too long.  I was tired.  I still feel twinges of it some days.  People ask me how I’m doing and when I respond with “okay,” they almost always return with “just okay?”  They don’t understand – “okay” means I’m not having that twinge.  It’s funny how we can see negatives and positives so differently from one another.

There are things in our lives that we have different names for but they all amount to the same; gifts, blessings, good luck or fortunes.  What many consider to be a blessing would be a sunny day.  For me, that would be a curse because of severe and rare health risks. To everyone else, Kryptonite is just a pretty green glowing crystal. 

It’s all about perception. 

I’ve always known I was different from most.  I have been the outsider to my own life, feeling the need to justify or defend my existence and its variables.  It was a linear way to the top of my mountain.  What I have learned to be my footholds are things intangible.  Love as it means to me, the meaning of life and my purpose in its evolution.  I say that I’m in a freefall, but it only feels that way because my deadline is no longer as obvious as the summit above me.  Where challenges and chaos have defined my path, I now feel there is reason.  It no longer has to be justified to anyone.  It only needs to make sense to me. 

Living each day as a lifetime is often a fleeting thing that falls away with the drudgery of an obligated existence.  Not for me; it is in me all of the time.  It’s a lot to carry, but and because the weight is not mine alone.  There have always been lessons, but over time the consequences weigh more.  While my life has always felt like I was climbing to nowhere, suddenly I understood that I’ll never get anywhere if I continue to carry so much dead weight.  The hard part has been figuring what or who am I going to need later and what is best to cut loose now? 

My friends have always been the most significant treasures.  They made up for the family I wanted little part of.  They’ve all had their place and time, though it’s taken me a long time to realize that.  Not everything is meant to last, and that includes relationships.  We think loyalty is defined by forever and feel betrayed when everlasting comes to an end, but we aren’t replacing the people in our journey, we are replenishing our souls. 

In the past calendar run, I have been called many things from bitter and spiteful to kindhearted and a superhero.  I’ve been advised way more than I am comfortable with.  I’m quite surprised I still have a tongue left after having bitten it so often.  In conversation with someone last month, I alluded to a 25-year friendship that I’d severed last summer and he asked quietly, “do you have any friends you haven’t had a falling out with?”  I was hurt by that because it proved he wasn’t understanding things I’d been saying, which had become the common theme with most of my friends, hence the falling outs.  It has become important to me to stop giving more to everyone than I was getting in return.  And it isn’t a quid pro quo thing.  It’s a harsh learning that I am not a superhero, and that I am vulnerable. 

It’s still a long way to the top, and Kryptonite hides in the darkest of places.

Someone asked me today “why is every story so negative?”  Stuart was laughing as he asked, but there was a nugget of truth.  I was starting to tell him a story and finished with “See?  It’s not negative, it’s interesting. And if I were on a stage telling it, it would be comedy gold.”  In the same conversation, he commiserated about my physical disabilities and conveyed a brief sadness when he asked “Have you ever looked death in the face?” and I said that I had.  “You’ve had a lot of challenge in your life.”  That’s okay, I said.  It’s given me a different point of view.

Life is all about perception. 

It’s not so much about having survived my life.  It’s the view that it’s given me.  Have you ever stood at the top of the world and looked up at a clear night sky?  Not all peaks are found at the top of a mountain.  Sometimes they are on a sandy beach, an isolated field of dry grass, in a clearing or at the top of a city hill. 

I may be falling free, but that landing is just a hundred tears away.

Sometimes we want to give up but fools like us, we keep trying.  You’re a long way from someplace you feel safe but peace of mind, it comes from just one place…

Circle Bound Trains

I can’t tell you where I’m goin’, not sure of where I’ve been.  I know I must keep travelin’ til my road comes to an end…

There is a price to be paid in living a life.

Last week I went for a train ride.  Alan asked me why.  “You don’t do trains.”  He is correct, I don’t do trains. 
“
Personal challenge.” was my reply.  It was something I’d been slowly building to, an experience I wanted to share with my friend Laurent.  He and I share a fondness for trains – mine so long as I’m not on one – and now every time I hear the lonely whistle as they pass by each day, I think of him.  As opposite happens often in my life, we each hear that sound through different emotions.  The trains excite him and bring joy, whereas they leave me melancholy. 

