On Thursday I ran away, on Friday I curled into a caffeinated stupor and contemplated dying. Friday night I cried myself to sleep. This morning, on the interstate somewhere between Point A and Point B, I found my way back to solid ground.
There are words I've put onto paper, into desktop documents, that I'd rather not share because they mean too much. They contain pieces of me that are broken, that are unsettlingly imperfect and difficult and painful and maybe far too honest for anyone but the quiet understanding of my future self and a God who grants grace. And yet it is when I try to write between the lines, to say what needs to be said without actually saying it, that I find the ideas paralyzed with in me, refusing to be shaped into any sort of narrative. "You would conceal?" it seems they say. "Then we have no place with you." Deception is a clever and occasionally necessary thing in conversation, but there is no excuse for it in art, and if writing is meant to be in some form a work of art then that writing demands a vulnerability not allowed by the desire to maintain a carefully constructed exterior manicured into inhuman perfection.
Why is it so important to keep that perfection?
Wednesday night I drove for three hours in the dusk and then the dark, reaching through the hum of road noise for some remnant of sanity and balance to call my own. There was none to be found.
Memories seep together in my head; somehow an evening with friends and sisters bleeds into a nightmare about losing someone too close to my heart, and that threads its way through an hour spent curled on someone else's couch, half dozing and vaguely aware of the rise and fall of many voices. In front of me now is a mug of potato leek soup, microwaved and fresh from its cardboard box, and the odour rising with the steam holds all the richness of last Thanksgiving's late night cozy meal. It was the first Thanksgiving I'd spent away from my siblings.
This coming holiday might be the second.
I flip through my Logbook in search of the last entry, and from between blank pages a paper gravestone falls. I sat inside a house of mourning, and it was neither a palace nor a hovel, but merely a clapboard-and-plastic shelter raised to guard looming grief from the November wind. But that is a story for another day. Today's story is different. Today's story is small rituals and the question of survival, framed by three blue jays on the back patio and a gaggle of geese flying low over the Gingerbread House, screaming.
Thursday afternoon I watched Lost In Translation, and in one of the scenes Charlotte, lying on Bob Harris's bed with her toes barely brushing his pajama leg, asks drowsily, "Does it get easier?" I'm asking the same question, just not about the same things. Does it get easier?
Does it?
His answer has slipped from my memory as if he never spoke in reply. As answers go, I have none.
Through the now-frigid wind a siren is howling. I miss home.
Saturday, November 22, 2014
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Fifteen Blackbirds on a Tuesday Afternoon
1. When it comes to working in a clinical setting, there is a pecking order. There is always a pecking order.
2. Acknowledging the pecking order will result in the near-immediate acceptance of you and what you have to offer on both a personal and professional level.
3. If you circumvent the pecking order by becoming the pet of the top dog, it is unlikely that you will appreciate any acceptance whatsoever, except that which we can find the grace to extend you despite your inappropriate assumption of privilege.
4. Acting as if people stepping aside to make a place for you is you doing them a favour is an inappropriate assumption of privilege.
5. Nonchalantly assuming personal responsibility for jobs that are part of another person's routine workday, without being asked, is an inappropriate assumption of privilege.
6. So is acting as if the connection formed through an introduction and then one half hour prenatal happens to be more important than a connection formed over two pregnancies and a birth and a miscarriage in between.
7. It's not.
8. The thing is, while I try to be reasonable I find that I'm also decidedly territorial, and what all this is showing me is not that you're a bad person, or that this conflict is beyond resolution, but that there's a wolf inside of me that sets boundaries defining what I call my own, and that wolf would rather tear you apart for one mis-step than it would allow you the understanding owed from one human to another.
9. The thing is, I keep discovering that I'm a nastier sort of woman than I think that I am.
10. I have teeth. Sharp teeth. And it's frightening to be so ready to maul you because you inched your foot over a piece of ground to which I had laid tacit claim. Because honestly, what's more important here? You getting the chance to meet a goal for which you've been working your heart out for years, or me having a month of comfortably roaming my own domain? You achieving something that will set you up for the rest of your career as a midwife, or me getting the gratification of being the one on the floor for yet another routine month at clinic?
11. Does it matter if I miss a couple of births that I had been hoping to attend?
12. Does it really?
13. So here's what I have to say, over halfway through this month, with all of the subtle distaste and distance there between us: Yes, there is a pecking order. And yes, you disregarded it. And yes, that stings. There were places I wanted to be and people that meant a lot to me, and you slipped between us, and I wish you hadn't. You were just a tiny bit rude. But the thing is, that's not going to matter in a year, or six months, or even one, and I'm glad, honestly glad, that you get the chance to accomplish something that means so much to you, that you're giving up so much to achieve.
