A Pale Scrawl
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact

New Year, Same Me

1/2/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
I keep trying to find the words to sum up the last year. And I keep stopping in my tracks because it was unceasingly cruel to people I know and love. 2018 left wounds that will never heal. They will scab and reopen for as long as we all breathe. I feel guilt for how my year ends while theirs drags on.


For my part, I know I crossed midnight from 2017 to 2018 in tears. I was alone and longing. In love and far from the one who loved me. I didn’t know if there would ever be a resolution, or a closing of our gap. This continued until June. The gap closed for three days in which the world around us disappeared. The chasm yawned again when he left, wider, rawer, and more uncertain, at least for me. I knew what I wanted. I knew what I needed. I didn’t know how to achieve it.


In July, death came calling again after losing my dog in April. This time, when it knocked on my door, I didn’t let it in, so it went to my neighbors, my friends, instead. I spent nearly the entire month mourning. I still mourn today. I mourn not only the lights gone out, but my failures in the immediate wake of those losses; my inability to bring to fruition anything to provide a balm apart from my presence at memorials. I was barely treading water in my own sea.


In August, my year began to turn. I traveled to new places with my one in six billion person. In the Las Vegas Four Seasons, on the 37th floor, he proposed to me. He said, “when you’re ready, I want to marry you.” I said yes. I said it because it felt right. I said it because this was different than before. I said it because we meant it. We wanted to be together. We wanted to build something to better each of us and not just ourselves or the other. We share goals, philosophies, and bone deep desires.


I returned to my empty home, and I immediately began preparations to sell the place where dreams had been born and died for six years. I’d brought in lives and said goodbye to them. I’d made hard decisions, outgrown relationships, and found myself in the rubble. The house stood strong around me, just as it had for a century prior to my finding it. At the same time I was selling the place, I was giving notice at my job of nearly a decade, looking for and accepting a new one two thousand miles away.


In mid October, I found myself saying goodbye to my chosen family, my friends, all the things good and bad I’d known for my entire adult life. My fiancé flew in and we packed a storage container in three days before driving another three with my sick, elderly cat in the backseat. I was still certain this was right even as I told my Shieldmaiden the night before I left, “I’m not avoiding you; I just need to get this packed,” while my voice broke, and we both stood together sobbing, my fiancé looking on, feeling responsible for both our pain.


I began my new job a week after arriving here. About that, I was uncertain, and am still at times. It supports me financially, but it doesn’t fulfill anything deeper. It’s not a labor of love. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.


The entirety of the rest of my new roles has been natural, bonds forming and strengthening with little effort on my part. Other things have been harder, less seamless, but nothing is ever perfect.


In December, I spent my 38th birthday feeling more loved than I have in years. My partner proposed again, this time at Donner Pass. I again said yes. Still sure of its rightness. Surer.


The remainder of 2018 left me happier, in better shape in all ways than I’ve ever been, so on December 18th, I told him I was ready. We organized a small ceremony on December 22nd at the base of a mountain, standing in the snow, promising to take care of each other, to have adventures, to support the growth of our best selves, and to be best friends for as long as fate will let us. We laughed as our officiant cut out entire swaths of her words to accommodate his impatience to kiss me.


While we were organizing the moments that would solidify our union, our offer on a house was accepted, cementing a place for our little family to thrive, and we currently wait in escrow to close.


We spent the last weekend of the year honeymooning in San Francisco, him showing me the places he grew up, excited about my first experiences. We had dim sum in Chinatown, kissed at Fisherman’s Wharf with the seals barking behind us, and walked the beach getting caught in the tide collecting sand dollars.


While I began the year in sorrow, I ended it in joy. I fell asleep next to my husband before midnight on New Year’s Eve, sober, safe, and feeling a security brand new to me. I know myself, have faith in my partner, and know that our shared dreams will come true due to determination and open communication. We make each other better each day. The work and time it took to get here seemed insurmountable most of the time we were in it, but now that it’s here, it was more than worth it. I would do all of it again.


I don’t make resolutions, but I do have hopes. I want things to be easier this year. I know it will present challenges, but I want less pain, less loss, and more contentment for everyone I know. I want to keep seeing new things, falling in love each day, doing things that scare me, and strengthening the bonds I’ve forged.


My hope for you is the same as my hope for myself. The work isn’t selfish. The conversations, though hard, will make you better. The leaps, small and large alike, will still advance you even when something else takes you back. I hope this year is kinder, gentler, that we all find new joys. I want our pain to be less.


0 Comments

Quit Claim

9/17/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
As I box it all up
Sifting and sorting
What once was wheat
Now turned to chaff
I found your vows
On a creased yellow post-it
The promise of happiness
In your crooked hand
Did you mean it?


It’s hard now to remember
The bright spots
Our first day here
Eating pizza on the bedroom floor
Surrounded by the boxes
That would fill our generation of this home


I wonder
Where we went wrong
When I said I wasn’t happy
And you said I was crazy
I wonder
If it was ever right at all


Looking at it
You could have written it yesterday
But I haven’t seen you
Since the day it ended
And I know you haven’t changed


Part of me
Is sorry I don’t miss you
Part of me feels cruel
While the rest
Is the proudest I’ve ever been


So I’m moving
Away
On
Up
With a pocket full of new dreams
Instead of the ash of old nightmares
But I shed a single tear over them
Swirled my finger in the paste it made
And licked the bitter clean
















0 Comments

New math

7/18/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
18
19
21
10


10?
You’re going in the wrong order.
Have you forgotten how to count?


