Between Want and Waiting

I had a moment of inspiration a moment ago but I lost it to the Facebook. Not  Facebook exactly. To the restless grey not-my-holiday-anymore Christmas. Not restless exactly. Not unless I stop to think about it. Me on my orange couch in the back of someone else's house, no tree, no decorations, back to a lifetime of Christmas as it always was, Christlmasless, but not as it is for my kids. Daisy curled beside the couch and the holly outside my window swaying with the rain.

This is Yule.
Quiet in all ways.

Last night the annual Christmas-eve tree decorating party. Longest standing tradition my girls have known in a life where nothing stands for long, and the first real hours I've spent inside the old place since I jumped that ship four months back. All those rooms I put together. Shelves I painted and painted again. My furniture. My table. My spider plants hanging down over the mantle.

All this morning I read.  The rain comes down and down.. Granta, Marie Claire, the CareOregon provider directory. Pandora busts up the quiet with Schuman and Chopin and I peek in on your holiday while my neighbor vacuums upstairs.

The rabbit cage smells all the way into the living room.
I owe my dog a walk.

Caught between want and waiting. Folded up around myself in Roxie's bean bag at the dead end of my house.The phone gives me quick facebook hits of Christmas around the world, or at least around the constellation of my world. Soak up a little satisfaction (or something like it) from the joy pushing out of those stills. Picture of  the world just how we want to see it.

It's not there, what I'm looking for. And it's not here either. It's dripping down off the bamboo outside my window, inside my mirror. Sometime this morning, early, I lay myself down on the floor. Keep that knot tied up inside my throat when I'm talking to my girls. Let it slide apart in streams when the phone goes quiet. Alone is just a song we sing ourselves anyway. By myself is how I chose today.

Something's in this quiet.
Gently used gift  I'll force myself to find.
Sit here in it and in it and in it until I can unwrap.

Coming Around

Two things that happened to me this week:

1. I lost a notebook I'd been writing in for a good five years out at the Edgefield on the last Saturday in September. It was handmade and spiral bound with Roxie's little pink baby hand prints on the front cover. The two hands that left those marks couldn't have been more than about 18 months old. Inside the pages were three quarters full with lists and thoughts and hand scribbled notes for the slowest first draft of a novel ever penned. Weird stuff, but I like to run it all together like that. Shows how life was on all those days between.

Weird night, too.Full moon and all.  But that's a story for another time. Let's keep this here on point.

I walked into the show with the notebook, a sweater, my wallet and a ticket shoved down into my big old purple show going purse and I walked out with the sweater on my back, wind rippling up the leaves,  never noticing how light my bag was. Just a wallet and my keys left in there. I don't when I first knew the notebook was gone. Long past any place I could go back looking for it. Probably 4500 people on that lawn. One little notebook, no name inside, probably bagged up with trash and rotting. Why bother calling on lost an found.

Four days later, 5:20 a.m., leaving for my morning ride down the empty pavement into town for work and there's a little brown package on my doorstep. Tied up neat with a blue twine bow. My little notebook inside with a new entry on the first blank page:

A cartoon. Two fairies handing off I don't know what to a bunny rabbit with a little Thoreau beneath the frame:

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."


I do believe in fairies, I do believe in fairies. I do. I do. I do.

Now, I have my suspicions about how this book found its way home. All of them wrapped up in love. 

But I'm not asking. Let's just call it magic and let it be so.


2. I asked the cat from my "ask the cat" deck what I most need to know about my writing right now.

That cat just said: "Wake up!"

Deja Vu

5:51 a.m.

Almost like mid-day. Been listening to the fan click its way though the hours since 3:38, keeping time to the crazies in my head. Here in this bed it's hard to keep my fingers on the keys. I want to scatter my thoughts out over the laundry and the dishes and the facebook. Across the kitchen floor. Not think them at all.

This whole past year spinning by in broken shadows cast out from the fan. But I'm still here. Still trying to figure out where here is, too. New digs. This light green room and the constant of my futon bed hard beneath by hips. Let it blow over my bare skin, light and cool from the ceiling down. Culture shock changes keeping me up at night. And my girls bunked next door, stacked one above the other in their dreams.

I got my life in boxes all around again. Dog at my feet. The curtains pulled open wide with the night coming in. I got some lovely flowers in the patio out back, but no front door. No street view, horizon pulled in tight around me. Hunkered down in the back of someone else's life. Strangers.

Nothing to see at this hour anyway. Just night pressed black against the windows, keeping still until the sun comes. And like a friend once said, I wan't watch it come to see how light emerges from darkness, remind myself: now and forever light always emerges from dark.