14. The thing is, there is a pecking order. There has been and there always will be, and it serves as a sort of social structure within a clinical context. But empathy supersedes that structure. That animalistic pecking order.
15. The thing is, I need to learn to let it go.
2. Acknowledging the pecking order will result in the near-immediate acceptance of you and what you have to offer on both a personal and professional level.
3. If you circumvent the pecking order by becoming the pet of the top dog, it is unlikely that you will appreciate any acceptance whatsoever, except that which we can find the grace to extend you despite your inappropriate assumption of privilege.
4. Acting as if people stepping aside to make a place for you is you doing them a favour is an inappropriate assumption of privilege.
5. Nonchalantly assuming personal responsibility for jobs that are part of another person's routine workday, without being asked, is an inappropriate assumption of privilege.
6. So is acting as if the connection formed through an introduction and then one half hour prenatal happens to be more important than a connection formed over two pregnancies and a birth and a miscarriage in between.
7. It's not.
8. The thing is, while I try to be reasonable I find that I'm also decidedly territorial, and what all this is showing me is not that you're a bad person, or that this conflict is beyond resolution, but that there's a wolf inside of me that sets boundaries defining what I call my own, and that wolf would rather tear you apart for one mis-step than it would allow you the understanding owed from one human to another.
9. The thing is, I keep discovering that I'm a nastier sort of woman than I think that I am.
10. I have teeth. Sharp teeth. And it's frightening to be so ready to maul you because you inched your foot over a piece of ground to which I had laid tacit claim. Because honestly, what's more important here? You getting the chance to meet a goal for which you've been working your heart out for years, or me having a month of comfortably roaming my own domain? You achieving something that will set you up for the rest of your career as a midwife, or me getting the gratification of being the one on the floor for yet another routine month at clinic?
11. Does it matter if I miss a couple of births that I had been hoping to attend?
12. Does it really?
13. So here's what I have to say, over halfway through this month, with all of the subtle distaste and distance there between us: Yes, there is a pecking order. And yes, you disregarded it. And yes, that stings. There were places I wanted to be and people that meant a lot to me, and you slipped between us, and I wish you hadn't. You were just a tiny bit rude. But the thing is, that's not going to matter in a year, or six months, or even one, and I'm glad, honestly glad, that you get the chance to accomplish something that means so much to you, that you're giving up so much to achieve.
14. The thing is, there is a pecking order. There has been and there always will be, and it serves as a sort of social structure within a clinical context. But empathy supersedes that structure. That animalistic pecking order.
15. The thing is, I need to learn to let it go.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
What I'm Listening To: "I Want You Here"
Because something happened, and it shouldn't have happened but it did — and right now this matters.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
There Should Be Words for It
"I'm sorry you have to get up so early."
"I'm sorry too."
And I was. I was. And then in the morning I drove through a thicket of trees and out to the wide-open space beneath a sky swathed in purple-grey clouds that pressed down against red-speckled blue-grey mountains, with the sun curtained behind their ethereal expanse and the moon overhead, three-quarters full. Over and over again the road itself would stretch through autumn-cloaked tree arches. The changing shades of the atmosphere in the early hours, for some inexplicable reason, stabbed to my heart.
I don't know, I don't think I can take this anymore; I don't think I can keep going, keep holding space in this place. It's been a hard week—a hard month, really—funny how it's all by proximity and not direct involvement and still the pain wrings so viciously. My head aches, and a cup of tea is a fine solace when the world is in order but what about when it isn't? What about when the world is screaming?
Tell me, do I truly love living life, or do I just think that I do? Half the time I don't know because it hurts so badly.
Life—you love that. The real life that flashes through the pain; it's what keeps us breathing.
Then I dropped the phone and doubled over on the bed, face buried in my knees: I don't think I want to keep breathing. I think this has always hurt too much. I think I'm tired. But then, that option isn't mine. There's no 'opt out' button; we get what we get, and, as Cheryl Strayed said to a college graduate whining about student loans in her column Dear Sugar, "You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding."
I'm searching for the fragments of life strewn amidst shards of blood-letting death and finding a man with no eyebrows (girls, remember Canon Tallis?), steam rising from a brimfull mug and scraping voices blending harmonious around a fire, words and worlds scrawled by a passing stranger who writes with a voice all too familiar. I'm searching for meaning in ritual, in faith, in the death that comes with every morning and the resurrection from each killing moment. At least, I choose to believe that it is resurrection. Sometimes it feels as if a little more of me has stayed dead every time.
