Thoughts for November

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.