Haunt, meet my girls. Girls, haunt.

After pulling an all-nighter following being startled from five minutes' dozing (and during that night consuming two marbled brownies and one handful of chocolate chips while watching The Princess Diaries One and Two), the optimal course of action one hour after dawn unquestionably involves packing a borrowed denim bag with pens and a book and setting out to walk three and a half miles of heavily-trafficked highway to a local cafe for a break in the form of an iced and spiced chai latte.

A Note from Edith: We're still figuring out this whole business of unobtrusively wielding a camera in public places, so excuse the awkward snapshots. In the future, better photos shall be acquired, provided the one holding the device can muster the courage to take pictures from a more appropriate angle than the depths of her lap.

The Open Road

~

 

Probably a man's destination (which is ever in the motorist's thoughts) colors the highway, enlarges or diminishes its defects. Gliding over the tar, I was on my way home. DeVoto, traveling the same route, was on his way to what he described rather warily as "professional commitments," by which he probably meant that he was on his way somewhere to make a speech or get a degree. Steering a car toward home is a very different experience from steering a car toward a rostrum, and if our findings differ, it is not that we differed greatly in powers of observation but that we were headed in different emotional directions. I sometimes suspect that when I am headed east, my critical faculties are retarded almost to the vanishing point, like a frog's heartbeat in winter. 

— E. B. White, "Home-Coming"

Cynically Yours

There is danger in the safety of trust, in feeling
the strength of your joy against my teetering soul.
Your laughter is like the strong wind at my back
when I stand already on cliff's edge, facing out—
when I hear it I want to tip
forward into freefall and believe

I will land at the bottom
on my feet
and find myself at home.

Purely Personal, With Love

And sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself,

because I could find no language to describe them in.

— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

There was a time when I could carve an image of emotion from words, when I could make hurts burn in the retelling, when I could use half a hundred descriptors to reproduce anguish in vivid immediacy. I made sense of feeling through words, using the medium of language to quantify and preserve the sinking of despair, the dizzying effects of pain, the blinding grief of a broken soul. I wrote my heart onto the page and left it there, content to wrangle words until they accurately reflected what I saw in myself, and those words once written were my lifeline to help, my reaching hand, at once the acknowledgement of inner turmoil and the begging for relief. And relief was proffered.

Relief came and choices followed, and more choices. I grounded in the place where I now stand, both physically and mentally. The world stopped spinning and I felt solid earth beneath me.

And I found that words were spent.

Oh, it isn't that I can't write pages of introspective rambling. It isn't that I can no longer over-analyse, over-dramatise, over-obsess, over-demand; it isn't that I've lost my way on the blank page and am roaming in blinding white, afraid to put down inky landmarks and build a black landscape around me. It isn't that at all.

It is only that somewhere along the way I lost the ability to transfer myself to paper, to re-create myself with words until I knew what I was, who I was, what I was thinking and feeling. It is not enough to say I'm terrified, can you help? or my heart is aching so much I can't take it anymore. It is not enough, because I know by now that those words spoken barely brush the depth of what is being felt; they do so little to adequately express legitimate inner need and unshakable fear that they are not even worth the breath used to speak them or the ink used to write them.

I don't know what to say. There is nothing to say. The force of the effort behind the murmured "I'm sad", acknowledged with a brief, unseeing glance and swiftly forgotten, is more than all of the energy spewed in paragraphs of extensive personal narration; the inarticulate whisper that dies before it reaches the air says more than any of my cries for help ever held. The tragedy was never in the screaming, the flailing, the nights spent rambling about anything and everything; it is in the silence now.

It is in the absence of words that bitterness is most keenly felt, because when words can be employed there is at least the comfort of a hollow diatribe against whatever fate drives the world, or perhaps the salve of a fantasy well-spun to set pain in a different light. In silence there is nothing of the sort. The emptiness spawns its own sort of grief.

That grief is gripping me now.

I am sad.

And yet even that is only a fraction of actual fact. Last night, after hours of wrestling through the dark and the silence and the aloneness, one fragment of a piecemeal dream brought a subconscious reminder of warmth and safety, and for a moment reassurance and contentment replaced the gnawing ache. As words elude me and my pen runs dry, it is not sadness alone that has hold of my soul.

