8-24

Glimpses into the past today. 

A scene of violence that makes me shake with the urge to intervene, but all I can do is stand in the doorway and use my Calm Voice. Sir, you're scaring people.

For a moment it seems to get through to him and he pauses, for a moment he looks ashamed, and it's enough time for the boy to put space. 

I pulse with the desire to do more but I cannot leave my post.  

Much later, when the police have come and taken the sheepish man whose temper has blown away with consequences, I wonder what will happen to the boy. 

Strangely you jump into my mind. I think I know what you would have done, and I see it so clearly I swell with panic. A part of me wanted you to be there. A part of me knew if you had intervened I would have gone blind with terror and I would have left my post in the doorway and disappeared inside my animal.  

I am shaking still and I wish you were there to hug me. 

I think of the time in the store when the nameless anxiety was swelling up and I asked you to hold me and, for once, you didn't question it, you didn't become aware and uncomfortable, you just put your arms around me and the fear subsided. 

I wanted you to hold me much longer but I knew how you hated to be seen loving me and I let you stop. 

It stabs at me, these moments remembering when you were soft, following a night that brings up too many bad memories. 

8-31

I am acting, playing a part.

I smile and pull drinks, detached. She's someone else, she's the character in a movie. Inside the cold wall my mind is whirring on thoughts miles away. Outside she smiles, makes a joke now and then. I like her, she is fun and friendly. She's tired. She's put in 13 hours to make up for past mistakes. She's working hard to better herself. She has a vision and she plows toward it.

Her face changes and I adjust it, keeping it lightly smiling, a tweak here and there to hide the exhaustion and worry. She's moving fast and she likes to be moving. This is good for her.

Afterward, when things are quiet, the walls melt down and I reach out. We walk in the dark, using light from the bright half-moon to navigate a well-traversed path we could walk with our eyes closed but moonlight is more pleasant.

She's settling back into me, merging parts. I am tired, and when I am tired I feel how sad I am. I pause and try to cry, but nothing comes. It's locked inside me without alcohol, or someone else's pain to bring mine to the surface. I become aware of being ridiculous, and shake myself free of the shroud of self-pity I'm pulling around me. I do not have to be sad. It's not a sentence.

The dog knows the path better than I, and knows we will be turning soon. She looks over her shoulder, nervously, awaiting my signal, moves forward, looks again. I love the way she orbits around me, autonomous but connected. It is comforting to my weary jealous heart to know she will be there, even in the dark. We will always be an entity. I am more melded with her mind than my own, sometimes.

My future is opening up, and good men are waiting for me, patient and calm, hoping time will change my mind. They stand back, polite, respectful but I cling so tightly to myself, will there ever be room for them?

Do I want to make room? when I am whole with myself and all my pieces, and this animal before me whose soul is such a part of my own?

I never wanted to make room, before him.

I'm becoming myself again, and I like traversing the path in the dark alone, with the silent connection to the animal who moves in conjunction with currents around my body. I like the quiet. I like the peace and the solitude. I like the way trees make secret shapes in the dark and some of them frighten me.

I force myself to stop and confront them so I can grow and quit making monsters of shadows.

I don't think there's room, when I have so many pieces of myself to gather up.

8-30

I temporarily lose control of myself for a little while each day.

I check her. I check you. I try to glimpse inside. I want to know what's happening but I've been shut out, I can only speculate. You said I just have to trust you and I'm trying. Is it as worthwhile, to trust someone after they've gone? I wish you had helped me to trust you before I went mad. I wish you had given me reasons to learn how to trust.

I look for clues. I look for hints and signs maybe you still think of me. I can't tell, from your cryptic words, if it's her or me you miss. Or no one? Or everyone. I press down the panic and I try to trust.

What we had was complicated, it was raw and confusing. It wasn't what I expected. It was more hurt than happiness. I don't know that it had to be that way. That's what hurts most of all.

I try to tell myself it was special, because it was for me. Despite it all. But does that make it special for someone else? All around the world someone loves more than the other. I trace the patterns back in my brain and they point to the negative. I knew it from early on, that I loved more than you, and it made me want to leave. Until you realized. Until you missed me and decided to love me just as much.

But you didn't, because people don't work that way.

I don't know if leaving you ruined a possibility, or an inevitability. Would you have stayed or gone, if I had made no move to leave?

I don't know. I want to tell you I hate you, I miss you and love you but hate hate love you. I want to say anything at all. I want the wall to crumble. I want you to be happy, but not without me, and then I feel guilty for that, and then I feel angry, and then I feel empty because you are not thinking these things for me and I am wasting so much of myself away.

