frost

Frost covers each blade of grass. Each blade of me.

There is a frozen impotence around me, a sense of rejection and awkwardness and tension. I miss not caring about connections. I fall back on isolation like the drink. It comforts me. Or rather it once comforted me, but now it aches in me. And I cling to sloppy communication like the ice on the world around me this morning. Unwelcome, it slides over everything. It appears more hyper the more it is ignored. I just crave connection. I become self-aware and retract again in daylight.

I brought a packages of goodies for strangers to the post. And my return address stamps smudged and my paper was too loose and the ink stained the postal worker's hand. She said, "You are my problem today."

I swallowed and thought, "I'm everyone's problem today."

I understand why my children believe a fairy paints each petal and blade of grass with ice. I step into our southern facing three season porch. The world is crystalline and silent. I stand in awe, as my stomach retracts into itself instinctively, and I blow into my hands. I want to say, "This is so beautiful." But no one is around to hear it. And anyway, I need to just be present in the beauty and silence. I keep filling moments with talking.

The frost will leave late this morning when the sun rises over the treeline. The porch will heat up. There is a difference between solitude and isolation, even if I am alone in both. There is sadness in New Jersey and the planets align and affect the magnetism of the earth and the birds shit right on my windshield and I will always still want to fit in somewhere. There is a postcard pinned to my inspiration board:

WE ARE ALL CONNECTED

It is the week before her death and her birth. Four times around the sun and I still have nothing close to wisdom. I have ornaments with her name and rituals I can't bear to do some days. And a promise of her kisses in my sleep, which I won't remember or feel, but remind me that I am not just two someone's mother, I am three. The way we are all connected is grief and loss, I remind myself. And love too.

to all and everything

My husband invited a rather large green bush-eating monster who despised all things wild and untamed into our yard. The beast ate our wildflower beds, and our butterfly bush. The monster snorted and huffed up in a slightly savage British accent, "All the wild things in the world make me terribly sick." He chomped the bottom first, then pulled up the gladiola. Lavender caught in its front teeth and caterpillars hung from its lips. The brute stomped through our yard muttering about radicals. He waddled off, farting and muttering about chaos and the proletariat. 

There was almost nothing left of the butterfly bush after the monster left. It was in full bloom with flowers just a few minutes before the monster came, a ton of butterflies visiting and circling. My husband stood proudly by. "Now we look like everyone else. Let us rejoice!" The bush is a weed to most people, but not to me. I see universes in its branches, her arms stretched wide beckoning all the flying creatures to come forth and live together in harmony. "Workers of the yard, UNITE!" Their signs read. Fairies and hummingbird and butterflies and moth create unions and collectives in her branches. Now it it looks like an amateur bonsai hackjob, sad and withered, forced into a subdivision of barely anything resembling bush. My wildflower garden is digesting in the belly of the brute, the leftovers put into yard sacks to sit on the curb until next Thursday. I cried, deep guttural moans, an incessant wave of mourning all day. "My nature, they killed my nature," I tell my sad story to anyone who will listen. It is unlike me to weep, but I raged and ranted, keened and screamed Mayakovsky from our front step.

An eye for an eye!

Kill me,

bury me -

I’ll dig myself out,

the knives of my teeth by stone —

no wonder!-

made sharper,

A snarling dog, under

the plank-beds of barracks I’ll crawl,

sneaking out to bite feet that smell

of sweat and of market stalls and eat the flowerbeds of writers!

I vow to replant. I give speeches in the streets.

WE ARE PAGANS!
WE VOW TO WORSHIP UNSANCTIONED GROWTH AND NATIVE TENACITY!
LET YOUR YARD GO WILD, HUMANS! LET IT BE NATURAL, STINKY AND MUSKY AND FULL OF SEX AND HEAT AND DEATH!
RISE UP WEEDS!
EMBRACE THE REVOLUTION!

I am a wild thing. My nest is gone. My sanctuary ripped out for order. The absence of those beds makes me feel misunderstood. I should be woven into a daisy chain and worn as a crown, rather than cut down with a gas-powered mower, the last bits of me grasping for earth as I am pulled out of the ground. There is nothing left for me here. Summer is oppressive and solitary. Without nature, it is empty. All my places are lost to suburban pressures. Grass is cut once a week. The neighbors wear khakis and eat Hamburger Helper. I feel weak for weeping, but suburbia is stronger than me.