There is no why. Instead of answers there are questions gaping with hunger, questions starving for resolution. I haven't any. I only have this very second of cracked, aching wakefulness, my fingers curled around a cup of tea, the words I scribbled on a page while driving Sunday morning. I only have the weary determination not to succumb to the weight of the load but to try to go on and give everything I have to at least make it a little lighter for others. I have that.
And, for what it's worth, I do love the colour of the November sky.
"I'm sorry too."
And I was. I was. And then in the morning I drove through a thicket of trees and out to the wide-open space beneath a sky swathed in purple-grey clouds that pressed down against red-speckled blue-grey mountains, with the sun curtained behind their ethereal expanse and the moon overhead, three-quarters full. Over and over again the road itself would stretch through autumn-cloaked tree arches. The changing shades of the atmosphere in the early hours, for some inexplicable reason, stabbed to my heart.
I don't know, I don't think I can take this anymore; I don't think I can keep going, keep holding space in this place. It's been a hard week—a hard month, really—funny how it's all by proximity and not direct involvement and still the pain wrings so viciously. My head aches, and a cup of tea is a fine solace when the world is in order but what about when it isn't? What about when the world is screaming?
Tell me, do I truly love living life, or do I just think that I do? Half the time I don't know because it hurts so badly.
Life—you love that. The real life that flashes through the pain; it's what keeps us breathing.
Then I dropped the phone and doubled over on the bed, face buried in my knees: I don't think I want to keep breathing. I think this has always hurt too much. I think I'm tired. But then, that option isn't mine. There's no 'opt out' button; we get what we get, and, as Cheryl Strayed said to a college graduate whining about student loans in her column Dear Sugar, "You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding."
I'm searching for the fragments of life strewn amidst shards of blood-letting death and finding a man with no eyebrows (girls, remember Canon Tallis?), steam rising from a brimfull mug and scraping voices blending harmonious around a fire, words and worlds scrawled by a passing stranger who writes with a voice all too familiar. I'm searching for meaning in ritual, in faith, in the death that comes with every morning and the resurrection from each killing moment. At least, I choose to believe that it is resurrection. Sometimes it feels as if a little more of me has stayed dead every time.
There is no why. Instead of answers there are questions gaping with hunger, questions starving for resolution. I haven't any. I only have this very second of cracked, aching wakefulness, my fingers curled around a cup of tea, the words I scribbled on a page while driving Sunday morning. I only have the weary determination not to succumb to the weight of the load but to try to go on and give everything I have to at least make it a little lighter for others. I have that.
And, for what it's worth, I do love the colour of the November sky.
Thursday, November 6, 2014
"Lines After M. B.'s Funeral"
I keep trying to find the words, but this is perhaps a case of feeling too much and so being able to say too little. Ironic, isn't it, that where we care most we can express least? I'm reaching for letters, for sounds, trying to speak, but they're escaping me again; there are tears in my eyes, but shedding them is out of the question, shedding them would be a waste. There's a hole in the world. I'm afraid I might fall through. So instead I shuffle from market to kitchen to room and to kitchen again, seeking solace in mugs of tea almost too hot to drink and writing sympathy cards via dishes of food, because what can I say? What can I say? Someone has died, was, has gone, is where?
The cry of the South-flying geese sounds almost too desolate and wild to be borne, and the silence wreaks havoc in its wake only because somewhere else, amidst the noise and clamour of life too loudly enacted, fragile people are stuffing trembling, over-white fists into their open mouths and asking soundlessly if they can go on, because my God, this is too much for us; can't You let us be? Tragedies are folded and laid by with years past, and referenced calmly, but only when the wounds are allowed to heal and then scar. What about when there is no scarring—when there cannot be—because the blows are laid so heavily and swiftly that the blood cannot even be staunched? This is neither the first nor the only time that space has opened. We are riddled with death like a sieve.
Is it easier when there is time to adjust to the morphing of eager hope into horror? Is it easier when the emotional battle can be fought in the privacy of a darkened bedroom instead of beneath glaring lights, amidst strangers? Is it easier to divide one's dreams from one's reality and lock those fantasies carefully away than it is to sign life away on a multitude of forms and carry death home wrapped in a hospital blanket.
How many times can a heart die before it stops beating?
The dark holes are as multitudinous
As the stars in the galaxies,
As open to the cold blasts of wind.
If we fell through,
What would we find?
Where is the mercy in this beating? Well-meaning people speak vaguely of pruning; is the definition of pruning truly laying waste?
The reading of The Year of Magical Thinking was serendipitously timed, I cannot help thinking with some bitterness. Now I can cling to it as a manual for grief. As a blueprint for how to be present without being burdensome. As a prescription to allow, if diligently taken, living with death.