Laurent and I have spent time together walking in parks or downtowns, taking in the crisp fall air that soon gave way to bright tinsel and ornamented trees.  We have these long remarkable talks about love, food, philosophy and the state of the world.  He has filled a void in me at a time that I find myself losing friends again to death or to life or wherever it is that lost friends go. 

I can’t help but wonder; just what is my addiction that I find myself in a constant state of recovery?

It’s been an isolated holiday season this year.  I haven’t had the heart to give to things I ordinarily do.  Charity and kindness has been a struggle – not because I feel callous but because I feel I’ve not much left to give.  A year ago, I nearly died.  Being allergic to the sun had caught up to me at last.  A seemingly benign blister beneath my breast contracted a deadly infection and it had to be carved out with a scalpel.  My life going forward will be a vulnerable one as I am apparently susceptible now to such things.

It was months to recover and I’m not all the way there yet.  In times of weakness, I tend to overcompensate.  To make up for missed work, I am now buried in a perpetually unfinished to do list.  My emotions swing one extreme to another as I strive to find balance.  I place myself at the foot of personal challenges because an uneasy step in a different direction is still less frightening than standing still. 

As we boarded the train for an hour’s ride across the bay, I tried not to give in to my innocuous thoughts of train derailment.  I take a lot of chiding in regard to my dislike of planes and trains.  I am quoted statistics and levied with common sense while my control issues go unheard.  It isn’t about logic at all.  It is about the whirlwind that can at any moment become a tornado.  “Trains derail, you know.”  I said.  Laurent smiled at me, as if he had the superpower to keep it from happening.

It was on the way home that things went awry – my disabilities often have me feeling like an elephant in a cage.  Everyone else bounded up the narrow steps to the seats above while I stared in dismay and cursed my leg for failing me. One thing falls into another and my embarrassment triggered my anxiety of being in such close quarters with too many strangers with no means of escape.  I survived the return but now Laurent had seen a side of me that I wasn’t ready to show.  But it was an experience that I wanted to share with him.  It seems that’s how this friendship has gone from the beginning.  I can’t undo it, so best to embrace it and move on. 

I’ve been noticing a slow increase in my sun blisters.  Remnants of the adventures and talks and struggling to walk because sitting is for sissies.  Sometimes I have the strong need to just be normal.  I watch the scars multiply and hold at bay the paranoia that any one of them could become deadly in any moment, which is silly because their visibility shows everyone just how abnormal I really am.

Last night I couldn’t sleep as I felt in the dark at the beginnings of a blister beneath my breast.  I called my husband in to look, the graveness in his eyes reflected my own words.  “I’m scared.” 

This morning I woke up to the headline that a passenger train with 75 passengers had derailed on to a busy freeway.  “But I could show you the statistics…” Laurent replied in a text when I linked him the story. 

"Not so much the point.” I sighed.

“I’m confused.”

“Yes, I know.”

There is a price to be paid in living a life, with metaphorical coins to pay our fare.  Do I sit alone and not venture into the world?  Or live each day without the fear of what could kill me?  We think of all the ways we might go but it’s often the unexpected that claims us in the end. 

Life has its toll, and sometimes it derails.  We need to climb on board anyway because it’s the only way to get anywhere. 

Like a poor wayfaring stranger that they speak about in song I’m just a weary pilgrim trying to find what feels like home.

How I Turned 46

Celebrating an anniversary of my life was a daunting prospect when a month prior my doctor had put me at death’s door.  Many handed me the gift-wrapped rhetoric of “you’ve survived!” and “this year will be better!”  I have learned to smile politely and say the things that people are looking to hear.  

There are some things I have learned since blowing out the candles of my last birthday cake.  I’ve learned how to die with both fear and grace.  I have found my old sense of humor that had seemingly gone astray.  I have realized the best thing I can do at times is to not say anything at all.

