I thought my 20s
would be when everything
made sense –
I don’t know what I was expecting, though,
since my 20s began with the death
of my mother
and ended with the death
of my limitations.
My 20s held funerary services
of who I thought I was –
who I thought was worthy of me.
It was the death of ignoring myself;
My 20s ended with me coming to life.
I’ve lived with anxiety and depression for the majority of my adult life. Rather than say, “I’ve struggled” with either, I’ll take away any controlling factor and simply state, “I have lived.” They are like annoying roommates who mostly keep to themselves and then one of them clogs the toilet and doesn’t say anything, so it just overflows until I find it and then I’m stuck with the mess. I use the analogy of the toilet because a clogged toilet both makes me anxious and also a little sad. Feel free to insert whatever analogy works for you.
When my anxiety creeps up, I want to impulse eat. I want to yell. I want to run away. When I feel depressed, I want to hug my dog and live in my bed under the covers until dark and never come out. Luckily for my dog, I have extreme issues with guilt and an overwhelmingly responsibility to take care of others so it never lasts long and he inspires me to go outside, or for a trail walk, or to play fetch.
Tonight was a little different, though. I just really wanted to take a nap. I really wanted to drift off for a couple of hours and wake up a little less drowned in my own thoughts. This didn’t happen, though. The universe – and nature – decided a flash flood would be scheduled for 7 PM and I was woken with what sounded like a tornado running down my street. My dog and I both shot up and I heard my phone going off to the emergency alert system. I looked out the window and saw my neighbor Joan’s car parked with the trunk wide open.
Joan is elderly. She’s sweet, the right amount of nosy that any old woman should be, and my dog is her number one fan. She always forgets to close her trunk. Her husband had major surgery recently and she’s been inundated with helping him. There have been nurses and family members in and out of the condo next to mine in order to make sure Joan’s husband has the proper care. It makes me think of my grandpa and how rough the medical care was on the family and him for the last few months of his life. Her husband has improved, though, which makes me happy to hear.
So back to Joan’s damn trunk. I don’t even think about it, just say, “Dammit, Joan!” I throw on some pants and a tee and run outside like a mad woman and slam the trunk before the rain gets too bad. I don’t tell her. I don’t make a scene; just prevent a soggy trunk and run back into the house. When I closed the door it hit me – no matter how stuck I feel, regardless of how fucked up things may seem, I (or you) always have a purpose. There is always a purpose to do even the smallest thing for an unwitting person. I (you) always have a place in this world, even if it’s just closing some old lady’s trunk in a flash flood.
We stand shorebound and watch
fishermen hold tight to rocks,
their faces smooth like beach glass
from years of meeting with the sea.
A wave will crash
and more and more –
Applause for the morning’s bounty.
Even icy dawns
when we saw the sunrise
over wild spraying sea –
And biting winds threw birds
towards the end of the earth
and the horizon lay as if it were under the tide
ignoring the seabirds fights and cries,
she still accords with fishermen
trading patience for salt.
Their steady, tired feet and tired eyes
meet the wind and take its bites
and respect where the horizon lies.
Is there one single, all-encompassing truth and we are all too small to see it, or are we all floating freely living truths strictly based off our own realms of perception?
I often have wondered if there is a rhyme or reason to human interaction, if we are moving around like atoms who sometimes collide and sometimes work together. I wondered why my ex-partner saw logic in his infidelity, believing he was protecting me by hiding a relationship while maintaining a life with me, as if that false sense of security was better than me being alone. It’s alarming, as people, that we see others as we want them to seem, and that we see situations based on the depth of our own personal perceptions. It’s a hard truth for some that we are only capable of loving another based on the capacity of what we believe we deserve. No matter how hard we want to believe we can give more than we are able, we cannot. So is there a truth, larger than all of us, that we are too small to see? Or are all of our truths, hitting into each other, what the big picture is?
I never got the urge
to cry
when looking at someone
I loved unless
they were moments
from death.
I never felt such overwhelming
joy
until that September afternoon –
Your eyes.
Those eyes like mine
made me feel
such joy
I almost wept.
I could not contain
just how much
I loved you.
French press mornings
that gifted us our futures in the bottom
of our cups –
I cannot read our future.
