in my bones

Elephants have cemeteries.  Its true.  They visit the bones of lost members of their herd, and rub the bones with their trunks.  They say an elephant never forgets.

I wanted to forget.  I wanted to put all the sadness away; bury it far down like a hidden secret.  I quit writing about it.  I put it away, but it was like sitting it on the mantle of the fireplace to stare at you every day, screaming “Look at me!  Touch me!  FEEL ME!” And, I’d look at it every day, then tell it to fuck off.  But, I left it there to stare me down every morning and on the way home from work and when a picture would be found in a box, and mostly every time I heard the word “sunshine.”  Certain songs and it would laugh at me.

I promised myself I would change my life.  I’d be happy.  I’d cherish every moment, and I’d lose the things that drag me down.  All that baggage, I’d find a way to lose it, get rid of it, bury it in the desert. I’d find peace and love and move on.

Its been five years, and I never realized how angry I am until last night.  There was this uncontrollable urge to rip everything off the walls and out of the cupboards and watch it all shatter into pieces on the ground, ‘cause my heart still feels likes its doing just that. I wanted to tear my hair and scream at the top of my lungs…the temptation of giving in to the urge was overwhelming.

Destruction.  Complete and utter destruction.  Chaos.  I wanted it out of my chest and into the real.  I wanted to SEE it crashing all around me, so that I didn’t have to feel it.  So I could see it and know it was real and THERE...HERE. I wanted it in slow motion…to see the pieces of everything shatter in a time lapsed sequence, so I could say, “THERE!  THAT is what its like when everything…just… breaks…”  That moment in the photograph when all the pieces are flying into the air, right before they start descending back to the earth, stopped, the edges blurred…white porcelain, fragile, and flying, but frozen in time, and I wanted it broken, so shattered there would be no chance of ever putting the pieces back together.  Teeny, tiny shards that poke you in the night and wake you up wondering …

I’d like to say I’m so mad I could scream, but, I’ve been screaming this whole time.  Screaming, screaming, screaming in the confines of a space where only I can hear.

I’ve told myself others have lost more, felt more, deserve to grieve more.  That my loss is lesser.  But, I’m confused, because my loss hurts.  Dear God, it hurts  to the marrow of my bones.  It hurts in the kinks of my guts.  I make my toes smile, but even they hurt sometimes.

I just cannot, for the life of me forget that day.  It won’t go away.

I never wanted to be mad.  I always wanted to feel blessed. I was so lucky to have a friend like that, and I just CANNOT wrap my head around WHY, and it pisses me off.  To no end.  I don’t get it, and I have come to the realization I never will.

I give myself one day a year to cry…and God and everyone in this house knows I sob.  I just can’t believe I never let myself be mad.

I’m smart.  An intelligent, educated person.  I KNOW the stages of grief.  Shit, there’s been enough of it through the years, but I can’t believe I wouldn’t let me be mad.

So, now I guess I just ask for some leeway to be fucking pissed off.  I decided I need two days this year, ‘cause yeah, right now, I’m angry.  I’m irritated.  

I just want one more day, to open the in-box, or answer the phone, or call her, and share a cup of coffee and bitch to the only person that ever got in to see the workings. We talked EVERY damn day.  The only person that ever understood, because our lives were so similar.  I want one more conversation with my soul sister.  To tell her how much I love her, how much I miss her and the wine and getting lost.  Tell her I miss how much we laughed…how for so long, she was the rock I parked my ship on.  

I want her to know there was ONE person that knew everything, that never judged me, that was JUST like me.  I just want one more conversation, and two days to rage…then I will go back to the bones, the barest of bones, and I will be ok.  For now, I need to be mad.

I will be mad, and then like the lotus, that gets buried in the scum, then blooms at the surface, I will find the sunshine.               