I focus on my own life and I love my life and I am happy, but my mind pulls back to you, a compass to true North and the happiness dissipates.

What do your words mean? Am I in there, at all?

It is sunny, my life is good, but for a while every day I swim in the darkness. Who is in your words? Where am I in your mind?

I think I could be stronger, if I knew.

But what do I know.

8-30

I run, though I am tired. It feels good to move, to send my mind down into my body and feel the strength building within.

It's a glimpse of old routines; the familiarity comforts me. I have been gone from myself too long, and I am welcomed back. My old self is still vaporous and undefined, but she is stirring in my blood, warming it.

My new self is within grasp. I see her before me, and I run, detaching my brain before I sense the usual conceptual urgency to breach old and new.

I must be patient.

I'm not good at patience. I want to fight, leap forward, to skip ahead, and my feet on the dirt ground unconsciously pick up their pace. I am uncomfortable on this bridge between what I was and what I will be. I want to see the fruit of my efforts. I run toward an image of fulfillment, contentment. Cut lawns and cement floors in the morning, watching the sun fade slowly through the trees at night.

I am not my old self, not truly, and never will be again. Thank God. I have faith now. I trust in my own strength and determination. I have seen the worst in me and accepted it. I have seen the best and I know how to feed it.

Now I only wait.

The air is cool and I am running farther than I expected; my body feels light and charged, this is my weather, this is my territory. I run and I try not to think, to only see and appreciate. I race past the thoughts that begin to swell and whirl. Concerns and worries about my future. Images from the news that make the pit of my stomach blacken. Thoughts of you and of her and of what if and maybe and how.

I tamp them all down and I run, because I need to do something to feel I am moving forward, and I am not a patient woman.

8-29

There’s an interlacing of the seasons and I’m in love with it. I can’t get enough, I’m obsessed, I’m infatuated, I can think of little else (as seems to happen when I fall uncontrollably in love). Light creeps down, peeking between the thick tree and brush where the boldest leaves are beginning to mimic the sun’s fading glow. Red sumac tinged with brown hangs heavy with vines, climbing persistently in defiance of their inevitable desiccation.

Now is my favorite time of the year, and I welcome it. Soon I’ll be in orchards biting crisp apples and sitting on the grass, wandering through mazes tan and gold and rippling in the wind, everything smells like cider and Jack and cinnamon and mulled wine and the twisted black wrappers of cheap candy. 

There will be white tents and jars of candles and I will smile and chat with strangers who will hand me crumbled green bills. 

I’m entering my own new season; I’ve been chasing an image of myself for years and now I’m catching up with Her. My chrysalis is cracking.

She’s watching my foot bounce frenetically and I can read her thoughts on her face.

I gesture to my large bag, where the soft top of a ball of yarn is eavesdropping. 

“I crochet now, when I go out; it helps my nervous hands.”

Nervous hands.

A curious tongue, my dentist once told me when I couldn’t stop exploring his work.

A sly grin. I didn’t like that. I can’t help that my smile pulls more one way than the other.

My body is an assortment of personalities I must try to control.

My crochet hook falls out of the bag while I am drinking cocktails and mispronouncing fancy menu items, and the busboy hands it back to me, confused, and I flush.

My fingers twitch now. I try to still my foot but the electricity must go somewhere. It’s autonomous from the rest of me, it’s a channel, a vessel, for the lightning in my blood.

She asks if I’ve ever been treated for my anxiety.

The white pills are smaller than I expect. She wants me to break them in half for now, but they’re small and delicate and it would be cumbersome to clumsily crush them, so I take it entirely. 

Depression and anxiety. It was smart to come, she says.

I tell her about the pills I took in another stage of my life, the ones that made me swim in and out of existence, and she’s horrified. Their purpose has changed since my worst times.

How many semesters did I complete--did I work two jobs or three?--while doped up on high doses of sleeping medication, purchased to make me not feel doped up and sleepy.

My foot vibrates back and forth but the rest of me is always still. I like the energy. I like the bright beautiful thoughts in my head--will they go dull and quiet?

I like the thoughts, but they are simply a response to the bright and beautiful things around me. The smells in the air and the way the light hits bark soft with moss. I will not lose these things but perhaps I will quiet the monster in my head that sharpens his teeth on me while I lie in bed at night, the lightning charging through my limbs and the dread settling into my thoughts.

I take the pill and I love the seasons and I succumb to inevitable changes.

8-28

It’s odd to look back at my history, the violence and the fear and the incredible strange things I have gone through--human shit on the floor, rides from strangers, handing back a key and closing a door, striking out with my fists, sirens and red and blue lights piercing the thick night over and over.