I feel like I will never forgive my husband. It is stupid to be upset and sad about some plants, but I scream the Russian's words anyway and play pretend revolution, but I am just heartbroken and telling tall tales about monsters and Russian poets who cry for better working conditions for the people. The bush is gone and my flowers are gone. I screamed at the children today, because they were screaming at each other, then I wept about breaking that boundary in me. I don't have the strength to stay quiet. I am an coyote. A crow calling his friends, annoying the neighbors. No, I am a cicada whose deep hard shell is stuck to a lawn chair, broken open so delicately that it is hardly noticeable. In fact, I don't think my husband noticed I wasn't in there anymore. I almost looked alive, but I was not there. When the bush left, so did I. I will never understand flower beds and weeding and suburban ethics and I need to stop trying. 


When I am like this, I sit in church basements and drink shitty coffee and pray constantly. 

God, show me your path and grant me the strength to take it. God, help me accept. God, help me grieve. God, save me from myself. 

It is the opposite of grief season here. The wind is hot and wet, my hair sticks to my neck and I beg for a breeze. It is a prayer tucked between strength and guidance. The dog knocks the wind chime when he bounds down the stairs, and I mistake it for wind, then I stand, open armed, waiting for the shell of me to be carried to a garden full of foxglove and butterfly bushes far away from green monsters, fibs about grief, and the bourgeoisie.

peas

I feel empty of words now.

There is nothing to say. I feel emptied out, shelled, as it were. A pea pod, closed up, looks filled with meatiness. But I am an empty thing, torn in half. There is a stubbornness that is gone. A fight someone flicked from my insides and threw into a bowl for a soup.

It feels good to have no fight left in me. When a soldier surrenders, he sits, places his weapon behind him, and doesn't look back at it. He is done. That decision is made, and there are no second thoughts about overpowering the soldier he just held his hands up too. He just sits and waits for direction. 

The rain started this morning after midnight. First the wind, then the rain. I heard it coming, pulled another blanket out of the cupboard, and covered the boy and myself before it reached us properly. I thought about the meteor shower behind the clouds, and how all those wishes only come to those who see them. 

I can't sleep. My mind races, then I read and grow tired, then I put down the book, and my mind races. It starts again, the racing and reading and racing and reading.What I am thinking about is an unwinnable war. An endless war. A pointless war. A war from which I surrendered, but keep thinking of how much I loved my fucking rifle back when I would use it. So I listen to the rain and wait for direction.

I am sometimes in love with my defects. They are spicy and meaty and get me things I want, even as they come at the expense of others. I am a pacifist now. It feels empty, but I know it is filled with something else entirely. I sit beside the road and wait for an enemy to give me direction. I try not to give into the voice that tells me to turn around and look the man with the gun in the eye. Stare him down, defiant even as I am submissive, my mind saying, "I had a gun once. And when I had a gun, I should have used it."

There is nothing to be said, because I am empty of bitter fruit. I cannot rewrite the recipe that made me who I am. I cannot even say anything about it, because it is gone into the soup.I forget which spices. Which veggies.

The soup is unpalatable. The one made out of me. It contains a pound of flesh or six for a crime I committed lifetimes ago. She is gone. Into the soup. I kicked the witch into the fire and danced in the forest following a trail of bird scat in place of the bread we dropped ages ago. I am home, carrying the cauldron of me. It needs salt, or sugar. Perhaps both. I keep trying to take things away. Once something becomes part of a soup, it cannot be extracted. So, I add counter spices. Chants and spells and a candle for the new moon. It is a banishing spell. But the parts of me are still there, waiting to be shot despite the surrender.

I have no words left. And yet these fall out of me, like the man at a crossroads telling riddles to adventurers. One pathway leads to the beautiful princess and the pot of gold, or the other leads to certain death. I am either the one that always tells the truth, or never does. I don't know why I write like this when I am distressed. This was just about not having peas in me.

sick

The boy threw up on my neck. I hate being touched, or kissed, or caressed on my neck. I am a meats and potato lover. No tickling or fancy soft touching. I want to be unteased. When I have wet, warm, half-digested food on my neck, it is more soft and touching than I can bear. I hate it more than even puke in my hand, and not knowing what to do with it. Throw it away? Rinse it off? What I really want to do is scream, shake my hand, and run far away from these barfy little people.

There was almost no escape from the virus. It was ON! MY! NECK! And yet, in the day proceeding my sickness, it seemed to want me to feed it large quantities of food, like chocolate covered almonds and rice cakes. Mango nectar and tofu. Probiotics and quinoa. It lulled me into a false sense of security. The virus is a hippy. A smelly, stinky, stomach-churning hippy.