Why did you fall in love with me?
You smiled and said nothing.
I asked again –
I took your hand –
You’re easy to love, I said.
You smiled and said,
because you’re kind.
Kind to heart and kind in patience
rose-colored and divine –
Too rosy to see your eyes that hid
what you couldn’t tell me until
many months past.
To leave me devoured and spit out
spit up resentments where love once was
our cups empty
my –
My cup empty.
You touched her –
and her –
and probably her as well.
Black coffee grind hand on my heart
too divine to stay elevated
fell again
at your feet.
And I wept and wept
to look at your face
to see the death of us –
dead to me.
I often wonder what moment
for you was the pistol
and what moment
was the decision to pull
the trigger.
It’s usually a split
decision that moves like
an indiscernible
brush stroke, uniform –
An obvious beginning
and end but no sign
of the climax.
I often wonder what life
you would have led
if you didn’t stay –
If you didn’t say yes
to a rock that was below
your worth –
If you didn’t measure
your life in poorly
assembled dominoes –
A uniformity doomed from the moment
you began self-medicating.
You were never meant to fall straight.
Would you have
remained
in the Native Land
with red clay to call
home and ground yourself
to ancient beings who never fell from the sky?
Who would you have become
if you stopped
holding on so hard?
I may have never been
but I speculate the sacrifice
would have been worth you knowing
old age.
You shot me point blank
with your smoking gun
semi-automatic
heart.
Charming spectacle
convincing sparkle
in your eyes –
An addicting, blinding,
white hot
like the sun in the summer
but carrying the effect
of an atomic blast.
I soaked it in
and was dust before
the boom.
If I hadn’t met
you,
I wouldn’t have fallen
in love
(although you weren’t
in love with me – incapable,
you said)
for the first time.
Said it out loud to those
eyes
beautiful eyes, like
mine
(but mirrored to mine
because you are
the opposite of me).
Am I Narcissus,
then? Am I
self-indulgent
or do I love
the darkness more than I like
to admit?
(to admit to you I loved your shadows,
fiery red)
You told me you liked
the Call of Cthulhu
because you couldn’t see it –
because you had to imagine how bad it was.
Lovecraft was smart that way,
you said,
to make us imagine our monster.
In our end I realized
by no wanting of my own –
the connections of you and the faceless beast,
a thing I never fully saw.
I have been turned down by – if I’m keeping a vague count – probably 50 or so literary agencies all over the country. I’ve been writing – or if I’m being honest – trying to write books for the past seven or so years. I’ve grown accustomed to rejection letters and passive “we’re so busy here or else we’d give you better feedback” emails that I feel like recently I submit my work just to pass time. I have filled out countless applications, wrote query after query, prayed, hoped, cried, and sometimes practically begged for a chance. I want an agent to take a chance on me and be pleasantly surprised in the same way I took a chance on myself in my early 20’s. I want someone to see me and say, “Hey, she probably works well under pressure, ” or, “Hey, she probably takes criticism well,” and I want to shake that person’s hand and look them in the face and say that I won’t let them down.
In the end, I’m doing what I’ve been doing for the sake of getting out my story. I take years and years of suppressed memories and thoughts and regrets and throw them down line after line for no one other than myself, and I think realizing that what I’m doing is for me is what encourages me to continue filling out query after query and expecting a hearty “No thank you.” The market is over-saturated and the world is over-populated and for some reason I hold onto a shred of hope that something I say will help someone else somewhere even if I’m never published because I’ve seen it happen on more than one occasion just by verbal interaction. I’ve been writing since I could write and I’ve been talking non stop since I could form a sentence. Some people are simply born to be certain things and I think I was born to be a writer.
I’m not sure if my mother’s addiction, my abusive household, her death, my father’s mental illness, or my own personal turmoil was destined to happen because I was somehow destined to share my stories, but I am sharing my stories and my life regardless of my platform. My soap box has not yet caved in. My heart is still beating. I am not finished. I have learned in this process and cycle of application and rejection that I own my past and my truth and I am no longer ashamed of where I come from because I see exactly who the fuck I am and honestly? If that’s as far as I’m meant to go, so be it. Just let me know if I helped someone.
Hold the Space 