Yet I look back and that was my life. People adapt. That was my life and I lived it. What else was there to do?

Maybe enough time has passed now that the memories are just dull. The depression and throwing up my meals in secret, the overall fear fear fear, knives under the pillow, sleeping with the lights on so I could protect myself--the memories are in my head but they’re not a part of who I am anymore. 

They happened to another woman, a girl who outgrew her fierce existence and settled into expectations. A feral child from the woods who was given language and societal restrictions. Pocahontas, carried from her open land to waste slowly away in smog and cobbled streets and restrictive clothing that shifts the organs.

I am adapting to my new life. The mundane things become enormous when they are the only sparks on the horizon. I have to stop myself from making specks of dust into supernovas. I am past the rapids and I coast, catching my breath. In my heart I am still alert and defensive, an animal in the zoo. A fed creature in a cage, you must keep your fingers from the bars.

I was past the rapids but I let myself be carried away in the current.

New life. New love. New home. Overwhelming. Frightening. I fought the peace. Peace comes before the war, so I trained for battle.

I wish I had lain down my sword earlier. I am trying now. I keep it close, my armor on, but I must give myself time to rest. I must not continue to make my own enemies of shadows.

I would start over, if I could. It’s a pretty image, letting go of the things behind us, but in truth my fingers are always twitching toward the hilt.

I wish I could have broken open and let you see within, see how much I loved and wanted you. Perhaps then you would have lay down your sword and we could have rested together.

But perhaps not.

Life is life and we adapt.

8-23

I did not take the pill, and predictably, I wake at 2 a.m. They say if you wake at two in the morning it is because spirits are attempting to communicate with you. I’m not sure why the spirits are tormenting me with an obsessive circulation of Jon Bellion lyrics, but who am I to try to divine the motivations of the spirit realm? Personally, I think perhaps I was just very bad in another life, and I will always be punished in small obnoxious ways.

Beneath the rolling lyrics, at least, there are beautiful words. I want to hold onto them but I know they will be gone by morning (they were) so I let them ebb and flow over me, a gentle saline tide. I am simply grateful they are there. For so long my head was empty of anything but you, and that piece of me quieted, overwhelmed. I am happy they are coming back, creeping in like an ice flow, a million pretty thoughts and images, disconnected, glimmering.

They say being highly sensitive is an instinct left over from our animal days. They say anxious people have a stronger survival drive. They say overthinkers like me are smart and protective and act most wisely in an emergency, because in the back of our brains we are still fearful soft creatures looking for escape. They say a lot of things.

He was angry at me once, for knowing him. No, not him, another. Their faces are bleeding into each other, these lovers of mine who are somehow the same man underneath. He asked me how I knew when his mood changed, and he was angry, I think, because he was an actor and a writer and he prided himself on being an actor and a writer and fooling the world (I truly need to stop dating artists). I can’t explain an instinct.

I know because you shifted like a change in the wind. I know because it clings to me, static on a blanket, and it transforms my mood into yours. Is that fair, when someone hijacks your emotions? It’s hard to keep them sorted out sometimes- what is mine, what have you given me? What a frustrating gift, sometimes, to be given someone’s moods against your will.

I have a choice coming. My mind chews and worries it from every angle, checking for danger. Monitoring the escape routes. Fight or flight.

But if the choice comes I know what I will choose. I will choose good. I think perhaps I was very bad in another life. I will be good in this one.

I have slept on floors and erased myself in the morning. I have clutched leather and metal in my hand, preparing a weapon. I have walked barefoot for miles, drenched after a rainstorm. I have done good things and I have done terrible things I will never forget but also do not regret because I am a human and I have a breaking point. Fight or flight. I have done both.

My circumstances do not change me. I tap back into who I am with wires and songs at two in the morning, drinks with friends, morning sun on the water, the dog’s leg propped over my hip as she sleeps. I am already built. These little things are what has always defined me. Not living nowhere, not owning nothing, not the gun he pressed to his head after he told me we had only each other and then he tried to put that bullet through himself and leave me on my own. He told me I had no one but him and then he tried to leave me alone, but I grew and learned that he was lying. I have everyone, and I have myself. I am never alone but they will always try to leave me. He left me on the dock alone, strange men whistled at me quietly. 

I have been tormented by weak men for far too long, this flush of memories at two a.m. I would rather do without. I wrestle my mind back from them--it is mine, I have wrenched it back, they have no ownership here. I am tired of being told who I have and what I feel.

My instincts guide me, and I know my choice.