   

Happy toes

Its really not a good thing when I get bored.  I don’t mean your average, “GAWD, there is NOTHING to do.”  I get cabin fever, as in climb the walls, get me the f*k out!  I get caught up in my head, with an incessant tape, playing over and over and over, and it tells me how lame my life is.  There gets to be this mirky hurricane stirring in my brain, but I can’t get out of it.  My brain doesn’t open up all four lanes of the freeway and tell ya to get out.  It doesn’t offer a bus to Houston.  It locks you in the Superdome to swim in the misery.  And when it gets to the point of eruption, I do really stupid shit, like think I can spend two weeks in China alone (I never would’ve made it out of the airport) or decide to snow shoe to the medicine wheel when its 40 below in a blizzard.

    

I like to get totally lost, and mostly, I do it because I know if I get lost inside my head, its gonna be bad.  And, there are times I find myself going so far in, the only thing to do is to go out and get lost, because I know how hard it is to climb out when you get that far in. Get lost in a moment, or a feeling I haven’t had for a while, or a place I’ve never been.  I want OUT, out of the house, out of the walls, out of my head.  If I can get lost, I know I’ll find what it is I need. 

I get this urge, like an itch you can’t reach, to breathe.  To wander aimlessly and watch things happen without thinking.  To not wonder, “Why?”

I’m a big why-er.   And, why can be dangerous…especially if I’m the one answering the question. I prefer a place without the why, where I can smile…with my whole being.  I want even my toes to be happy.

 I’ve been bottled up for a couple of years. I’ve heard of writer’s block, but it never hit me until about a year and a half ago.  I’m not much of a talker, but words have always poured out onto the page.  Then… it stopped.  Nothing but a blinking cursor and a feeling that I just needed to get it out, but I wasn’t sure WHAT.  

I got scared, and it stopped my words.  Because, I discovered, when you write it down, when you give it a voice, people are forced to listen.  I’m still not sure how that works, but they can turn their back on you when you speak, and ignore you, but they never do that when you write it down.  They don’t turn you off.  They can’t make you disappear….

Moreover, I discovered people close to you don’t like you admitting your problems…despite the fact we all f*n have ‘em...somehow it means you had a bad childhood or your reality of the situation was off.

What I learned a while ago though, is this: those heart wrenching moments of grief and heartache, those trials I didn’t think I could climb out of, they were a gift.  A new opportunity and a new life.  A chance to be better…to fulfill a potential I felt for a long time I had wasted.  

I was in a serious funk when I booked my trip to China. I had not written a single word with a meaning in a year.  I was telling myself I didn’t know what to say, but as long as I’m being honest, and looking back, I knew.  

I wasn’t going to get lost.  I was running away.  Looking in the rearview, I didn’t want to write it, because then I would have to listen.  It would force me, like writing always has, to make sense of it, come to terms.  Deal.  Cope.  Accept.  I didn’t want to.

I wasn’t happy—with a lot of aspects of my life.  I was tired.  Tired of laundry and cleaning and getting up at  4:00 in the morning.  Tired of hearing the teacher glad I could make it in a condescending tone, despite her unwillingness to schedule a conference after 5:00 or on a Friday.  Tired of the Schmoo crying because she wanted me home like I used to be.  Tired of the battle with my husband who hated his job so much that it gnawed away at every ounce of   happiness and every brief moment.  We were starting to hate each other.

He quit three days before I left, and to say I was pissed is an understatement.  I cried the whole 22 hours to China, and it seemed to seal the deal on the decision I thought I had made.

But, I got there…to China.  A place I had always wanted to go.  I don’t know why I always wanted to go there.  Probably because growing up in a town with two ways out, it was as far away as a kid could get.  So foreign and different, and a long, long ways from everything and everyone that seemed bogged down and sad and fading.  

I told my sister I wanted to get into Tibet.  THAT has been number one on the bucket list, and it remains because of protests.  I’d rather be locked out, than locked in.  So, we went to some Buddhist temples. I’d be a liar if I said it wasn’t the hardest time in my life coinciding with something I never thought I’d see.  Life falling apart, but at the same time, a realization that you are exactly where you were meant to be, tried to be.  The realization that I could actually afford to go, because I worked to get somewhere, despite the ever-playing tape in my head saying I would never get “there”…to that place, the literal and metaphorical “there.”