I didn't want a manual. I wanted to pause and be still, be silent, and then move on from reading about one woman's pain to sharing in other women's rejoicing.
I wanted life.
Life is not stillness beneath my hands or static reverberating from a Doppler. Life is not a flat line on a fetal heart monitor. Life is not "Two children still living, two dead."
What is the point of this?
If we fell through
What would we find?
Show me
Let me look through this new empty place
To where
The wind comes from
And the light begins.
The cry of the South-flying geese sounds almost too desolate and wild to be borne, and the silence wreaks havoc in its wake only because somewhere else, amidst the noise and clamour of life too loudly enacted, fragile people are stuffing trembling, over-white fists into their open mouths and asking soundlessly if they can go on, because my God, this is too much for us; can't You let us be? Tragedies are folded and laid by with years past, and referenced calmly, but only when the wounds are allowed to heal and then scar. What about when there is no scarring—when there cannot be—because the blows are laid so heavily and swiftly that the blood cannot even be staunched? This is neither the first nor the only time that space has opened. We are riddled with death like a sieve.
Is it easier when there is time to adjust to the morphing of eager hope into horror? Is it easier when the emotional battle can be fought in the privacy of a darkened bedroom instead of beneath glaring lights, amidst strangers? Is it easier to divide one's dreams from one's reality and lock those fantasies carefully away than it is to sign life away on a multitude of forms and carry death home wrapped in a hospital blanket.
How many times can a heart die before it stops beating?
The dark holes are as multitudinous
As the stars in the galaxies,
As open to the cold blasts of wind.
If we fell through,
What would we find?
Where is the mercy in this beating? Well-meaning people speak vaguely of pruning; is the definition of pruning truly laying waste?
The reading of The Year of Magical Thinking was serendipitously timed, I cannot help thinking with some bitterness. Now I can cling to it as a manual for grief. As a blueprint for how to be present without being burdensome. As a prescription to allow, if diligently taken, living with death.
I didn't want a manual. I wanted to pause and be still, be silent, and then move on from reading about one woman's pain to sharing in other women's rejoicing.
I wanted life.
Life is not stillness beneath my hands or static reverberating from a Doppler. Life is not a flat line on a fetal heart monitor. Life is not "Two children still living, two dead."
What is the point of this?
If we fell through
What would we find?
Show me
Let me look through this new empty place
To where
The wind comes from
And the light begins.
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Yesterday's List, Tomorrow's Adventure: In the Interim...
making: kale salad; an overdue birthday present; tomorrow's work lunch; plans for the winter
cooking: vegetables with much impatience and an ample helping of adventuresome forbearance
drinking: Good Earth lemongrass green tea, every day, steaming in an oversized Eeyore mug
reading: Tori Amos: Piece By Piece; Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, by Cheryl Strayed; the gospel of Matthew
wanting: confidence in hope; the solution by which to fix my camera's nonfunctioning memory card
looking: for ambition, my copy of Elements of Style, and the perfect hula hoop
playing: counters in lieu of the piano; the live-action anniversary version of The Game of Life
deciding: to uncurl my fingers and let go of what I shouldn't be holding, bits and pieces at a time; to be more open and at the same time more closed
wishing: that tomorrow could be postponed just twelve hours
enjoying: a Starbucks venti blonde with steamed soy milk, always
waiting: for time to heal open wounds; until I get the chance to sit down again with Madeline and the Bad Hat; for the second season of Call the Midwife to be returned to the local library
liking: Tumblr humour worth saving
wondering: how many people actually care about truly living life and how many just think they do
loving: people for being refractive glass; people for being so alive and warm and real
pondering: the difference between a god who demands ascent to his level for salvation and a god who descends to ours in order to level the playing field; Ian's theology in respect to popular regard of the blood of Jesus, from The Highlander's Last Song
considering: finances; educational and work options for the next handful of months; strategies for spending time with my siblings
watching: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, over again from the beginning; the airing season of Doctor Who; the skies change with the season
hoping: for thawing as the earth freezes over; for new understanding; for faith even now uncomprehended
marvelling: at being alive
needing: reassurance, a hand in the dark; the departure of this persistent head cold; to clean out my car; to actually stop eating gluten, for good
smelling: something suspended uncertainly between frosty air and an upset stomach
wearing: clothing and a very fuzzy blanket
following: impulse, as usual, with a dash of sense haphazardly added after the fact; her Tumblr and her art
noticing: the way the moonlight fractures the clouds; how biting my nails makes my fingers feel clumsy