I don't want to share my daughters. There. There's the truth. I said it. I don't want to send them back to him for half the week and half the year and half their lives. No, I don't. And I don't care about fair. Who's to say what's best anyway.

There's fresh made chicken soup in the fridge, my first, and smoothies leftover from last night's new blender. Damn right, it's different this time. And still the same old change and change and change. Right here where it always is. Constant culture shock. Reset the compass. Re-calibrate and go again.

1:04 a.m.  Halfway under too much comforter, hot and cold and pushing myself toward I don't know what. All the books piled up beside me can't say. Sleeplessness is just the place I go in the middle of the night. But we got hours to go before the middle of the night comes into this here Camp. Sunset still burned across the insides of my eyes. Head pounding how it does, down the the tight spots in my jaw, up where the hinges tie in behind my check bones. So this is 42. Not so far shy of 43. And nothing feels so soothing as that train whistle hauling far off on its way to somewhere. No such thing as poetry without motion.

two more things

Every now and then the spambots latch on to an outdated post from my old, decaying blog and bomb the shit out of it. I have no idea why this happens. The logic of it, I mean. The pattern. Has to be a pattern, right? Some SEO equation my brain can't calculate. A word that's trending tucked down in there somewhere.

Why now? Why 20 nonsense ads posting to the comments of a five-year-old post in less than three hours? Me being me, I can't look away and I can't let it go and I can't pass up an opportunity to scream synchronicity.

But I don't even have to raise my voice. It's all right here, a shout out from me to me, circa 2007, from the end of the journey I'm starting again.

I gotta believe I got new wings sprouting.

Thanks spambots! It's good to be reminded.

Originally posted Oct. 27, 2007:

two things

 The front of the card says "Faith is believing that one of two things will happen," SHE SAID. "That there will be something solid For you to stand on -- Or that you will be taught to fly."

My mind catches first on the sound of the words and how she said changes the rhythm changes the sentence. Changes the resonance.

 How SHE SAID is brilliant because She Said Makes this: Faith is believing that one of two things will happen. That there will be something solid for you to stand on - Or that you will be taught to Fly.

 Hallmark card

into This:

 Faith is believing that on of two things will happen. SHE SAID. That there will be something solid to stand on - Or that you will be taught to fly. She said has that little roll of an up down wave with the water breaking on you will be taught to fly.

I read it three, fours times listen to the sound of every word hitting the next. I'm a nerd like that.

I go to the meaning that faith is knowing you will be ok. And my mind takes it apart. Beleiving one of two things will happen. Something solid to stand or be taught to fly. Standing or Flying? Ripped up that way I read a choice in it.

 Stand or Fly?

 For two days I pick the card off the bookshelf and read it as a question. Ask, ask, ask myself. Which one would I chose?

The Ground or the Sky.

 I look up to remember clouds know all the answers.

Like tea leaves and old gypsy women.

and I think, me, I'll take the sky.

I was headed for the final school pick-up of the week last Friday. Same stretch of road and traffic lights and businesses I drive every day to get the girls back and forth to their education. Sun glasses on, windows down, first tease of summer blowing through the spring and I'm taking it speed limit slow. Plenty of time to make the 3 o'clock bell.

Traffic's moving about the same pace as me. Stopping and going in both lanes. Nobody fast, nobody slow, nobody in hurry. Except for the blue pick-up behind me. First I don't notice him there crawling up my bumper. Then I don't care. He's honking and waving me into the next lane so he can get by and I have room to speed up, but I just keep my pace. I like my lane. It's the lane I need to be in, but not just yet. It's the lane I want to be.

He honks again. And I wave a friendly hand up, hold my position.

I don't know why we do this on the road. Rage out at each other. My mood is high and I just keep smiling, a little sad for this guy and his hurry. A little smug, too, if I have to tell myself the truth. Lane beside me wide open.

Soon as there's space to make a move, the guy jams his blue pick-up out around me, quick enough to cut me off, and slams the brakes so I come up just short of his smashing into him. With that summer wind coming early through my window, I tell myself this guy can't get to me. He can have his road rage to himself.

I laugh.

I laugh for me because have to, and because I have my days, too. Mostly, I try and remind myself there's nothing on the road worth raging at. But, I have my days. All his anger gets him out in front of me and that's it. We're still stopped at the same light. Wherever he's going, passing me isn't getting him there any quicker.

I laugh for me, not at him.

