October 2017

Someone posted this to Facebook.

I started typing, compulsively, without thinking just letting my sadness pour out of my fingers into my phone.

The 15% battery warning flashed and my screen went dim.

Me too phone, me too.

But I kept going.

It sounded a lot like “I want”

Like “I know where the cupboards are, I know where the car is parked, I know he isn’t you” ~Tori Amos

Like this…

I miss you.
Like the French say “you are missing from me”.
Like I am emptied and hollowed out.
I don’t know if you took something from me, or if when you were here, I finally felt fulfilled and I am readjusting to my half empty/half full state but I don’t know how, even though I must have lived this way for years before you got here.
It’s harder now that I know what it is to be sated in all ways.
Like I still can’t think straight.
I’m Eeyore and there’s a rain cloud over me always.
I miss you like sunshine.
I’m trying to move, to live and breathe but it’s like work now.
Everything is grey and heavy.
I want to hear you laugh that way again when I walked up behind you and touched you.
I want to map your freckles. In the way astronomers do, find the patterns, name them with the names of the old ones and make up myths about them, tell you the stories of your past lives and why your eyes are black moons.
I want to spend an eternity trying to figure out why all of me wants you all of you so much.
I want to pull your atoms apart and see how they match mine. Like puzzle pieces from an old exploded star, I want to put the star back together and have it shine somewhere only we can see because we know where to look.
I want you to call me wifey again. I don’t care about the ring, the diamond can stay coal and I will love it just the same because you gave it to me and it carries with it the idea of warmth and wanting.
I want to fix your couch and make you dinner. Like I promised I would. That is what this is, open ended promises with no way to fill them, no way to fill the minutes in my day, but I am trying.
I want you to see this room and home I made for us.
I want you to come home.
Everything made sense when you were here and now nothing does.
Trees whisper your name. I was supposed to be your flower girl and now I don’t know what I am, so I keep their names safe in my mouth and plant bulbs called hope and allium and narcissus and amaryllis.

I keep sending echoes out “please be okay” over and over again.
Maybe this isn’t love, when I love I can find contentment knowing whomever I love is alright wherever they are.
But you, you I want here, with me. On the other end of the phone telling me about your day. With you, in your house playing housewife for real, knowing you are coming home, floating on the butterflies in my belly. With you in this room I made for us. I thought of you with everything I kept and everything I gave away.

I think of you always.
There is this one remaining red thread tying me to you.
It’s too fragile to pull.
So I stay still.

I’ve been left before. Worse than how you left but…
This is killing me.
I don’t want anyone else even looking at me.
I’m still yours and you’re gone.
I don’t understand how a god or a universe could finally let us find each other and then let you walk away.
Say something…
Anything.
Please.

Even if you tell me to fuck off, stop or go away.
Anything would be better than this silence I am forced to fill with my own thoughts and the echoes of the things you said and the things I didn’t get a chance to say.

Like I love you.

I can still feel you there, are we tangled in time somewhere. Armistice

I woke up early in the dark.

The last traces of yet another hurricane bringing the sky down in big fat drops or warm, wet rain. The morning quiet punctuated with far off rumbles of thunder.

Everything is closed. I was home alone and the dog refused to come out from under the blankets. I wish I could be her and have that choice. Just stay in bed until this metamorphosis is complete. It must feel like chaos to the caterpillar. All of this change, locked in a cage you made yourself, turning to liquid, hoping the casing holds lest you spill out before you are done becoming.

I keep thinking I am breaking through, any minute now emerging with wet wings, still fragile and vulnerable but closer than being goo.

I found my wings yesterday. Real ones, made of metal and rusted from being left outside.

I am trying not to read too much into it, but have we met?

I pulled into a parking lot to turn around, on an errand I didn’t have to run, and there they were.

I realized after I had picked them up and put them securely in my backseat that I was behind the hotel he stayed at, the place we had our first kiss.

It’s not a metaphor, I did really find a bit of metal that looks like wings. General consensus is that it was a fireplace hearth. Removed from god knows where and just left in the parking spot I had to turn around in.

Now the only question is, do I clean them up or leave them as is. Rusted and a little beat up but heavy and beautiful.

And for a minute, before I peeled myself out of my dirty, thrashed in sheets, I could feel him in there with me.

He is supposed to be here. And in some version of reality, he is.

We didn’t get a chance to sleep together and touch each other in the night. The one night he stayed, it was too hot for autumn. The temperature in my room soaring into the 90’s. So we left space between.