And I have at last found my worth.

People always ask “why do you write?” and I never have a fully formed answer.  I’ve often felt inferior in the face of other writers who have glorious imaginations or intense passions for the written word.  For me, it’s always been about having a conversation with myself.  More recently, I’ve been working on a series of short fiction stories that tie in with my music obsession.  But you see, I’m a writer of little imagination.  Too often I am grounded in reality and despite the dark clouds that hover over me, I rather like it that way.  Telling the very real tales that are universal yet uniquely different – it leaves me feeling that I have a place in what is a very large world.  

Of course, it’s easy to delude myself into thinking that what I’m doing, I’m doing very well.  I believe people when they tell me as much, but I almost wish that just once someone would tell me I’m terrible at what I do and that I should drop my pen before I truly poison someone with it.  Perhaps then I’d feel as though I’ve arrived.  

It came about that this year on my 46^th birthday, I would be spending it in the company of two women, one whom I admired very much and the other who was more well known in the literary world than I’ll ever be.  I was to be presenting them at a lecture later in the evening.  Being an extremely shy person by nature, I spent weeks wondering what would I talk to these two authors about.  Being a bestseller?  Writing award-winning work?  Having my words acted out before thousands?  That’s all about them, not about me.  I wanted to ask advice, to walk away with more knowledge and instead, I walked away with an experience that held a magic I hadn’t expected.

I’ve met many celebrities in my time.  Some pretty impressive names.  This evening, however, on the 9^thday of August, I did not have dinner with two well known authors.  I shared a meal with two best friends who welcomed me into their world for an evening.  They laughed and displayed a familiarity with each other that I envied.  I’ve lost many friends as of late and being on the fringes of such a relationship made me miss having that in my own life.  

Victoria and Anne have only known each other for just a few years but sometimes instant connections quickly make up for a lifetime.  They mothered over me as I picked at my macaroni and cheese, but I was more interested in the conversation swirling around me.  They talked of how they’d met, chuckled over shopping excursions, told of how they collaborated and didn’t hold back on each other’s bad habits.  There was no pretense, no politeness, only an authentic affection for each other and even for me too.  Victoria has enchanted me from the time we first met with her talent and energy.  As I spoke to them both, I related my own stories of edits and creations and inspiration.  Then we talked of personal issues such as family and childhoods the state of the nation today.  I was privy to not only what made these two women successful, but what made them human. While our experiences were different from each other’s, there was a universal bond and I thought, I belong here.

And I felt my worth.  

It was at the end when the birthday brownie arrived at the table, complete with a candle to make a wish on, that I truly sensed a kinship.  They could have simply said “Happy birthday” upon learning of the day, but Anne and Victoria took the extra step to make it special.  Such a simple act left this old girl still believing that good does exist in this war-torn world.  

These are the gifts that need no pretty paper or bright bows.  These are the gifts that cannot be bought because time can’t be found in any store.  It’s not what others can do for me, it’s learning what I have to offer of myself.  

The Traveling Soldier

He’s a little shy so she gave him a smile.  He said “Would you mind sittin’ down for a while and talking to me, I’m feeling a little low…”

All of the songs in the world are jumbled in my head right now.  In trying to reign just one out of the clouds, it only makes me feel more lost among them. 

I read a beautiful essay today titled Even Hitler Had a Wife by James DeKoven.  I’d never known of this writer before today but as everything does, his words came along at just a pivotal time. 

I’ve always been drawn to complex women. Intelligent, opinionated, philosophical, not-so-perfect childhoods, maybe a little crazy. They say it’s foolish, even dangerous to date that kind of a woman, but when is it not risky to expose your heart?

These opening lines haunted me, as they strongly resembled my former self.  Age has tamed me in this last third of my life, but at my core I still feel driven to be wanted as that girl.  The wild, complex, free-reign one who reveled in being so misunderstood. 

Today I’m chatting with three lovely bartenders about their day as I try to examine my life over a mountain of shellfish and butter drenched biscuits.  Times have changed.

