Tidbits from 2024
That I am still getting over. Or things I wrote when I thought I wasn't writing.
Yesterday on the plane I read an essay about disaster and it was stunning. As I read it I thought about the disaster that has been my life lately. I’m back in Seattle again but it's like I can’t remember myself. Who am I anyway? When I am not drowning under the weight of somebody else’s life? I used to write poems about drowning. I used to turn somersaults in the Caribbean thinking how silly it is that I used to write poems about drowning. Yet here I am again, trying to speak some strange truth from the sea floor.
Somewhere in Seattle a woman who sometimes feels like a girl sits on a green velvet couch unimpressed and slightly embarrassed with all that she has written before. Irregardless she returns to her computer and opens a google doc again. She wants to write but worries she has forgotten, and it is not the first time but lately there is so much silence. The impossibly heavy things sit atop her chest and she cannot breathe for long enough to find the words.
A roller coaster? A shadow? A haunting? A weight?
An impossibly heavy thing?
A memory. A remembering. Too many yesterdays.
A storm? A kind of disaster? A Catastrophe?
A burning house.
The impossibly heavy thing is why my back hurts. The impossibly heavy thing is why my shoulders are hunched forward and I cannot breathe. The impossibly heavy thing makes me want to send a text telling the person who hates me I forgive them. I think about how ashamed they’ll feel if they ever realize just how much harm they have caused. I think maybe the shame will find them in the quiet moments but Tito’s vodka finds them instead. 5-6L a week, possibly more. I think maybe the shame tries to find them in the quiet moments and that’s why the tv is always on.
They want me to know they have “a lot of animosity and resentment toward me” . They want me to stop checking on, listening to, believing what my niece has to say when I am not there. They want me to know they “feel abandoned.” They want me to come to their birthday party in July. They want me to know they love me no matter what. I respond with statements like “I’ll be happy to have these conversations with you when you are fully sober” even though we both know we can’t be sure if/or when that will be.
A woman who sometimes feels like a girl, discovers that the people she loves have been engaged in an elaborate game of pretend and she is the last to find out that none of it is real. The realization knocks the wind from her chest and leaves her gasping helpless and confused. She sobs in intervals, outside a friend's house in the car, in the parking lot of the grocery store, in her apartment, and at the beach.
A woman who sometimes feels like a girl, discovers that the people she loves haven't been the people she loves in many years. A woman who is no longer a girl looks into the eyes of the sister she loves and is startled to discover the sister that she loves hasn't been a sister who loves her in quite a long time. A woman who was once a girl but isn’t any longer looks into the eyes of the sister she loves and finds enough absence to bring her to her knees. Instead of falling, she steels herself. The absent eyes want to fight her and she knows she cannot show weakness.
My sister says she’s holding me up but none of it is real. My sister says she's fine, but none of it is real. My sister says I lost the car keys but don't worry she forgives me, and for a moment I believe her but then I find the vodka jugs in the car and realize again that none of it is real.
Yesterday someone told me there was a storm and it wasn't outside, and there was no before, and after has yet to arrive. I stood at the window and I did and didn’t see it for myself and I knew that I couldn't be sure of anything at all. I said yesterday there was a storm somewhere, and it wasn't outside but I still felt the thunder in my pulse and there were no places in my apartment to hide from the rain that fell from my two eyes.
I kept putting on my shoelaces to run and finding that my shoelaces were missing. The grief that had stolen my shoelaces held them hostage. Wore the face of the life that I had fought like hell and in spite of to build. Stunned me immobile. Asked: “How could you walk away from yourself and into a storm?”
The grief that wasn’t yet gave back my shoelaces and watched me run into a burning house.