knowing: the philosophy of Good Earth tea bags and fortune cookies, while compact, is too aligned with simplistic platitude to be deeply applicable to life
thinking: that lying on the booth bench in the hotel bar in Eugene wasn't such a bad thing to be doing or a bad place to be after all, and maybe someday time will carry me back to it
admiring: the white socks on the black cat that crossed my path this evening
sorting: old papers, old notes, and a host of squirming ideas that just want to be put into words already
buying: dull necessities such as floss and toilet paper; car insurance
getting: into the swing of the holiday season (namely, Christmas)
bookmarking: eggless cookie dough; a reminder; a blog post discussing winter health
disliking: the way technological white noise disrupts clarity of focus
opening: tiny missives from two of my dearest girls; the eleventh volume of Library Wars
giggling: at ridiculous plans for future social anarchy and small-town rabble-rousing
feeling: a little bit lonely, a little bit sick, and vaguely content
snacking: on organic strawberry ice cream and baked potato wedges
coveting: presence, and the chance to cuddle with Rye
wishing: for the cozy corner of the leather loveseat and someone else's midnight breathing and Arrietty playing quietly in the dark
helping: tomorrow drag longer by staying up late now; children in grocery stores stop crying and settle for bewildered staring because yes, full-grown people can be just that weird
hearing: the skin-grinding hum of electronics in a room empty but for myself
cooking: vegetables with much impatience and an ample helping of adventuresome forbearance
drinking: Good Earth lemongrass green tea, every day, steaming in an oversized Eeyore mug
reading: Tori Amos: Piece By Piece; Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, by Cheryl Strayed; the gospel of Matthew
wanting: confidence in hope; the solution by which to fix my camera's nonfunctioning memory card
looking: for ambition, my copy of Elements of Style, and the perfect hula hoop
playing: counters in lieu of the piano; the live-action anniversary version of The Game of Life
deciding: to uncurl my fingers and let go of what I shouldn't be holding, bits and pieces at a time; to be more open and at the same time more closed
wishing: that tomorrow could be postponed just twelve hours
enjoying: a Starbucks venti blonde with steamed soy milk, always
waiting: for time to heal open wounds; until I get the chance to sit down again with Madeline and the Bad Hat; for the second season of Call the Midwife to be returned to the local library
liking: Tumblr humour worth saving
wondering: how many people actually care about truly living life and how many just think they do
loving: people for being refractive glass; people for being so alive and warm and real
pondering: the difference between a god who demands ascent to his level for salvation and a god who descends to ours in order to level the playing field; Ian's theology in respect to popular regard of the blood of Jesus, from The Highlander's Last Song
considering: finances; educational and work options for the next handful of months; strategies for spending time with my siblings
watching: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, over again from the beginning; the airing season of Doctor Who; the skies change with the season
hoping: for thawing as the earth freezes over; for new understanding; for faith even now uncomprehended
marvelling: at being alive
needing: reassurance, a hand in the dark; the departure of this persistent head cold; to clean out my car; to actually stop eating gluten, for good
smelling: something suspended uncertainly between frosty air and an upset stomach
wearing: clothing and a very fuzzy blanket
following: impulse, as usual, with a dash of sense haphazardly added after the fact; her Tumblr and her art
noticing: the way the moonlight fractures the clouds; how biting my nails makes my fingers feel clumsy
knowing: the philosophy of Good Earth tea bags and fortune cookies, while compact, is too aligned with simplistic platitude to be deeply applicable to life
thinking: that lying on the booth bench in the hotel bar in Eugene wasn't such a bad thing to be doing or a bad place to be after all, and maybe someday time will carry me back to it
admiring: the white socks on the black cat that crossed my path this evening
sorting: old papers, old notes, and a host of squirming ideas that just want to be put into words already
buying: dull necessities such as floss and toilet paper; car insurance
getting: into the swing of the holiday season (namely, Christmas)
bookmarking: eggless cookie dough; a reminder; a blog post discussing winter health
disliking: the way technological white noise disrupts clarity of focus
opening: tiny missives from two of my dearest girls; the eleventh volume of Library Wars
giggling: at ridiculous plans for future social anarchy and small-town rabble-rousing
feeling: a little bit lonely, a little bit sick, and vaguely content
snacking: on organic strawberry ice cream and baked potato wedges
coveting: presence, and the chance to cuddle with Rye
wishing: for the cozy corner of the leather loveseat and someone else's midnight breathing and Arrietty playing quietly in the dark
helping: tomorrow drag longer by staying up late now; children in grocery stores stop crying and settle for bewildered staring because yes, full-grown people can be just that weird
hearing: the skin-grinding hum of electronics in a room empty but for myself
inspired by jodi at practicing simplicity
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