But, we made it, sweating and tired, after walking in the heat and humidity, and me putting everything in my head into a confined space, to think about later, as Scarlet O’Hara always did, to the temple.  I burned some incense, and found myself standing in front of the biggest Buddha I have ever seen, and THIS hit me:  “If by renouncing a limited happiness one would see an abundant happiness, let the spiritually mature person, having regard to the abundant happiness, sacrifice the limited happiness.”

I was standing in a temple, thousands of years old, dedicated to happiness.  I can’t tell you how many times I had read that quote…probably daily.  And it hit me, mindfulness, happiness, compassion.

Sometimes, its hard to have compassion for yourself, we are, after all, our own worst critics.  But, I came to the realization, in one swift moment, that happiness is a choice.  It isn’t a path or a journey.  It just is…always and forever there for you to grab.  It’s a decision, really.

I just turned 37.  I’ve made mistakes; I’ve loved deeply; I’ve grieved intensely; I’ve lost a few times.  I didn’t try as hard as I could have on more than one occassion; I’ve made mistakes.  But, if I can’t control that tape in my head…my thoughts…only then have I failed.  If I can’t reach out and grab the happy, and smile with my toes, well, that’s my own fault.  

As cliché as it sounds, shit happens.  It is what it is, and it boils down to which tape you decide to let play in your head.  I’m just happy to get the experience…of living, of breathing, of loving…of totally screwing up, but loving myself just the same. And it was a long road, but that loving part, that happiness part, it includes me now.

I don’t want to run or get lost.  I want to sit in the now, and be grateful for the now and everything it makes me.  

Acceptance is hard.  Its REALLY hard, because I tell myself what I don’t deserve and sometimes settle for a limited form of happiness.  I want abundant happiness.  I want happy toes.  At the end of the day, it’s the one I decide to accept into my life.

Doors

http://open.spotify.com/track/0qWZzQ3S8dz52ElgCeWM1R

I remember the quiet.  Staring at the green countertop while she stared out the window.  Trying to think of things to say.  The orange afternoon sun streaming through the south windows.  I still don’t know why they sent me.

Maybe because I was old enough to stand watch over a breaking heart and responsible enough, at 12, to call for help if something else broke…like her sanity.  As far as I could tell, something else had broke and the woman I knew wasn’t coming back.  Not any time soon anyway.

Maybe ‘cause everyone else was having their own hard times dealing with it, and I seemed just fine. 

It’s a gift, really.  Pushing everything out and finding something else to think about. So is pretending to be fine.

I’d dusted everything, taking extra care to get all of the fingerprints she hated off the shiny wooden furniture.  Looking back, maybe I shouldn’t have done that.  Maybe I had wiped away the last goodness she remembered.

I’d vacuumed every inch of carpet, following the lines in the carpet in a zen-like repetitiveness just to have nothing to think about. 

I left her sitting at the table, staring out that window at God only knows what.  Not much out there to see, but a tree dying by the sidewalk, the big red shop, a graveled drive-way, and the path to the burn barrel.  Last I’d eavesdropped, word had it she got some real use out of that barrel, and probably pretty amazing she didn’t go up in flames with it.  Seemed to me at the time, her soul certainly had.

The evening was chilly.  I wanted to sit and cry with her, but there were enough tears everywhere and nobody needed mine.  Mine are too big anyway. That’s what they tell me—I have great big alligator tears that follow me everywhere; when I laugh and when I cry.  

I took the well-worn path through the pasture, remembering a red coat I had and holding Papa’s little finger while we walked through the grain to feed the horses.  

I walked the slough, careful to avoid the mud.  The smell brought back memories I felt guilty for remembering.  Moss and stagnant water, the smell of the mud.  They reminded me of finding duck nests, chasing kill deer, and catching frogs.  

I found myself at the very back of the field, against the fence, and I realized I’d never been out this far.  Not even on the horse.  New territory, but instead of feeling adventurous, I felt scared.  It reminded me how much I don’t know…about anything.