My priorities have shifted.  I need to feel desired by men for my soul rather than crazy sex fantasies in the minds of wayward boys.  I want women to relate to me as a companion and not be seen as competition.  The meaning of life comes to me in the smallest and most gigantic of ways.  I am a fool to walk blindly through the songs and not listen to the words. 

This past week has been tremendously emotional.  On Thursday, I was breaking down, unable to sleep for days in a row and quite worried about my state of mind.  My husband listened with a measured ear to my tearful confessions that I was teetering on an edge.  Then Friday brought me a day long conversation with a handsome man that went long into the evening.  It was the most meaningful dialogue I’d had in some time and filled a cavern in me that had been growing wider in the lonely nights.  Saturday, I had to put on my in-charge mask as I encouraged leadership in others by playing strong and relating my own experiences.  As I tried to come down from that, I allowed myself a short time away from the world in hopes of short-term repair.  By the time Sunday came to deliver some heavy news, I was done.  My head was preoccupied with just everything. 

This wonderful new friend I had the hope of knowing and spending time with had received news that he was being transferred way to the other side of the country.  He is a military man, and our talks had been engaging on so many levels.  We both shared a love of comedy, of theatre, and long, frank conversations.  Roger is my best companion, but we all need to have our independence and outer influences.  Having lost so many of my closest friends, I’d been craving someone to come along with whom I could just be.  It is rare to find someone who demands nothing, wants everything, and will never ask for anything I’m not ready to give. 

In telling me that he had to leave, and understanding its impact on someone like myself, he’s shown patience and kept me smiling through the sadness.  He spoke of his self-obligation to do what he needed to do, but the effect it’s kept on his personal life and the love he’s had to leave behind.  “This is the life I lead.  It is what it is.”  I heard in his voice the same notes of loneliness that I often read in my own words.  It’s given me much to think about and has opened up a lot that’s been suppressed for some time.  This connection has taken me to a place I need to return to, but it is a painful place.  It is a stark reminder, however, that it’s okay to be afraid of life sometimes, but we must march forward and feel anything that we need to feel in every moment that we have. 

Pete kept telling me that if he’d known he would be receiving these orders, he would not have initiated this friendship, based upon what of me he knows.  In that, I would have missed out on this profoundly lyrical life moment, and the rarity of being understood.  I don’t know how adept I’ve become at any kind of loss, because I freewheel between detachment and stabbings of hurt, but I’m going to feel this one.  I'm slowly learning, though, the difference between death and distance. 

Songs are meant to be sung; sometimes in our heads when we can’t find the voice to sing out loud.  They surround us like clouds in a sky.  Every once in a blue moon, I have the fortune of reigning one in. 

He said “I bet you got a boyfriend but I don’t care, I got no one to send a letter to.  Would you mind if I sent one back here to you…?”

Sincerity

I’m a walking cliché even when I’m soaked in sincerity… the truth about the truth is it isn’t going anywhere

I always mark the greatness of a road trip by the degree of voice I have left by the time I arrive home. 

It used to be I never hit the streets without risk of losing my voice.  Car concerts have been a staple of mine beginning with my mom, continuing with my girlfriends and then it became a private show between me my pretty Firebird.  Mom’s been gone for thirty years now, my girlfriends are distant and the buzz of my little red sportster isn’t quite the same as the low rumble that once covered up my way off-key performances.  Change has never been easy for me because it’s a cover song for letting go. 

I’ve been carrying a lot for an awful long time, and the road was always a good place to let it all drop when I needed to.  I could release just enough to keep holding on.  It all began to pile on until the hills became mountains, and I was speeding downward so fast it was like my brake line had been cut. 

Then I slammed into a wall.  Sometimes we walk away from that, and sometimes we wish we didn’t. 

Tomorrow I’ll be saying goodbye to yet another friend.  The older I become, the lonelier life gets.  The last three years have been blurred by tragedy, abandonment, solitude and more reflection than a wishing pond.  When the darkness became real, I had to drag myself through every single day.  It was of no help that many of those days included moving on and refusing to let go.  I resented the endless “celebrations of life” because their lives are over but mine isn’t.  Everyone now wants to pretty up a funeral but it doesn’t take the sadness away, does it? 