I woke up in the night and put my hand on his chest and it came away burning.

But I kept doing it anyways. Making sure he existed in the night. He reminded me in the morning, of how real he was and I let him in. Pulled him closer until we were as close as two people can be.

That was real.

I know it.

I have text messages and a random dirty sock to remind me that yes, that happened and yes he was here in this house, with me.

But I have moved houses. Called all my power back from the old walls and windows and doorways. Left those keys on the kitchen counter and I know they are gutting the place. I am gutted. Flesh falling off my bones because I keep forgetting to eat, to breathe, how to tie my shoes.

How will he find his way to a house he’s never been too?

If you are sad you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are content you are living in the present.

I do not like this present. This is not the reality I choose.

The future is uncertain and full of the holes of what we were supposed to do.

The past is full of clues, and repeating patterns, lessons on loving prophets and him.

8. When you find him in his room, thrashing the sheets, pressing his palms into the wall, howling. His face a river. Close the door. This is how he makes wine. Leave him in his sorcery. 

Lessons on Loving a Prophet-Jeanann Verlee

The door is as closed as I can get it but my fingers are welded to the jamb, they won’t let go. Iron grip or whatever those wings are made of, something heavy and unyielding.

She goes on to say be ready with tourniquet and prayer. I have been praying, kneeling, hoping.

All that is left is one fragile red, silk strand, holding.

The last line of that poem is YOU WERE MADE FOR THIS.

I am.

Karma markers and amalgams. Pieces of what came before, the good parts, the kind you put in a scrapbook and keep, all presented themselves in him.

Old songs that struck my soul like a chord, all making sense now. Things I have read and quoted and seen. All lining up like stars taking me home. I drifted so long. I am impatient for shore and solid ground.

The wings will be the last thing to come into this house.

Seems like the right thing to do.

Metamorphosis complete.

After we move I’m gonna…

(The list keeps growing)

Get my nails did

Make some asleepin’ playlists

Apply the edits to the book and work on the separated Siamese twin.

Get my hair cut

Take my fucking life back.

I once wrote to dear Brother Matt and also Habibi that ‘the moment we think we are cursed, we are.’ But we will get to that in a minute.

The secret is all inside your head she said to me, the answer is easy if you take it logically.
 (Paul Simon)

I had to go digging through all of my things, I had no choice, we’re moving.

So much useless junk I have been holding onto, in white file boxes named “novella” and “mementos”. The scraps of paper, scraps of a paper girl I used to be. I remember thinking it was soooooo important to remember, it ain’t. I saw my stupidity and error laid out on the living room carpet in black and white and other colors. I got 3 boxes down to a small accordion folder and set a few things on fire. Releasing that energy back into the world where it can be recycled into whatever I choose.

I know what hurts, I don’t need paper cut reminders.

I kept a few things, from public school, high school, there is a section for the 90’s. The tag from the first horse I rescued at auction, the memoriam cards and leaflets from the dead. Faded construction paper finger paintings from my son and other people’s children. Those I will keep.

I had things the poet sent me tucked away somewhere, bound in red thread and silk. I didn’t want them and I was going to give them away. But I couldn’t find them anywhere, not in time for the deadline to send them away anyways.

I have been time traveling backwards. I spoke to 10 year old me and rescued her from the basement with the brown speckled carpet. I made peace with the girl who stayed at the farm 6 years past what she should have. But there are no ‘shoulds’ here. We did what we did and it’s alright now.

Except that one thing.

When I looked back along my timeline, to this version of me right now. I am mostly large and in charge. I am better off financially than I have ever been, I wrote a book for fuck sakes, yay me. My home is beautiful, my friendships unparalleled, my dog adorable, my son a mystic…farm girl me would be so pleased, and I am.

But there is that one thing…

The poet came into my life at the beginning of my transformation. Dripping honey from his tongue over the phone whilst I was holed up in the chalet in the woods. Figuring out what it meant to be alone with myself, to hold my lovers and myself to higher standards. When I was finding my voice and understanding what it meant to be me.

He came and went, and then came and went again. Other lovers that seemed like they might stay just up and left in the night without warrant or warning. Just ouf and poof.

And this whole time, I blamed myself, I am the common denominator am I not?

In a conversation with the Giant the other day he was forthcoming about his first impressions of me whilst we were brainstorming about why men run from me.
The stripper thing came up and I said
“I know that makes me disposable.”
He said
“No. It makes you intimidating because you can walk into a room and do/get whatever you please. Naked and unafraid no less. It’s terrifying.”
“Then we get to know you and you’re so much more. It’s even more terrifying.”
I’m glad he stuck around and we muddled through.
I don’t see myself as anything but a squishy dorky ball of love.
I need eyes to borrow sometimes.

