I'm afraid. But I have choices

I’ll sit on my deck

I bet the warm winter air

Will blow my hair

In a way some might say

Is beautiful

I’ll eat a cookie

Meant for Santa

That I could not finish

On Christmas night

And maybe

There will be a star

To wish on

If I believed

In wishes

But I don’t

I believe in loss

Love

Mistakes

Pain

Wine

Chocolate

Hugs.  Oh!  I believe in hugs so much

Music is an amazing thing to add to the list

When I was young

I fell in “love” with boys who barely knew my name

I sang them songs

Plunked out on simple piano notes

No chords

Just words

And tears

I wrote tear stained poetry

And lamented

Tender hearts

Left broken

On sandy shores

I’ll sit on my deck

Now

Eating Santa’s cookie

Looking at stars 

And knowing

What it is to be alone

It’s so odd

What humans can do…

I hurt then:  I remember a babysitter’s bed

In Martha’s Vineyard

Where I learned that the “he” I thought would “be”

Had lied and “loved”

TWO others.

I thought my heart died that day

And I thrashed at the sheets and tore my hair

Till my everything was spent.

And off I went, to babysit

We live…when we choose to not end it

And when cancer and luck and heart disease

Don’t jump in our bath with a toaster

We live

And we remember the pains that painted everything

Onto our bodies

The backside of our eyelids

That changed the tempo of our hearts.

But left them

Beating

I’ll sit on my deck

My hair might blow in the breeze in a way

Someone might say

Makes me look beautiful.

I won’t feel beautiful.

I barely feel alive

But that

Is what

I am

So I promise

Thought I’m terrified to tears

I promise I’ll try

To honor that life.

I’ve known too many

Who’ve died.

Community vs connection

Both are foundationally

Exceptionally

Necessary 

for a strong way forward

ANY way forward

I’ll tell ya, this starts all poetically, but it isn’t a poem.  It’s just another tiny moment of realization.  I live in a paradox of gratitude and jealousy…joy and grief…optimism and depression

People from my past, and from the mist, push through and zap my family with light…a sparkling halo of calm and hope and comfort

And I am able to spread magic

Small, sparkling, splendid magic

And then, my little magicians,

They go to bed

I see one of my friends in my mind’s eye:  with his wife and his three kids

Annoyed at struggles, worried about vomit, with so much family and the love of his life

To put his arm around, and lay beside.

I see another friend:  so very betrayed, she spent years fighting to be the best mother ever.  Her heart is a living spark of hope…always has been…and she is no longer alone…she lays her head beside the one she found online

And another friend:  such a sweet connection, caring, yet intentionally distant. I keep reaching, accidentally, into the void where I think he stands..

There is also the one whose cancer came to her life while she was pregnant.  From a distance, she seems to have love, again. I am grateful...and, if I am to be honest, bitter...jealous

And the one whose death came on the birthing bed…a moment of talking to him, years ago, gave me moments of connection that made me pause, wonder, hope…for not long enough…and there isn’t even a friendship…but I see him in the distance, with a woman in his profile

Evaporation

Is part of the water cycle

we drink what once was
dinosaur pee
 

Disease continued a cycle that had nothing to do with him, My Love,

One where I end

Alone.

But cycles are about connection

And life is about community

Remembering that it’s the tiny bits and pieces

That make the puzzle of every picture

So, in the evenings, when the moon sings softly to the vibrating stars

And the sun sings harmony on the upside down

My task

Is unending and large:

Do not become what they were

Do not give up

Do not give directions on life based on what not to do.

     Imagine:  a taxi comes to pick you up.  In the back seat you say
     “I do not want to go to D.C. I also do not want to go to Baltimore.”

     And…?  

I do not want to be the women that were.  I do not want to be

A “woman in waiting”

I do not want to be broken, to be lost, to be afraid, to be

ALONE

But

I’m in the damn taxi

So I cannot choose from places of “I do not”

I accept the community that surrounds me,

From so many distances away

I crave so desperately the connections

I do not seem well enough to carve

So

I

Will

Breathe

And do my best to create a vision

Of what I

DO

Want.