Parts of the fence were falling down in the marshy ground…worn and gnarled from the weather, the foundation turning to mush beneath it. The desert, gaining ground in the distance.

I walked back to the tack room and stood staring at the faded door.  She hadn’t made it past the burn barrel in weeks, and I was guessing from my last few days, out of the house in at least a week.  

I knew what it used to look like in there.  Saddles hung up and lining the right wall with the bridles above them.  There should be a black rubber bucket, a quarter to half full of oats, next to the door.  Behind the door, a washtub with the grooming brushes and combs.  Wool horse blankets on the left.  I liked the orange and brown one.  The room should smell like leather and Absorbine, Jr.  If I got close enough, I knew I could smell it without opening the door.

I used to hide in that room when the boys chased me with snakes or tried to shoot me with the BB gun, and I holed up in there for hours the day I threw my Easter Tinkerbell perfume in their eyes, like mace, so they would leave me alone.  The door was easy to latch from the inside, and once you got it latched, no one could make you come out, especially if you were real good at being “bullheaded.” Whatever that meant.  Near as I could tell, the bull in the last corral was mean as anything I could think of, and if he got out, I always planned on hidin’ in the tack room then, too. But, that’s what she always called me when I got my mind set on something, like not coming out of there.

 

The kids would run off to the house to tell her I was locked up again, and she’d march out there, yelling at me to quit being “bullheaded,” and eventually she’d shrug me off and walk back to the house, leaving me alone in the dark, with the smell.  I’d wait until the other kids had wandered off, giving them enough time to make it far enough away in the field they couldn’t hear or see me come out,  knowing she’d let me back in the house if I was alone.  When I got back, she’d ask if I was “done throwing a spoiled WOP fit,” and give me an ice box cookie or peanut butter cookie, smeared with butter, then let me sit in the gold chair by the back door and read.  Or, she’d have me dust.  She used this stuff called Klean and Shine, and it foamed when you sprayed it on things.  I didn’t mind; I liked the foam.

I couldn’t make myself open the door, so I climbed the haystack, and sat at the top, watching the sun sink low until it almost kissed the mountains.  Something crazy had changed the world, and things just weren’t ever gonna be the same.   Maybe I didn’t want to open that door because I knew it couldn’t block out the world now, and she sure as shit wasn’t gonna give me a cookie when I came out.  The cupboards and the fridge were bare, except for a block of moldy cheese.  

I’d found a tub of frozen stew in the pump house freezer, but that woman wasn’t eating.  I don’t think God himself could make her right then, even with a cookie and all the butter in the valley.

I sat on the hay, feeling helpless.  Old enough to do chores and try to feed her, but too young to know what the hell was really happening or even to know what to say.   

The phone would ring every now and then, and she’d answer, and I’d wander off, knowing I wasn’t supposed to listen.  Half-knowing she might talk to someone if I wasn’t in ear shot, but I’d stay close enough to hear her cry, and then reappear, feeling awkward, but wanting to stop the tears.

I just couldn’t stand her staring out the window anymore, saying nothing, wiping a tear every once in a while.

Maybe I didn’t want to open that door, because if my last refuge was gone, or altered, or changed, my heart would break too.  

That’s the funny thing about adolescence.  Clinging to what we know about ourselves, scared of changing, but having no control over it.  I couldn’t alter what was happening; hell it already happened, but I had control over that door.  

Seemed everything in life that was normal and sane, was locked up behind that door.  If I opened it, and it was different, or the smell was gone, what then?

If it really is the same back in there, can I contain the flood of memories and the knowing that there won’t be anymore?  So much hidden behind that door.  So much in that formerly safe place that could fly out at me and kick me in the guts and take my breath away.  No matter what’s happened in there, it’s gonna knock me to my knees and make me sick.

I never opened the door.

It’s hot.  Hot enough I have to have a partner in the field.  I don’t like it.  We’ve walked for miles, and he talks too much.  

