Transparency

I'm starting to think I'm poisonous: harmful to the human body. But I can survive myself. It's slow, the process. Like a digestive enzyme eating away at their skin and self glacier-slow. Suddenly they realize; I am revealed for what I am. What am I?  Man or beast or woman or jellyfish? Raven or writing desk?

They take it for an act of betrayal. It is my fault: I was not able to articulate me. They say I've tricked them, roped them in with a set of lies about the nature of my being. How can I lie to you? Can I, if I never knew the truth?

I want to warn them but I get so caught up; maybe this time it will be different.... They will have armadillo skin, impervious to my wicked ways. It was an accident, I didn't mean to be this way. Help, help, help me! I've got to get out, out, out of this skin, skin, skin. I am not Square (VAS, Steve Tomasula). I own my body, I am not my body. These genes are no message just material. Let me out.

"You've changed!" No, you see that's the problem. I keep trying but nothing seems to work.

But I am scared to jump out of my own skin.

A Full Stop.

A stop sign at the end of a road. That's where I did my thinking.

A brief pause before a treacherous left turn, before my time alone was up and I had to face them all again.

I remember sitting there, the minivan shaking with effort all around me, crying and praying. I would use that precious time to talk to God, and ask Him what was wrong with me

and ask for help.

I would talk to myself, work out my problems. Many speeches, later delivered without tears over silent telephone lines, were composed and concluded at that stop sign.

Night was the best time. There would be no cars around me to stare at my unceasing lips, no one behind me to honk if I paused a little too long. I could lay my head down on my steering wheel and scream if I wanted. 

I did.

Sea and woods. Family and individuality. God and me. How does it all fit? I've been trying to make it all fit.

Here there was no

"I told you so"

"Because I said so"

"I've fallen in love with so and so"

"I'm leaving you. So...what do you want to do?"

That sign did not judge me. It waited patiently while I found the effort to begin again. And again and again and again and again...

The one place where I needed no one to understand me, because I found me. At the stop sign.

Summer Lovin'

His name was Max.

I found him in between two roots of an oak tree. Whether he had fallen or had been forcibly evicted from his ancestral home didn’t matter, the message was clear: you are unwanted. I knew right away that we would be great friends.

He was infectious. Those black eyes opened and I was stuck, struck. At first I fed him, wiped him, held him, rocked him, did everything for him. Then he was crawling, reaching, dancing, calling me out to play with him in the grass and trees that he knew. Sometimes he would run and climb where I couldn't follow. When I lost sight of him I would start to sing, and sooner or later I would see those fuzzy ears plodding my way.

We ran, we raced neck and neck through that summer. Tunnel vision: I didn’t realize that our time was running out. Suddenly the fall was dawning and my breath of new summer life was ripped from my lungs.

You’re leaving me today,

good riddance thumbtack teeth that love my ankles,

striped conclusion to my dirty little problem child,

hooks that pierce my clothes with extra button holes.

Adieu my little boy black bandit,

no more chasing through the sleepy shovel-headed  ivy bed  

battling potted plants.

Shipping you back like a misaddressed package,

surrogate mother shift spent.

Tonight I’ll stand beside the fence and sing,

pretend you’ve stayed too long  in the dark woods

  

Someone bought me Breton's Nadja. It's one of those books that resists the reader at every turn. I hate it. I cannot accept the idea that coincidences carry weight.

The other night I opened the front door to inspect some loud noises coming from the front porch. A raccoon was stealing the cat's food. The sight of me sent it running. It was halfway down the driveway when I started singing. I know you're not going to believe me, and there's nothing I can do about it. He stopped, turned, and stood on his back legs testing the air with paws and nose.

I'd like to think that it was meant to be, two undesirables that keep finding each other against all odds. But he couldn't stay.

New Endings

"Perhaps the easiest supposition is that this will not last forever. After all, what starts this abruptly 

will certainly end as such. "

I read that somewhere, at least I think I did. Maybe it came out of my own head in a dream. Regardless there's truth there. Even these things we take to be eternal and steadfast are forever changing under our noses.

Most people are afraid of the ocean. There's the constant yelling of warnings: "Don't go past your knees! You'll get pulled out by the undertow!" The secondhand stories of secondhand stories about tourists drowning. Of all the things that leave me anxious and useless, the ocean is not one of them. 

Don't get ahead of yourself, water and I have had a shaky relationship. There was the matter of the lizard in the tub and that float trip where I got acquainted with the stream bed. But for whatever the reason the waves and I have no qualms. 

That is what makes me nervous. That a life began so haltingly beside the sea has to lose something, it cannot go on how it started. Someone told me not to worry so much, to smile more. They suppose I have a choice in the matter. But if I cannot somehow hold on to even this, if the vast reaches of the ocean will not stay, even to change, then everything will be lost. 

http://heavy-boots-and-parachutes.blogspot.com/2012/09/flight.html

Number One

The question is: where to start? Looking at it all now there seems to be a common thread but I’m not so sure it started out that way. Sometimes I can’t even distinguish between real memories and ones I’ve made up. It happens like that, someone tells you a story, or you tell it to yourself, over and over until it springs forth actual color and smells. The same way people get all jumbled up in your mind. I can’t place them. Not your friends and family of course, but the people on your periphery, the ones you never really look straight at. Those are the ones that, if I close my eyes, I can’t remember the details of their faces, just a general feeling. Dreams work that way too. If I don’t lie with my eyes shut and mull over them they drift away somehow. I go to tell someone about it and I’m embarrassed because it made sense and I remembered a moment ago. So there I guess it does all run together, even the places. Apartments and hotel rooms can drive you crazy even, because you go to clean a bathroom or you open up your eyes in the morning and you could be in any one of the places you’ve lived, or none of them. At least they have addresses, at least they don’t move and change and trick you like the others. You don’t have to argue with yourself over whether it really existed.