Everyone has heard “if you love someone, set them free…” but setting them free was giving up and I haven’t ever been very good at that.  Funny for a girl who lacks follow through.  However, if there’s one thing I have needed to take away from the misery, it is that letting go is how we free ourselves to move forward. 

The real fear comes in others giving up on me.  Sometimes they don’t die; sometimes they just walk away.  “When you see yourself thinking of me, of us, years from now … say you see me on the street somewhere, or remember the moments we’ve shared, will you think of us and smile?” I was asked this one blazing summer day.  There were no clouds to protect me, no rain to mask my tears, and nobody to save my broken heart.  I couldn’t answer because people who can’t remember the past lose their ability to see the future. 

I’ve been trying these past few weeks to regain my compassion, my familiar place because, you see, I’d been letting go.  It’s the be careful what you ask for syndrome; when we ask for peace, it can come in ways we may not want.  I needed to heal, so I tried to shut out all of the noise.  In essence, I needed to lose the person I had become.  In that, I have lost time, and thoughts or stories that should have been written only now I can’t remember them.  They’ve disappeared to that place that doesn’t have a name but lives inside of us all.

I recently asked that love if sad smiles counted in my memory of us.  “Well, no.” came his more-logical-than-me reply.  “Sad smiles are still sad.” 

In the search for my not so distant self, I felt like I was driving fast but not getting too far.  I’ve replaced the sadness with a numbing static.  Buckle up, get down to business, and rely only on myself.  Limits, labels and roadmaps have never really been my thing so trying to put myself on an advised course hasn’t taken me as far as anyone thought it should. 

I found that when I stopped talking about the things that nobody wanted to hear, I didn’t like myself so much.  I suddenly had become boring, ordinary, as though I’ve given in to the demands of others to be who I am never going to be. 

We can wish for peace, but we need to risk sacrifice in return.  We can’t ever have anything without losing something. 

Last week, I went for a drive.  For the first time since I can’t remember when, I gave every song everything I had in me.  When I arrived home late that night, my voice was exhausted.  A song will always have the power to soothe or stab me, just as any friend does. 

Hope is what feeds the peace inside.  It doesn’t need to be grandiose, over the top or floating on a rainbow.  In letting go, sometimes the road brings us back together but to a new place.  Sometimes we can revisit the places we left behind but see it in a new way, begin a new journey from the same starting point. 

In every goodbye, there comes a hello; sometimes in a familiar voice. 

Yesterday, I watched this movie play out on a big screen, and at the end the redheaded woman stood at the ocean in the setting sun, embracing the rugged older man and as they gazed upon each other, I felt the tug of a memory, and I smiled. 

Sometimes you get what you steal.  Sometimes you see things for real and sometimes sincerity feels like you’re lying…

© May 21, 2016

Lyrics:  Sincerity / Miggs

Footprints On a Ledge

Take your memories when you go, but leave no footprint behind.

Take a walk with me. 

I’m not a hiker, actually.  Nor am I a biker, a wanderer, or an adventurist.  You won’t find me out in the woods, unless it’s hugging fast to a curve along the paved road.  I stumble enough through life, despite my destined path, to go taking a header into a cold river in the middle of nowhere.  I will live vicariously through the minds of Cheryl Strayed and Bill Bryson, hikers of two famous trails on opposite ends of our America. 

Even when I was young, the only need I ever had to go far from here was because home was a place I was afraid to be.  In 44 years, I have stayed because like any other dysfunction, home is what I know.  Fear and sadness and anger are familiar rooms to lock myself away in.  The sun is a cloud that darkens my every step, causing me to return until I can feel safe again in the moon’s light.