That's not what he sees. His door opens and he's out on the road a step or two toward me screaming goddamn bitch and asking if i think i can control the road? the harder he yells, the louder I laugh. Laugh him all the way back into his truck.

And out of nowhere my laughing is crying. For this guy and for me. For whatever hurts him so bad the sadness comes out at me as anger. For whatever I'm doing to make him feel worse.

He stays right in front of me, slow as Sunday, taking back control of the road. I keep my distance. Light by light we start and stop together, and I let the space between us grow, foot by foot, until I make the my turn for the school and he goes on his way. But I can't shake him.

It's spring and the flowers are smelling fine and the clouds are grey and the dog smells like dog. No amount of bathing takes the smell from her. No floral shampoo. I ran my car through the washman yesterday and the kids squeelled at the big bristles coming over the window, and now the red paint shines, but inside the car still smells like dog. Lenny the handyman came by today. He fixed a broken window in the front door, screwed a drawer back together, adjusted my ever-running toilet and replaced hinges on the sticky garage door. I wiped down the kitchen and vacuumed the living room before he arrived, but the house still smells like dog. WHich right now smells a little like stale smoke. Has she been out rolling in cigarette butts?

All last night I wondered lost through my dreams. My subconscious doesn't know a thing about subtlety. Just me walking rooms and rooms and rooms for a party I never quite make, though I find some of the people I'm searching out. They're always on the way to somewhere else. A couple steps ahead of me. There's an award ceremony I barely miss. More I walk the more there is. A maze of a warehouse, endless rooms expanding every step. A restaurant. A bar. A magic show where some exploding trick sends me running, smoke and fire at my heals. And then basketball and tennis and swimming rooms before I find the street. Not the right street. Or maybe the right street. Who can know if you exited the same door your entered when the building won't keep still? The car parked where I left my car is not my car. The sign that wasn't there when I parked says two-hour parking. Tow Away zone. And I'm up before I bother looking.

At the gym this morning I run the elliptical straight through to nausea, hard as I can, my legs go shaky and the sweat runs down burning into my eyes, but I can't run the restless out of my skin. Can't slip out of my body and can't keep still in it.

Just how it is inside this change.

***

Lila and me were working on shoe tying on the floor of her classroom after school. She got the got the first crossover pulled taut. I tried guiding her little hands one bunny loop through the hole of the other to finish, but the loops fell apart in our fingers.

She said "I love you, but you're not one of those moms whose good at teaching things." She meant I am not patient. She said. "It's ok, mom, you're the only mom I want. You're good at lots of other things."

She meant the way I can't keep still inside my skin, keeps me from teaching. I don't know what I'm good at. The way my insides crash against the edges of me, rolling waves that cannot break the boundaries of me and cannot settle.

I said "Yeah?"

She said "You're good at doing dishes."

***

My waking dream.

I sit on a rock river bed and swallow tiny smooth pebbles. Perfect stones formed hard with everything I am not. One by one. I hold them in my mouth. Here is patience. Here is calm. Here is peace.

One by one. They slide through me, cool and reassuring, the way you feel the path of water down work your throat. The way the first swallow coats your insides everyplace it touches, cools the veins.

One by one. Peebles settle in my toes and knees and belly, another and another and another stacking all the way to the top of me, displacing my restless, weighing into me something solid and sturdy. Something whole.

1 a.m. it's me and the dog and the snow coming down and coming down and kicking so much light back into the sky it could be anytime. Doesn't matter. And doesn't feel late, just the kind of quiet worth staying up for, the world all to myself and covered so fresh it seems like nothing could ever hurt.

The way snow sits on the trees and pulls them down makes them into something new. I almost wake Roxie, pull her from her bed to give her this moment just in case its melted by morning, to give her this moment of me and her in the middle of the night and the confetti sky dropping down, to give her something to hold when we tell her we're taking it all back. i'm taking it all away again. because that's the truth of it. me. this is not consensual. there is no us. least i can do is load the winter with little bits of sparkle when I can. But I keep it for myself.

Just boot soles squenching down on snow, the dog breathing, the flakes coming fast on my hood. Loud enough to be rain, but its not. And I walk. Nowhere to go. This is my time. Even when I don't want it. Back here through the looking glass to turn it all inside out again. What I mean is: fuck this cryptic poetic bullshit, words, snow fallen words to cover the muddy underneath. What I mean is I am gone.

If I could get myself up of this couch and up the stairs and into the bedroom, which is really just the office and my same old futon by the wall, I would put my legs beneath me and start walking. But I'm halfway out and you can hear the bedroom snores right through my office walls. Better to sit here, feet on the cushions and the full moon outside for company.