Today is one of those days where I really have no idea what to say. I am trying to drag words out of my mind and onto the page as if I have to wade through syrup. Paris is too close for perspective. Everything else is too far away. I can only hope that I am tapping the maple tree and the drops will lead to flow. At the very least, I am capable of using a metaphor.
Perhaps the next device should be synecdoche, starting with the smallest possible element.
Cheerios… one word for the fullness of motherhood.
The thing I lack from above and below. The “below” is of little consequence. The “above” has become the finality of losing a single puzzle piece behind drywall. It’s still in the house, but I’ll never find it. It is a desperate, histrionic and lifelong search. Even if I find a different manufacturer that manages to find something that fits, my spirit will always spot the fake, even if I step far enough away to look at the Impressionist painting promised on the box.
I am fortunate that the ultimate axiom in life is pain becoming beauty through reminiscence and introspection. There are moments I wonder (as I wander), can cat burglars steal love? Even if it was possible, I’d have to hire it done. Would I get relief from a middle man? Would I accept what was placed in my hands, or would I write it off as ersatz? Could I hug until the fur fell off? Could I wait until a fairy appeared to make it real? Just how long would my nose grow in the indeterminate meantime?
The interim is filled with REM induced dreams of a fictional character with his arms around me, stroking my hair and saying “fixed point in time. I’m so sorry.” My days are filled with Suzanne Vega running through my head like a mantra:
If your love were taken from me,
Every color would be black and white.
It would be as flat as the world before Columbus,
That’s the day that I lose half my sight.If your life were taken from me,
All the trees would freeze in this cold ground.
It would be as cruel as the world before Columbus,
Sail to the edge and I’d be there looking down.
The truest comfort I think and feel is that she didn’t die feeling her exclusion from my inner landscape, which started when I was 12 and carried long into my 20s. It was never that I didn’t want her there. I was led by hopelessness, my emotions rather than logic. I wrote her off too quickly, attributing genuine concern regarding emotional abuse as homophobia… but to be honest, there was some of that as well. She cornered me, literally backing me into my closet, angrily whispering that I would not make my father lose his job. The message in the madness was, ironically, “straighten up and fly right.”
I was physically present, but my mind ran away, genuinely and severely frightened.
In my head, the relationship was toxic… and I ran straight into the snare of another one, yanking me upside down and backwards.
The disturbing downward spiral ended for good on my 36th birthday, the moment I began staring into the sky… salty, bitter tears and sunshine leading me into the resulting rainbow’s promise of gold.
I didn’t find it quickly or easily.
Another fixed point in time accelerated the process, but before that seminal moment, I was dragged… kicking and screaming with disbelief… willful ignorance… shame that held the trap in place for far longer than I thought was even possible.
Shame that I didn’t see light when it was right in front of me.
Relief from finally talking to others that I wasn’t unique or special in that regard… and still, it would only be mostly dead, that I would feel triggers for the rest of my life, some that were just noticeable and some that would wrestle me underground. I would still have to claw my fingernails into the dirt and find a foothold to propel me upward so that when I looked up, I would no longer see roots and mud.
In those moments, I have sometimes completed the process quickly, and at others, been too exhausted to try. This is because triggers happen in nanoseconds, and recoveries are variable. By the end of her life, my mother could reach my six feet under. I wish I could do the same.
Succor is by the grace I have met people with the same scars on their own skin, rubbing velvet ears bare.
Stories That Are All True 