Safety, like happiness, is a fleeting fall of rain; I know that it exists, enough to keep moving forward in search of it, but the canyons in between are hard to navigate without the proper gear.  Things like strength, courage, and motivation are in short supply.  I’ve been using them instinctively, not keeping track of my inventory, and the problem I’m finding is having no idea where I am on my map.  These resources haven’t only been a part of my own survival, but I’ve been foolish enough to share them along the way. 

Perhaps I’ve given away too much.

Somehow I have fallen down onto a ledge, and I don’t know how to climb back from it.  There is further to fall, which isn’t abating my fear of heights any.  What’s happened is that I let myself be pushed here. I have let people push me further and further until my confidence gave way like sliding rocks.  Now I’m stranded and either too blind to see the hands reaching out to me or delusional enough to believe they exist. 

We’re wandering now, and I’m not supposed to do that.  I’m supposed to stay focused, eye on the mountain peak, and all that crap.  They say to name my emotions, like bread crumbs to leave behind as proof that I made a journey. 

How can I leave no footprint behind me when I need proof that I have lived? 

The better question is who am I proving myself to? 

The nearest star is 4.5 light years away.  That’s 26 trillion miles.  There are more galaxies in the universe than there are grains of sand on the earth.

That’s pretty big.

And we are very small.

 

I feel as though I’ve traveled 26 trillion miles, and have collected many stars along the way like stones in my pocket.  Some have lit the path ahead, many have burned to the touch but I held them tightly anyway.  Silly me.  The thing is, with all of those stars inside of me, I am not so small.  My soul strives to be bigger than that which contains it. 

This isn’t what I set about writing today.  I wanted to exorcise my anger, to let the wind take it from me, but when I began to scribble one word after another, it wasn’t the footprint I wanted to leave behind today.  And I do want to prove to myself that I have lived, because this day will become forgotten like all of the others.  It will remain, however, a lost letter unless I figure out how to rescue myself from this ledge. 

What I think is so intimidating about climbing mountains is that we’re only supposed to find satisfaction when we reach the top, when we stand with arms outstretched to a blue sky and proclaim victory. 

I don’t know why I have to take on every day as if it were a mountain. 

This cliff, too, is like home to me.  It’s what I know.  Today I am tired, but tomorrow perhaps I will take hold of my fear and sadness and anger and I will tie them together with knots of strength, courage and motivation. 

If I let it be known that I was here, then maybe the next person who tumbles onto the same ledge will know they weren’t the only one who fell along the way.

We didn’t even get to Mount Katahdin.

Another mountain, Bill?  How many do you need to see?

 

 

© September 2, 2015

Quotes:  A Walk In the Woods / Bill Bryce

Lost Stars

 

… but are we all lost stars trying to light up the dark?

It’s like I’m in denial that I’m never going to see him again.  Then it’s a thunderous boom; I’m never going to see him again.  Anthony was a candle in the window to much of my life.  What others avoided seeing, he never ran from.  In fact, he came with his hand reaching outward. 

Always. 
 
Today I have lost one of the greater loves of my life.  Anthony was a light that guided me through the darkness I’ve become so familiar with.  He knows things that no other soul ever has.  In all of that knowledge, there wasn’t an ounce of judgment. 

We met over two decades ago, when I was dating a rabid football fan.  I despise football, but had a bet going just to poke fun at this guy’s amped up rant.  I called in repeatedly to the local radio station asking for the score.  Finally came “I have to know… why don’t you just check the tv?”  I didn’t have one at the time.  When the end came, and the DJ asked why I was so interested for someone who hated the sport, I explained that a dinner was at stake.  His reply; “Girl, if this were a couple of points difference, I’d say you win a Big Mac.  If it were even a ten point spread, he should buy you a dinner at Denny’s.  But with this score, brother oughta be flying you to Milan for dinner with breakfast in Paris!” 

It was a year later that we actually met.  I won a contest to be a DJ for a day.  Anthony was the hosting jock, and I carried my nerves on my sleeve when I walked into the studio.  I didn’t realize it was the same guy until months later.  He gave me a quick tutorial of the mechanics, and then switched on the microphone.  I knew it was my voice, but I never figured out how I managed to speak.  But I did.  A couple of hours in, me still shaking in my heels, someone called in requesting a song from a daughter to her father.  I began to rattle off all the fitting titles I knew and he stared at me, eyes wide.  Twenty years after that night, he said it only confirmed what he saw when I spoke my first words; “You were a natural.  I watched it, and everybody heard it.” 