Even when I do not know what that is.

poem with thanks to Into The Woods... (just typed, not edited...)

Things are bigger than

You think they are

And they are smaller too

What you do to me

Affects you

And like the butterfly

Wings flapping

The pluck upon the spider web strand

Reverberations

Spin

And tremble things into life

That otherwise would not have been

And the connections are layers

Topsoil feeding eluviation layers

And making regolith

Growth isn’t always on the surface

In the glow of the kissing sun

In the woods our lives

Are made of moments

Bad ones

Good ones

But if life were made of moments

We’d never know we had one

So they whisper in our ears

And guide our dreams

Through us they speak of respecting women

Regarding mistakes made

When we were too young to know

What our tongue could taste

And love

Love is all the things

And nothing:  connection and loneliness

Joy and guilt

Hope and hurting

Healing and destruction

Just remembering you’ve had an “and”

When you are back to

“Or”

Makes it all mean more

With nothing

Being easier.

So the song singing to the moments

Is my siren…remember them.  Hear them

Heed them.  You may not believe they are connected

You do not need to.  You may not know that one pluck

Keeps a heart beating.

It just does

And thus

You continue

Moment to moment

Springing and singing from strand to strand

In the hopes that your dance

Brings life

To someone

Somewhere.

Somehow. 

Cognitive Dissonance

My space heater rumbles

Like a part is loose

Everything inside me

Stumbles

In the first place

Every place is hollow

I promised not to say broken

So my fingers hover

Over keys and my heart argues

With my mind

I can’t write

I can’t love

I am nothing

I am everything and everyone

I can do it

All

And every choice screams in the echoes of our hearts

We betray

We honor

We help

We harm

How many of our foolish steps are

Steps we took to save something

That ended up

A pirouette

Into a place where our deepest insecurities

Slide and melt us

Deeper

Into

An illicit

One. 

our last first tooth

I prefer my pets to people

It’s not that they are perfect.

My dog has destroyed my couch, ottoman, three pairs of my shoes, my daddy blanket, Cecilia’s daddy blanket, two of Neil’s shoes, 3 of Cecilia’s, my sheets, my new blanket, three pillows…

I STILL like that mother fucker better than people.

Today, my baby, our baby, lost his first tooth.  It seems like it took forever to happen!  But now that it came out, I want to shove it back in!  And revel in the awesomeness that is his growing up.  And the hollow that rings in my chest echoes and echoes and echoes.  John didn’t even get his first tooth.  There is that silent screaming thing I do, again.  I don’t make plans for things often.  I guess when I do, I do it without realizing.  I have always loved kids, but never planned on having them.  Mostly because I didn’t think I would ever find anyone I’d want to have kids with, anyone that would love me, anyone I wanted to be with.  I even threw my coins in the Trevi fountain in Rome and asked only for a husband.  Because I had to be sure.

As far as I can tell from this side of things, "sure" ain’t nothin’ but a deodorant.  And I’m here raising three kids on my own, going to bed night after night, getting up and going to work, and on and on ad infinitum…never having a best friend anymore.  Always having to create the safe space, never entering it.  Comforting and caring for.  How do we do it?  The single parents who are single forever?  How do you keep going?  I feel like a life vampire has been attached to my hip for three years, on and off, mostly on…sucking away at my life.  Count Rugen’s awful torture machine, set on low and made to be worn like a back pack…increasing the loss of life incrementally.  I see my hands and they seem to represent the slowing and drying of my heart.  The psoriasis hasn’t fully gone away and there are always spots that are peeling.  And I so often think to myself in a mumble how I don’t want to do this anymore.  The loneliness is a poison dart in my spine.  I got nothin’.  So I take a breath.  I go to sleep.  I try again tomorrow. 

And at least I have my pets.  Between them and, for now, my kids, I never totally sleep alone.