When I began throwing up, I thought about how long it had been since I vomited and how often I used to do it. Through my pregnancies with morning sickness and through my twenties and early thirties with undiagnosed alcoholism. My head rested on the toilet seat, knees tucked under me. I dry heaved, and felt the muscles all over my body tighten and release. The pain surged down my shoulders. The nausea, vertigo, stomach churning minutes before you know there will be a clutching from the inside out. My husband asked me if the vomit suddenly overtook me, and I said no. It was more like when you drank too much and could go either way, but know it would be a better morning if you just vomited before you went to bed. The feeling that you need to get the poison out of your body. So, you go to the bathroom, kneel, and wait. You think of disgusting things, like the inside of the toilet bowl, or the things clinging to the toilet brush. That was what it was like. He cocked his head. Then I remembered he was a normal person and had no idea what I was talking about.

I didn't miss drinking this week. I was reminded of that feeling in the morning, the feeling at night, the feeling in the daytime. I always felt bad--a low-level nausea and headache that I never knew was a hangover until I didn't have it anymore. I had vertigo and was shaking, like the early days of sobriety. And I was throwing up.

I miss drinking when I was sophisticated and free. Charming and funny. I wore snakeskin boots, had a flat stomach, and painted deep red lips. I had a bravado that challenged people to kiss me hard in a bar, then I would knee them in the groin. I smoked cigarettes, and belonged to no person. My drinking was victimless, if you don't count me. I twisted my hair up in chopsticks, and I cussed like a sailor, because I was a sailor and a longshoreman and a whore and a virgin. Actually, I don't know if I was ever that person, not really.  But it is the film that drinking played in my head, over and over, distant, mysterious, exotic, liberated, sexy, macho. Loading the docks, unloading the ships. I drank a whiskey and chewed tobacco and spat into the garbage strewn water.

I bought a sewing machine. It is the anti-drinking move. I am too impatient to be a seamstress, but it feels good to be able to construct basic things, like pillows and meditations mats, aprons and hems. Nothing is straight, or cute. I am adopting the idea of wabi sabi and calling it a philosophy.

I just wanted to write today.

I don't have a purpose, really. No larger musing on grief and viral attacks. I just feel stranded on this island of sick. I have a friend who always says when you are suffering or sick, it is all you can pay attention to. It is true. When I was first grieving Lucia's death, that sentence would bounce around my mind often. When you are grieving, it is all you can pay attention to. It demands everything. When you are sick, it is equally impossible to be giving. I thought a lot about being sick, and what that used to be like versus what it is now. And I thought about what like would have been like if I had quit drinking ten years ago, the first time I asked for help with my drinking. I thought about the friends that are gone. And whether they are cleaning up puke too, whether they think things could have been different. But that is a dangerous road to walk down.

What are you thinking about these days?

one of those days...

yesterday, i felt so strong. i felt so empowered. "i am really doing good," i thought. only eight weeks out, and i feel okay.

today, i feel so impotent. i drove to visit my father, who is wheelchair bound, and in a nursing facility. he is over an hour away. just me and bea. i notice that i only have 30 miles until my tank is empty. one of the only good things about living on jersey side is never having to fill up your gas in snow and rain. still, i didn't exactly realize this until in philadelphia citylimits. i decided to hit the gas station by my dad's place. when i get there, seven miles left on the DTE, i open my diaper bag to realize that i had left my wallet in my purse. the purse that is sitting next to my front door. i transferred my make-up, but not my wallet. i am an hour away from home. i have no gas. i don't have my wallet. i suddenly realize that i can't prove i am me. i am noone. i have no proof that i exist. if they can't prove i exist, they can't prove lucy existed. i sat in my car and cried.

it wasn't a big deal to ask my dad for money. i just felt nauseated. and as i am taking the elevator up, a nurse gets in with me. she tells me how cute my daughter is, and asks me if i am expecting another. i realized then that i am still wearing my maternity winter jacket, and it puffs out. i just never dug any of the old ones out. plus, to be honest, i am only two months postpartum. this probably should have happened before, but it hasn't. all the air left in the elevator was sucked out in that minute.
"uh, no, i just had a baby." stare forward. floor two is taking way too long.
"oh, how exciting, how old is your baby?"
"yeah, um, my baby didn't make it."
"sorry?"
"my baby, ahem, died."
"i'm so sorry. just so..."open doors. flee. head to my dad's room, and try to pull my shit together.

but i can't. some days i just feel like i won't be able to pull it together. isn't that our biggest fear? to be out in public, in a place where noone knows about us now, and not be able to pull it together? i am shaking and a mess, and yet, i manage to cry for only a minute, and then get on with my life. we always do it, though. we manage to pay our bills, and fill up the gas tank, and shop for groceries. we manage to somehow pull it together to get through the next minute until we can be safe again.

thank you all for the comments on my new blog. you probably don't realize how much you have helped me with your blogs, your words, your survival, your strength, your honesty and the love of this community. there are a lot of me's out there in this world, reading your stories, relating to your experiences. your stories have truly made me stronger. thank you.