Anthony encouraged me to follow that dream, and I did.  Like a butterfly who at last believed she had wings, I fell in love with the power of reaching people through music.  Of stirring the same feelings I found in the notes of a song.  It was a quietly turbulent time in my life.  I was the wallpaper that nobody noticed in a full room.  Many midnights I walked from the pizza place I worked at to the station, spent hours at his side or in a production room somewhere writing bad poetry about the lovesickness I was beginning to feel toward this tall, vivacious man as he bounced off of the walls, sometimes literally, making up silly words to songs he played – and he just happened to be married.  He would give me rides home across town in his beat up van but never let on if he knew of my schoolgirl feelings.  He instead gave me wings, and as I flew he migrated away when the station was sold. 

It was sixteen years later that we reconnected.  Anthony was no longer married, but I was.  He had gone into ministry, and I saw the natural fit.  We met, and we reminisced about the industry and then I asked a question that had burning inside of me for half of my life.  “Christians claim there is a peace at the end, that you go into God’s kingdom rejoicing in this Heaven that was promised.  Where was that peace when my mother died?”  Anthony didn’t try to sell me the Bible, he simply looked at me with his kind brown eyes, and took my pale hand in his dark ones, and said “There is no proof.  That’s why it’s called faith.”

He was the only person I’ve ever allowed to talk to me about God.  He accepted that we didn’t share beliefs.  Over egg rolls or pancakes or as he snuck a shrimp from my plate, I often said “You know the Bible is just a work of fiction created by man, right?” just to see the fire in his eyes as he launched into a sermon.  He wasn’t correcting me, he was simply being Anthony. 

I was a believer in Anthony. 

And he was a believer in me.  I was just beginning to find myself as a writer, and again he reached out his hand as I took each step.  He didn’t pull me along, rather he gave me balance.  I trusted him when he said my courage was contagious. 

Then one day Anthony had cancer. 

Everything changed, and I was afraid.  As he began his descent, I began to slip away.  Self defense; by now I should be a martial arts master.  Even in the distance between our visits, I sent random texts of “I love you.  Be strong, but you don’t need to be with me.”  “I will play that card one day.  I love you too.”

It was one night at 3am, when I often sought him out to calm my fears as Roger and the whole rest of the world was asleep, thoughts gone unspoken for so many years fell out between us.  “Now’s a good time for confession.   A girl shouldn’t be left to wonder all of her life.”  “We were good not to kiss and tell.  If you remember correctly, my wife was already thinking I was having an affair with you.”  “You never wanted me…” I remembered the girlish verses I’d scribbled on heart-decorated notepads. 

“That you noticed.”   One month later, he is gone.

We’d never once kissed.  It occurs to me today in his dementia that he’d imagined we had.  I find comfort in that, even if fleeting.  An unrequited love, not so unseen after all but instead a butterfly.  Our friendship had wings.

I don’t know now who I’m going to reach out to in the middle of the night.  That’s the biggest loss.  And the hugs.  The world seems lonelier after just one day without Anthony in it.  I went about my day as any other Wednesday, there’s just one less person to tell about it.  One very important person.

There is no moral to this fable, no lesson to teach.  No feeling thankful that he is out of pain because I’m selfish, and I want him back here on this Earth. 

This is just me.  Incredibly, irreparably sad. 

God, tell us the reason youth is wasted on the young.  It’s hunting season, and the lambs are on the run…

 

 

© Kymberlie Ingalls, July 16^th 2014  *  Lyrics:  Lost Stars / Adam Levine

Read All About It

You’ve got the words to change a nation, but you’re biting your tongue.  If no one ever hears it, how we gonna learn your song?

I wonder if people gave Socrates such shit for his philosophies.  

