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

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…?”

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