The desert sun is beating down, and my skin is getting red.  I turn towards the river, and he follows.  Always a few steps behind and always chattering.  If he really wanted to be a help, he’d shut up and walk in front to flush snakes.  I hate snakes, and he doesn’t seem to understand I need quiet to be on alert.  Maybe I’m just being a control freak.

He doesn’t know I’m headed for the river because he never gets out of the office and you can’t see it from here.  But, I’m tired of him talking and maybe if we stop for lunch, he’ll shut up long enough to eat.  He’s telling me ALL about the desert and how I need to stay hydrated. I get his life story.  Am I sure I know where I’m going and how far we’ve walked?  Sight lines are diminished, you know? Something about his divorce.  I’ve detoured a lot, can I find my way back to the vehicle? Where are we going now; the GPS says we need to go straight?

I watch the sagebrush rustle in the light breeze and notice the grass seeds are popping.  “WOW!” He says as we come down the hill towards the river.  “I had no idea this was here.”

I remain silent, set down the metal frame I’m packing, and park on a rock.  I take off my backpack, have some water, and reapply my sunscreen.  “You don’t want to go down there?” He says and points to the river, which actually has water for once.

“Cooler down there.”  I say, and he nods in agreement, giving me a funny look.  “Snakes,” I reply. I like the heat, and we don’t get enough of it for long enough.  I want to bake like the lava rocks.

Mostly, I’m hoping he’ll wander down there and prove me right, but he just stands there instead.

There’s still some snow scattered on the peaks in the distance, and I stare at Smiley Mountain while I have some more water.  My dad used to tell me legends about a blown up gold mine on that mountain, and as I look at it, the heat waves rippling and distorting it, I remember those stories. “You never say much,” he says while opening his lunch.

“Nope. Kinda like listening to the birds,” I hint.

I’m irritated.  This is my place now.  This is where I go to sit and be alone.  This is where I go to hide and breathe in the smell of safety.  I don’t like sharing it—especially with people who don’t appreciate it.  I’m pretty sure this is just a wasteland to him, a bunch of meaningless sagebrush that goes on forever.  I’m pretty sure the fact that he’s one of a handful of people that have set foot here in over 60 years is lost on him.  I doubt he gets it that this place has no doors, no place to hide.  

“I never realized how beautiful this place is,” he says as he sits.  

I look at him out of the corner of my eye while opening a granola bar.  He does appear to be taking it all in, and I realize he’s got a better spot.  All I can see is his head above the lupine in front of him.

“I love this place,” I say and stare at the river.  

He chuckles.  “What?”  I ask.  “What’s so funny?”

“I’ve never seen you use emotion,” He says with a wicked grin.  “We make fun of you, ya know.”

“For what?” Now I’m really irritated.  I want to stomp off, but there is nowhere to go, so I nudge the dust with the toe of my boot instead.

He laughs again.  “We placed bets the other day on if you’ve ever cried.”

I don’t know why it infuriates me, but it does.  I swallow hard.  “I’ve cried a lot,” I say, while thinking, “Probably would today if you weren’t here.”

“It’s just a joke.  We think you’re tough; that’s a good thing.  It’s just weird hearing you say you love something. You don’t seem the type.” He’s turned his head and is looking away now.

I start to feel guilty for being irritated with him.  I know he’s heard the rumors--the ones no one will admit to hearing (because they’ll give away the ONE person I told), but aren’t above peeking in the office door to ask if I’m alright and tell me they are worried--and maybe he’s just trying to cheer me up.  I sigh…deep and long.

“I love a lot of things,” I reply.  “My kids. Sagebrush, rivers, the mountains. Wine…chocolate.  Mostly chocolate,” I chuckle.

“But you don’t care a lot for people, do you?” He finally looks at me, and I look away, back to the river.

I tear some leaves off the sagebrush next to me, crush them and roll them between my fingers.  I hold them to my nose.  

"Broken hearts destroy people," I say.  "People break hearts, and I left that door closed a long time ago."