Yes.
I think I’ve forgotten numbers.


10 is too small.
I know.


10 doesn’t belong.
I know.


Why 10?
Because he was there, and now isn’t.
​Just like the others.



But he wasn’t like the others.
10 is video games
Santa Claus
LEGO
Dress up


10 is not knowing the world is cruel.


10 is...
10 was.
Bright and lively and unfiltered
Like sunshine on a clear day
Warm and squint inducing


10 was


0 Comments

ebb & flow

7/12/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
I am aligned with imperfection
Because I am also imperfect
Not halves of a whole
Broken and separated by time
But pieces
One ceramic
One glass
With sharp jagged edges
Which uncannily fit together
When placed one alongside the other


The meeting an accident
Of years of tides
You beginning on one coast
And I on the other
Pushed eventually
To the middle
And showing the wear
The salt sea etched
But oh, your lines are lovely
Beauty blushing beneath the bruises
The scars
A cuneiform spelling love


And what we had before
The lies we told
To ourselves
To others
To convince them all
That commitment
Would make it better
When it only got worse
When we landed on rocks
Harder than ourselves
Fractured
And sank
To the forgotten bottom


But wind
And the moon
Moved waves
Moved us
To the place
Where we could see
That when the swirling sand cleared
It was you
And it was me
And we fit
Because of the edges
Not in spite of them
And oh, our lines
Our lives
Are lovely








0 Comments

Divestiture

7/6/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
There are times
When you say the things that hurt
Sucking out the poison
Spitting it out
To hiss on cold ground
Instead of letting it seep osmotic
Into your bloodstream
Shut down your organs
Reduce you
To your organic compounds
Eliminating the essence
Of who you’ve come to be
And you watch it dissipate
Smokelike
Into the air
Like the ghost of who you were
0 Comments

Letting it be

6/29/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
As I age
I am learning the art
Of letting it be


Where I once dug
And weeded
And mulched
Have matured berries
So thick with brambles
Black with juice
I can pick a quart in a day


The picking is an exercise in consent
Prised gently between thumb and forefinger
I gently ask the question
Will you come with me?
If I meet resistance
I leave it


If I get too greedy
Or move too quickly
Thorns embed themselves
Or graze my arms
My hands
My feet
Catching themselves
In the skirt of my dress
Reaching for my moon white belly


But if I take my time
If I let them be
I am rewarded by the dark cupful
More than I can eat
Enough to share


0 Comments

Commingling

6/13/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
It’s just as I dreamed
Our lives and fingers intertwining
Like the trunks of trees
Grown close
Foreheads pressed together
Breathing as breeze through leaves
Our roots seeking the same gritty nutrient source
A silent agreement to share and not compete


To cut one down
Would be to kill both
Shattering the gentle symbiosis
Created by our quirky happenstance of a beginning


We will weather nature’s burdens
Gnarling and silver barked
A ring for each shared year
Reaching heights impossible
With any other or alone


Don’t let me go




0 Comments

Adrift

5/9/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
You said the hull would hold
The trickle nothing to worry about
“You just have to bail it out sometimes”
So I packed my provisions
Kissed my loves farewell
And climbed aboard


I could smell it coming
I could hear it in the gulls’ voices
As they swooped around us
Long before I saw the gathered clouds
Roiling in the distance
The wall of them more solid
Than you beside me


Your fair weather trickle
Became our undoing
Too much to scoop with a pail


Now land is far away
And the splinters of our vessel
Have drifted
Or I’ve drifted


I’m treading water
Arms and legs churning
Beneath the surface
Of the angry foam
Atop my sea of storm-tossed thoughts
With decisions to make
In this exhausted, bruised body
Hanging on to dwindling hope
And your cold hand






0 Comments

Definitions

3/11/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
You’re going about your day (in this case, reading), and you hit upon something common.


It triggers something in your memory like a bad smell, and you’re back there on that day, doing that thing, when you changed.


For him.


It was a small thing. Easy to change, and it meant saving you this kind of grief down the road.


Another thing on the pile of changes you made to adjust. Until all that was left was a pile on one side, and what looked like you but wasn’t on the other.


Incremental shapeshifting, the gradual emptying of yourself.


Later (today), you’re right back there (because of a single word), and you wonder why you did it. Why you changed. Why so many times you bowed to it, to him.


And you know it’ll never happen again. But you mourn your losses afresh. Even if you’ve recovered them. Because they were lost, and you missed them when they were gone.


You missed them immediately. Surrendered to concession. But you took the easy road rather than leave.


Today, the thing was reading. The word was “scythe.” The smell was the pronunciation. I changed how I said it to suit him. To avoid his derision. “It’s like ‘sigh,’” he told me in that way he has of shrinking you. Like he has of cutting through your defenses.


I looked it up today. It’s like “sigh-th.” Which I always knew. I was right. I always was. But the road I take today is the high one. And he’s not here to tell him.
0 Comments

Convenience

3/9/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
You feed me lines
And I lap them up
Like a rasp tongued cat
The bitter mash of discarded scraps
Sticking to the roof of my mouth
And I still say thank you
Because nobody else has fed me
And I don’t know the difference
Between gravel and mud
Except that mud goes down easier
So that’s what I keep choosing
0 Comments
<<Previous

    Archives

    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact