The Difficult things

The difficult thing about loving people is losing them. 

I have grieved the deaths of people who are still living.  I wonder how I will manage to walk across rooms and drive. To stir the soup and not set the house on fire, and to find any reason for the smallest pinch of joy when my life is no longer connected to theirs.

The difficult thing about living in general, is its loss.

To get up every day and know that it will end.  Maybe today. Maybe not.
And will the ones you love struggle to stir the soup, too?
Will they have to try to not set the house on fire while they miss you in their bones
and ache with your absence in ways they don’t even know how to tell? 

Inheritance

On Sundays, I am the sponge. 

From the moment I pull up and she is not upstairs waiting to be ushered, but seated in the car, unveiled by the garage door in perfect posture. Red lipstick in place, ready.  Her eyes sparkle like Mrs. Claus, but I am learning better. 

While others mentally sift through the belongings of those they are waiting to die, I am driving her to Sunday School...making a list of other things I want to inherit.  

Not the green couch or the bourbon tumblers. 

The jazz paintings on the wall, or her collection of bibles (well...maybe those I would keep).  

But rather, I wonder how to take pieces of her...of who she is, and wear them like a dress we share. 

Different fit. Different bodies.  

Beauty, autonomy, defiance expressed my way.  Borrowed from her closet. 

2nd Commandment

I bow to too many idols.  

I let them tug at me before light and waking crack open my eyes. 

If I were to measure the amount of time I spend connecting with God and the themes of life that are most meaningful, the tape would run shamefully short alongside the measure of time spent worshipping the woes of my day.  

My scripture comes to me in a live feed connecting me to the smooth surface of an Iphone.  There are people at my fingertips.  Instead of praying, I can reach out like a satellite to receive the messages of others.

 “I need you.  I like you.” 

I swallow it like communion.  

The bad news can be filtered away if it doesn’t suit me, and the holy spirit of social media can sweep in at anytime to bring me offerings of kittens, or stories of others who make me believe I am superior.  I am addicted to my grip on the rocks of judgment.  The power of my thumb and heart is mighty.

God misses me?
Then God should get a facebook profile.  And a blog. Competition is much too steep these days to sit idly by and expect my vote of faith. 

Fear is a vampire

There are days when I can feel it, pressing against the length of my back.

My neck tingles the way it would when I’d remember vampires just before bed and pull the sheet around me, tucking it in at my nape.  Then I would eventually pull my head under too, pinning the fabric at all my edges and across my skull, taut, so that the sheet hovered above me an inch or so, giving me room to echo my breath back at me.  

My eyes would adjust in the dark and cast their own light into the fort I had constructed;
body sized and coffin-shaped.  Sometimes this would make it worse, and I could feel my heart thump against the space; and I would struggle in my stillness until it would go away or exhaustion took me. 

In thirty years I have never seen a vampire.  

At night, sometimes I still pull the sheets taut the same way I did then, to feel the company of my breath in my own face and invite in the fear. I want to experience the belief and danger of then and contrast it against the tepid anguish of today; the manufactured reasons and distractions I give myself to block out the tingle in my neck. 

The muse wants to suck my blood.

But I would rather cut my own self with the searing edge of laundry and homework, and exist in the coffin of constant preoccupation.  

Paper Crumb Trails

I call them paper crumb trails. 

The little fragments of words and thoughts I put down when I feel like a tea cup that is overfull.
They are the parts that run down the edges and soak into the ground 

or the nibbles of my life’s cookie that fall away and land where I go 

and where I stay. 

I let them fall, or even scatter them out in an act of intentional mess making. 

Afterward I feel satisfied and settled, but it leaves a bigger swath of crumbs to contend with, and lately, when I look around I can no longer ignore them. 

They are everywhere.  In books, some half empty and full. In the top filing drawer. In the wardrobe in a brown paper bag, in a studio cabinet across town. In the basement, the mail, my mind, the ether...

I am surrounded by my own trail of crumbs, 

and they are waiting for me to follow them. 

Token bruise

In the weeks after it happened, they came.

I remember the way they looked... how soft and unusual they were, and the way they quietly appeared, mysterious strangers who did not call ahead.

They were pretty, and I found myself staring at them as if trying to make their acquaintance -
small, coffee-colored, mirror-like.
Satellites to each other, symmetrically hovering just below waist, just above hip arches.

Tender to the touch.

It was days before I realized that they were from thumbs.

Fear.

Fear. 
It is Red Rover  
and the one whose doubt fills her as she watches herself
run across the field toward the wall of clasped fists and forearms.

Their faces blur. Shoulders go soft-focus, until only an impenetrable wall of limbs, 

bony and tensile, are in view

and what shifts hardest into focus is the understanding that they all serve the same purpose.

Stop her. 

And what is not in focus, as she heaves toward them, is that they are her.