I thought that was it, the stripper thing and I’ve made plans and provisions to cut that out of my life. I am truly over it.

4 years ago Poet said to me that I was everything he ever wanted and everything he’d ever run from.

And in that moment I was cursed.

I liked that idea.

It made me something.

But it no longer serves me.

Just like the scraps of paper, I am setting that idea on fire and letting it go.

I am nothing to run from, and everything to run towards.

I have no desire to be everything to one person.

I am my own.

I am not dangerous, I am simply kind.

Let the curse be broken.

Its 5 am

And I am up.

I wake up almost every day at 5 and I force myself back to sleep. Today I cannot. Too many thoughts. Too much to do.

And him.

We used to text each other in the wee hours. Both up around 5:30. I was writing before work, he was hitting the gym before school.

Sometimes, twice if I am being honest, I can feel him peeking at me in the morning dark. Once in a dream and once awake. I saw him looking at me.

I am not sure if I can articulate the elation I feel when I see an email notification or hear the bing of a text. Nor can I summarize my disappointment when it’s just another garbage email, or roomie asking me where something is.

It’s been 14 days since he left. Abruptly.

I was given permission to go crazy for the first 72 hours, and I did. I thought about trying to find him, driving 5 hours in the middle of the night, getting up with the sun to try to find the orange house with the red door in a town I haven’t been in since I was 8 years old. I recalled, with great clarity that he was 5 minutes from here, 25 minutes from there and I triangulated which streets I had to drive along to find him. I found a motel near him called the Time Travelers Inn or something like that, took it as a sign from god.

I took everything as a sign from god. Lyrics here, billboards there, old memes I had left myself in my memories on Facebook.  Even the story of how I came to be. My parents met, my dad went to war, my mom waited. My dad came back, went a little crazy and ran off to California. My mom waited some more then drove across the country to bring him home. This is my legacy and reason for being.

I have no knowledge of any conversations that transpired between my parents after my dad returned stateside. Maybe I am just not as tenacious at 43 as my mother was at 23.

I am the sum of my wounds that won’t heal. I am used to being abandoned.

I wrote an article about what happened, I sent it to him, I regretted it.

Unfinished Symphonies. That is what this feels like to me…like we hadn’t even gotten to the good part yet and then it was gone. Looking like a limb torn off*.

I cried in an Ikea.

And I cried some more.

After the 3 days had passed I sent another email. It went unanswered.

None of this is fair, and yet it’s happening.

I don’t know why. Except that we were new and he went dark.

He had no idea what I am capable of handling and he chose to leave. Before I got to show him my favorite things, poems, pictures, songs…all the things that reminded me of him before we even met. I realized, before he left that I had been looking for him for a really long time.

I never told him that

Had this happened a month from now I could’ve known what to do. We could’ve had a plan. Or, I suppose if we are making wishes, I could’ve freed myself earlier and saved him some hurt as well. He’d been scratching at my door for almost a year before I let him in. I regret that too. I didn’t know.

I know this has happened before. This is my wheelhouse. I loved a man who was incurably sad and angry. I still do, he is numbered among my best friends. He lets me be me and supports me without question or agenda. I used to reach out very gently and tentatively. Checking on him once a week or so. Sometimes I would drive an hour to see him, shaking the whole way. Bring him candy, I called it reverse trick or treating. One time there was a mudslide and the 60 minute drive took 4 hours and I had to pee in a coffee cup with the car in park on the off ramp. But I made it, he laughed at my stubbornness and we had wings.

I’m speaking of the Hulk. I called him that with reason. He would rage and turn green, then shrink back to giant sized and have a world of regret on his shoulders. I couldn’t carry it for long, he wouldn’t let me. But I tried.

Everything about him belonged out west and not with me.

I accept this.

It helped that he didn’t shut me out. Sometimes I would drive the hour and he couldn’t muster anything but a hug. And I would hand him his candy and drive an hour back.

I ran to him for answers when this one left. Did he think me strange, crazy, pushy or rude?

He laughed and said no, I made him feel loved.

I would drive an hour or 5 to give someone that feeling, even if it just meant standing on the doorstep for 5 minutes and driving home. It’s who I am.

This new one made me feel cherished, protected, cared for and home.

I wish I could have given that back to him.

I just want to be let back in the house.

(Band of Horses*)

I went digging around in my dark place.

I had to.

If I remember it exists it makes the bright brighter and the happy happier.

If I say it out loud it makes other people feel less alone.

If you can name a thing, describe it with language and science it takes some of its power away.

I call all of my power back to me. Now.

Once upon a time I thought I had to be perfect to be loved.

The problem with that is everyone’s idea of perfect is different and in actuality, perfection doesn’t exist.

It’s our flaws and cracks that make us beautiful like stain glassed windows.

One of my many therapists told me that my psyche is a house. Filled with rooms that are, in turn filled with things I love. Ridicule from others, especially at a young age, made me board up the doorways to most of the rooms in my house until I was only a foyer with a wide open door, letting anyone and everyone in even if they were only there to cause harm and havoc.

I had locked up and blocked so much of who I was, I became an easy place for vagrants to sleep and gather warmth. I had no substance, I was malleable and too open to everything. They didn’t want to build or repair. Just stay and piss in the corners until they found somewhere else to sleep.

I still carry deep shame about being that way. I am trying to air it out.

But the house stood.

Despite every earthquake I invited in, every hurricane that threatened to pull it all down and left everything a soggy mess, every tornado that picked me up and dropped me somewhere strange. I stood.

After the therapist explained this to me I tentatively started walking up the stairs. I took a crowbar and opened the rooms. Some of the things contained within were silly bits of childhood, others rotten and useless, piles and piles of other people’s carelessly packed baggage they had left behind. And some of these things were precious beyond description. The ideas of home and hope and truth and love were all written on the walls.

I still don’t lock the door, but I do shut it from time to time, when I need quiet and time alone.

I started inviting people in, on purpose, with purpose. And much to my delight, they liked me. They called me sanctuary, and I am exactly that. 

They celebrated my weird collection of curios and curiosities. Show and tell at Sarah’s house.

I started writing again. First on my own walls, then finally in signs on the yard that passersby could see and they smiled, and said me too and thank you. And the sun was always shining.

I almost developed some amnesia about the dark places. Like in the pain of giving birth to my light self my dark self was forgotten completely.

And when I tripped and fell in one the other day, I forgot how to get out.

I said…

I hid my scars. And in them are written the answers.

There are still mines and shrapnel from the war I fought inside myself, blood and bones of who I was. They hide under the flowers and sunshine of where I live now.

And I trip and I fall and I explode.

Not remembering is a dangerous game. I was unprepared.

Someone who could have benefitted from seeing my dark place was denied, and I can’t reach him.

And even then.

Isn’t that scared and tattered girl a valid part of who I am? Doesn’t she deserve recognition for making it through?

I have to reconcile. I have to welcome her and love her.

Because she is part of who I am.

Skinned knees from crawling, raccoon eyes from crying, I love her anyways.

I found her. Behind a door I had never unlocked. Alone, scared, dirty and feral.

Dressed in tattered remnants of her favorite things, before someone told her trying to wear all of the colors in the rainbow was ridiculous and she decided to cover herself in grey to avoid ridicule. A hand-me-down man’s sweater she wore because it looked like sunshine and felt like a casual embrace. All of her clothes hand-me-downs because she loved the feeling of being touched by something someone loved once, still do.

Her hair not long or short because she could never grow it without becoming impatient.

10 years old was old enough to stay home on the weekends.
So she did. Watched spaghetti westerns and fell in love with stockings and petticoats.
But she was lonely being left alone.
Her vocal chords atrophied with no one to talk to.
If she could speak, she would try to tell you it was her choice, and it was in a way. “I didn’t want to go anyway”. But she still wants to be included, feel like she belongs somewhere that isn’t her bedroom and her her forehead will crease into what has become the only deep line I still carry, the mark of discontent between my brows. She feels sick when she lies, but she does it so often it’s almost a first language.

Lies like “I’m fine” when she’s screaming inside.

“It’s okay” when she needs to be held. Someone told her she touched too much and she believed them. She fights to keep her hands at her side. They make fists and push people away.

Then the bad ones. Pretending the kids at school actually like her and let her play without consequence and judgement. They don’t. Her friendships are imaginary and precarious. One wrong word or move and she will sit alone for days. So she stays quiet and still.

She made a fortress in her closet. A reading lamp and a stack of books she has memorized. Stories of other little girls and she prays to any kind of god, that she will someday get a happy ending too. Someday never came.

She is forced to take dance classes and has all of the stage fright and none of the grace. The other girls mock her and giggle into their fists. She doesn’t belong there either. She belongs outside.

All skinned elbows and knees from climbing trees and playing in ponds. She can’t keep her clothes clean, she bites her nails and they are not for polish. She isn’t polished at all. She is a wilding trapped in a world of shoes and should, and manners and homework and chores.

She has started to notice boys and has no idea why they don’t like her, or what that even means to be liked.
She wants them but doesn’t know what to do with them and it doesn’t matter. She is unwanted. They tell her she is strange, she talks to much, laughs too loud. She is too intense for them, but 10 year olds don’t use words like intense, or outcast they just ignore her.

Always too much for everyone but ends up feeling not enough.

She wants to be held, touched, kissed, loved and listened to without judgment.

But that mouth of hers, full of big words and ideas no one understands.

Her funny mouth.

Someone told her that her smile was crooked so she covered it with her hands and then stopped smiling altogether.

Someone told her to stop singing, so she did, but didn’t she get picked to be in the school play and had a solo? The negative outweighs the positive, so I just started singing in the car 6 years ago, always alone.

And I think, therein lies the secret.

I am standing here, in this dirty basement named depression, staring at this incredibly strong and brave girl, who lived through all of this and has been holding me up the whole time. She is my foundation.

I will bring her up into the light, let her wander the rooms. She can shower and grow her hair, I will braid it for her with her head in my lap. I will let her wear whatever rainbows please her and feels good.

I will tell her stories of how we danced, naked on stage and people applauded, not because they had to, but because we were good.

I will show her all of the music and watch her eyes light up at new songs.

She can sit with me in the car and we can sing them off key.

I will teach her how to drive so she can be free to go anywhere she pleases.

I will show her the places where we swim and we still climb trees.

She can howl at the moon whenever she likes and the wolves will come when we call.

I will show her forgiveness for how we had to survive.

She’ll meet our friends that truly love us even when we are dirty or sad or weird.

And I can tell her about the time I asked a boy if we could touch him and he said ‘yes please’.

It’s been 6 years.

6 years today.

I have photographic proof of my moment of emancipation.

The first picture taken of me in at least a dozen years where I don’t look haunted or hollow.

I have my face to the sun and I am content in the moment.

Those moments are much more frequent now, but for 12 years they were non-existent.

Maybe longer really. Always doubting myself, always afraid, low grade panic attacks that would stretch on for days so I couldn’t remember what it felt like not to be attached to a low amp electrical current. Coursing through my body, my brain screaming at me RUN. But I had nowhere to run to.

Or alternately living in the dark place.

I built a home there.

The only music playing just a chorus of “you are unworthy of love and trust and basic human kindness”.

I would sit for days in a darkened room, painted a moldy brownish grey that defied description. Paralyzed and perched on a tattered couch with springs placed in awkward places so although I couldn’t find the energy to stand I was never really comfortable. My legs were asleep anyways, always walking on pins and needles, like they weren’t mine and I had no right to them.

A low wattage lightbulb that would come on for a few seconds or a few minutes just long enough to remind me how ugly I was and that there were no windows. No way to tell how much time had passed. I lost days at a time.

The longest I ever shut the world out was a calendar month. The February before this photo was taken.

I was broken beyond recognition. I was taking pills to shut my brain off just long enough to sleep. I lost 10 pounds of flesh. My body was leaving me and my brain didn’t care. I coveted the empty feeling in my stomach from not eating anything. Nothing tasted good and that emptiness felt clean and like control over something when I was spinning out.

I couldn’t calm down and my only respite was sleep. I was always angry upon realizing I was awake, the fact that I had to be awake. Minutes became hours unless I was sleeping then it was the opposite and 8 hours felt like 8 minutes so I never felt rested. Just restless.

I remember having opiate induced hallucinations about John Cawfee and how he pulled the poison out of the warden’s wife. And I begged any god that was listening to just get it out of me. That’s what it felt like. Brown dust and flies swarming and swirling around my brain and body. The buzzing drowning everything out, the dust clouding my vision.
I wondered if I had a brain tumor.
I wondered if I was going insane.
I still do sometimes.
Like now.

I understand panic attacks, like in a clinical way. I know what chemicals are firing in what parts of my brain. I know it is a survival mechanism held over from when we lived in caves on high alert. I know that I have muscle memory of trauma, as much as I have cleared those files in my mind, there are still fragments and triggers. Abandonment, loneliness, even feeling too happy because someone might take that away from me.