Keyboard Dust and the Shape of Last Week

- moist, sweet banana muffins baked the previous Saturday and left over until Wednesday
- my new favourite sandwich: kalamata hummus spread thick over Seeduction bread and topped with turkey breast and lettuce leaves
- words, thousands of them both written and read
- full body soreness, an aching back, miles of bike riding and miles more of walking
- huge glasses of cold water emptied and refilled, over and over, and deliberately limited coffee
- at last, letting go of dairy for an indefinite period of time, in all but the occasional baked tastiness
- "The Crane Wife" by The Decemberists pouring through my cheap headphones and carrying me both backward into the summer past and forward into the summer ahead
- a stack of magical library books in which to submerge myself
- sickness and stretching and acceptance, all at once and separately, and the resolution to choose peace
- the first sunburn of the year singeing a bright red collar around my neck and over my shoulders
- consciously healthy eating and the privilege of tasting the goodness of food
- a soy-based iced chai latte—my first, and oh-so-delicious

Quotidian Notes

It has been a three-coffee day, fifteen hours of slow burn followed by sugar-laden dessert indulgence and the unashamed violation of my no-dairy policy, observed without exception for nearly a week. Something about nursing an emotional funk of queenly proportions and ambiguous origin all morning and afternoon rather promises an awkward evening, and the lesson has been learned: we are not doing that again, not if we can help it.

Fortunately, funk did not mean the absence of productivity. I had enough energy to finish every task on my to-do list, including making dinner, biking seven and a half miles to the store to pick up a baking ingredient and a personal stash of coveted almond milk, and attending to kanji. Fortunately, too, there were people available to play several rounds of Tatsunoko vs Capcom, and cinnamon and chai on the spice cabinet shelf for making a steaming chai latte, dairy and sweetener-free. I ate my cold dinner of brussel sprouts, broccoli florets, and chopped roasted almonds on the front porch, chewing slowly, and savoured both the flavour of the food and the coolness of the breeze in my hair. Funny how on paper the dull ache of the last fifteen hours seems less.

Walk With Me

things uncaptured by a poor-quality camera phone

i. light sparkling against the individual blades of grass on wet, dark lawns

ii. slender branches silhouetted black against the deep blue horizon

iii. lightning bisecting the thunderheads looming close above

iv. broken concrete cobbled together to create the barely-visible sidewalk beneath my feet

v. cool rain spattering hard with the rushing breezes against my face

Ordinary Things and the Keeping of Lists

Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world. 

— Pema Chödrön

I've been rambling on paper again, picking up the Logbook at all hours to scribble thoughts into it, to jot in neat lists anything that demands to be put down or that interferes with clarity of mind. Focusing on one thing at a time is something I am having to re-train my brain to do, since for so long I have been teaching it the opposite: to take in everything at once with no discrimination between what should be having attention and what is inconsequential. Lists help that. Lists help with a lot of things, from assuring preservation of a fleeting idea that might have otherwise been lost forever in some unnoticed chink of the brain to creating the shape of a day and keeping memories intact, and amidst the pages of rambling in longhand there are dozens of short lists, some sloppily scrawled and blotted with ink and some lettered with painstaking precision, all holding fragments of that vague experience referred to as life. They serve as a reckoning point, a place where the small mundane activities of quotidian existence are acknowledged and appreciated.

Lessons of the Week

in no particular order

some re-learned and some acknowledged for the first time 

... I can keep walking; I can also keep living.

... I can't decide how my body and emotions react to circumstances over which I have no control, but I can decide to show up and do my best to enable them to react well regardless of those circumstances.

... I can also choose how to respond to the way my body and emotions react, and it is almost always a good idea to go light on the self-inflicted guilt and heavy on the rest and the fruit and the tea.

... writing helps. it helps a lot. so does walking, and sneakers and macadam become addicting just like the feel of the pen sliding across the page.

... there is no reason to apologise for using standard English spelling or listening to an unpopular form of music that I like or painting your nails black just because or being unashamedly human. there is no reason to apologise for tears (not even to myself).

... procrastinating writing notes to loved ones who are waiting for them is unacceptable; those people are far more important than any lingering personal reticence.

... milk is not a necessity even if giving it up for several weeks feels like deprivation.

... soy-based lattes are even tastier than dairy-based ones.

 A Random Assortment of Small Things

for which I am thankful

hot tea with honey

burning candles

soft couch cushions against my aching back

books stacked neatly anywhere

emails from sisters, messages from friends

birdsong at night

rain falling

Goals for the Remainder of the Week

goals which may not be accomplished

and that is okay

finish Shadow's birthday gift

read from stack of library books

write feedback for girls' research papers

catch up on kanji reviews

play Portal

make caramel snickerdoodle bars for the first time

make Saturday's dinner

mail letters

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

— Mark Strand


He gives a whole new definition to the motivations behind travelling and behind running away.

*Image Credit: Photographer Ryan Muirhead 

Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to. 

— Alan Keightley

Fragments, Twice

If I were to be entirely honest I would have to admit that I've been running away from writing, especially any writing with the intent to share with anyone beyond the self I encounter at three in the morning when everyone else is in bed and I'm alone with the darkness and the ticking clocks and the creaking pipes reaching up from the basement and through the walls to the second floor. There is something about putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard that pries away one's inner secrets, something about writing that bares the soul, and I've been trying to avoid that until now, trying to avoid it because I desperately want to stay concealed in my little imaginary safe-house, where I can push people away and keep all but the most superfluous of thoughts to myself.

Well, that hasn't been working so well for my girls, and it hasn't been working so well for me either, and now that events have pried my fingers away from some other methods of purging my system of stress and thrust a pen back into my hand I am confronted with the necessity of writing, and writing honestly. Speaking honestly, really, but somehow writing wraps up nicely with living and talking and acting with transparency, since words on paper—words on screens—will always be my first method of frank communication. The other things I'm learning: the meeting of eyes and the freedom to touch, verbal confession and reassurance, silence at the right moments, a well-timed gift. Those are coming, if slowly. It'll take a lifetime of development to grasp them. The words, at least, I have now. The words I am using to sort through a brain wrecked by everything from life to love to my own terribly destructive habits. The words are already in my hands.

So is the coffee, black and cold, but that is hardly worth mentioning.

~ ~

For the past several months I've been mulling over progress, over what it means to be "getting better" when every day seems a redundant cycle of physical pain, emotional lagging, and general lack of wellness; when sleep patterns are still as volatile as hormonal fluctuations; where my body thinks functioning properly is an out-dated notion; when I have nothing I can carefully box and label and say "This is why I'm a worthwhile person: I do this task well and this person desperately needs me and here is where I'm going." It's hard to accomplish any noteworthy achievement, however small, when the journey from beneath blankets to the Keurig in the kitchen for coffee is a journey that exhausts the day's energy reserves. It's hard to find relevance in other people when too discouraged and sick to be of use to anyone, even oneself. It's hard to have ambitious goals that somehow justify one's existence on the planet when the thought of living past one's twenty-first birthday seems too overwhelming a thought to be entertained.

To be quite frank, I don't feel like I've made any progress at all from that place of ruin in which I stood not last winter but in the winter previous. I don't feel like anything is being mended. Right now there is more cause for despair than anything else, because my dreams of finding something that would snap me back to life have been reduced to shambles, and I know very well that I'm still a horrid mess, in so many ways. But what I feel means little.

What I feel is not all that relevant now, because, regardless of the negative emotion churning continually through my head, the tiny moments of concrete decision throughout each day and night have become my touchstones for sanity. Saying no to a third cup of coffee for the day. Snacking on vegetables instead of punishing my body by skipping food. Exercising instead of brooding. Choosing to focus attention on a task in front of me, however irrelevant, instead of spacing out in order to review everything that I cannot fix around me, everything that is broken and driving me mad. Determining that moods, however relentless, will not be the compass by which I travel, and any sort of mood will most certainly not be my North. And perhaps last night's choice most of all: I went to sleep. Finished watching a movie, then shut down the laptop in preparation for bed before proceeding to sit silently in the recliner, rocking back and forth, for forty-five minutes, and instead of getting up and creeping through the dark to the kitchen to brew a mug of coffee and spend the next three hours giving free reign to despair and lonely fancy I wrapped myself in my fuzzy blanket, flopped face-first on that oh-so-comfy leather couch, and went to sleep. Forced my brain, trained to play insomniac, to let go of something that was bothering me and acknowledge my body's need for rest.

Funny how something so small and apparently inconsequential can seem so much like victory.