Someone recently said to me he didn’t understand why anyone would want to blend, to be like everyone else. ‘Sheeple’ was the term Loren used.  I smiled as I pointed out the irony in someone beating his chest as ‘different.’  He sure was blending into the antiestablishment crowd with the trendy term.  Then I tried to explain that for those of us who stand outside of the crowd, it’s not always easy.  Not everyone wants to be the circus freak.  

Not all of us have the choice.

It’s like any other disfigurement; we either hide away from the world or we deal with it, but it’s a lonely life.  He chided me for my “pessimism,” as if it were a soap he could use to scrub his hands clean as he walked away.  He’d wanted instant intimacy – not the kind found between the sheets but the real kind that draws two minds together, because he found me “interesting.”  He couldn’t understand that I need to reach out to others because I’m so tired of the masturbation of my own mind.  

Examination of a life is what makes it worth living.  Otherwise, we walk blindly through with no regard for the days we have lived.  I refuse to leave that legacy behind me.  I love fiercely and trust slowly.  After only a brief effort at a friendship, Loren declared that “it shouldn’t be a challenge, not right from the beginning.  We just have different philosophies of life.  When I like someone, I unguard myself immediately.”  Him, Optimist.  Me, Socrates.  If I’d turned away every challenge I’d ever seen in a person, I would have missed out on some of the most obscenely wondrous experiences.  

I saw this movie today, True Story.  A man is accused of killing his family, and when asked by a reporter if he did it he replied “Sometimes you have to accept the way you look to others to protect what’s more important.  Sometimes the truth isn’t believable.  That doesn’t mean it’s not true.”  People see me as this stubborn walnut that they need to crack, thinking they’ll find something magical inside.  Walnuts are the most complex nut there is.  Look inside one sometime, see how entwined everything is.  

That’s me, the nutty philosopher.    

If Loren needs to see me as uncrackable so that he can move on, I get that.  It doesn’t change who I am at my core, but trying to find the heart of that can wear a girl out.  It’s like the reporter said in return; “I got so wrapped up in trying to tell a great story that I lost sight of my bigger obligation – the truth.”

As I sit in this restaurant with my passion-flavored iced tea, trying to write this meaning of life and eavesdropping on three elderly ladies with their happy hour martinis at the next table over, Irene stopped by to take my plate.

“How’re things?” I asked.

“Things are good!  I feel like I’m ready to take on the world”  Her smile is always bright and fruity, like sweet strawberries against her long, youthful dark hair.  It’s the brown eyes that show her irrepressible spirit. 

“How do you plan to do that?”  

“First, I’ll stop crying.”

“What is making you cry?” 

“My boyfriend and I went through a break up, and I felt like I was being so oppressed, and now I just feel liberated!  I don’t know if that’s the right way to feel or not.”

“It’s right if it’s how you feel.  And I totally get it.  I’m tackling that myself today, actually.”

“Then let’s topple the world together.”

I have thought a lot today about the friendships in my life.  Loren had said “I guess I prefer to keep my world small and simple.  A small crowd of people.”  I never really thought about how big my own universe was until I’d lost so many people in it, but as I look around and see the large crowd still standing, I see my examined life and its rewards. 

As Irene halted at my table again, she eyed my very large, frosty strawberry milkshake that had just arrived. “That looks like the perfect way to tackle the world.  Are you going to take on that whole thing?” she said with a gleam in her smile.  

“I’m going to try.” 

“Do it!  Start with that whipped cream.  And you might want to get to that cherry before it goes rolling off.”

I don’t wake up every morning with the hope for a day full of roses and bluebirds.  I prefer to wait until the sun is settling into its hills to see what the day has brought.  Sometimes it begins with a goodbye, and sometimes it ends with a sweet cherry.  Whatever the in betweens are, they are mine to write down before I forget the flavor of them. 

That is my truth.  My story.  

You’ve got a heart as loud as lions, so why let your voice be tamed?  Put it in all of the papers, they can read all about it, read all about it…

 

 

© April 29, 2015

Lyrics:  Read All About It / Emile Sande