I know the low build that starts as a slight clench in the gut. Lactic acid is released into the muscles and they start to buzz and twitch. Sometimes, now, I can keep it there. Not let it progress. The loops of ‘you are a piece of shit Sarah’ become a round, where the calm part of me chimes in ‘this will pass, we have done this before’.

I lived in that buildup for 12 hours the other day.

At one point I wanted to go over the edge.

The edge for me is that I lose muscle control. I lose all of my words and reason. There is no logic in this place. Just screaming noises in my head and a burning in my lungs because I can’t take a breath or I take too many. My hands make fists, my body goes into a fetal position, my legs and arms become tree limbs shaking in the wind but completely solid and my head is an angry beehive, swarming and stinging. I can’t move.

My body decides that when given only the 3 options of fight flight or freeze, to freeze, solid.

I don’t know what is worse in those moments. Being alone, convinced I am going to die here on my floor or having a witness to my mess.

I don’t want to be touched but I want to be held. I don’t want to talk and I can’t even listen, their words just become more stings and buzzing in my head and I feel judged and so much shame. Because somewhere in me is a woman who knows this person standing over top of me is right, which just makes me feel more wrong. The shame is a weight that pushes me under further and I have to fight harder to get out.

I met a man once. He knew the dark place, like I know the dark place. All the feelings that had no words found language when we would talk about it. He would slip and I would reach in, not to pull him out but so he had something to hold onto. He did the same for me.

I learned, finally, to master the third option.

It’s fight, flight or freeze.

I ran, I hid, I went solid so no one could get in. Those reactions I knew like the back of my clawed hands.

6 years ago, I learned to fight. I learned to self soothe, just a little bit. I learned how to use my words when they were available to me and find some answers. I learned how to say my shame out loud and found someone who said ‘me too’. And that was huge for me.

My logic grew stronger the more I exercised it. I started reminding myself that I had survived these things before, that although in the moment I thought I would die (and I wanted to), and that I was indeed still here. Brushing my teeth, tying my shoes, eating, laughing, living…all the things that seemed impossible in those moments or months when anxiety would win.

I learned to touch trees, to walk barefoot in the dirt, to let the shower wash away the bad things and I’d feel them slip down the drain and out of me. I realized everything is energy and it is neither good nor bad, and those moments where I felt like I was going to explode is because I had collected energy and my negative thoughts were making it into pain and that I could decide to let it go. I learned to clear my own blocks.

Then Wednesday happened.

I realized that I had done myself (and others) a disservice by celebrating all my love and light and victories and not showing the battleground where it was fought for and won.

I hid my scars. And in them are written the answers.

There are still mines and shrapnel from the war I fought inside myself, blood and bones of who I was. They hide under the flowers and sunshine of where I live now.

And I trip and I fall and I explode.

Not remembering is a dangerous game. I was unprepared.

Someone who could have benefitted from seeing my dark place was denied, and I can’t reach him.

And even then.

Isn’t that scared and tattered girl a valid part of who I am. Doesn’t she deserve recognition for making it through?

I have to reconcile. I have to welcome her and love her.

Because she is part of who I am.

Skinned knees from crawling, raccoon eyes from crying, I love her anyways.

This blog is a few things.

A giant coffin.

A diary (darling).

A time capsule.

A place to vent and be myself unedited, for better or worse.

And a handbook of sorts.

I said to Panda on the porch yesterday whilst sipping our morning coffee and discussing a friend “I wish she would just let me swoop in and fix her life, like really listen to what I had to say and follow my instructions. Life coach you know? I am so good at seeing other people’s shit and giving good advice. My life though? No clue.”

She agreed, completely and emphatically.

Then off I went to the job I hate and got drunk again.

What was that law? Remove the mote from thine own eye before tending to the eyes of others

My writing has been shitty and sporadic lately. I don’t seem to have time to sit down and write, and when I do, I don’t know what to say.

I have stumbled on this thing that all other page runners figured out years ago wherein if I schedule my posts half an hour apart (instead of my usual rapid fire blitz posting) more people will see them. Broke my own record a week back. 3000+ hits on ye olde blog. It’s just a number but it did boost my lil ego. Not gonna lie.

Also, I have been posting descriptive blurbs, which means, I myself, must read what I wrote.

Sometimes I am filled with pride. I can’t believe how well I articulated a particular train of thought, or even the wreckage when the trains derail or collide.

Sometimes it fucking hurts, again, not gonna lie.

I feel shame for getting so lost in my idea of someone that I couldn’t see the truth.

I am still learning.

I’ve seen how much love I have for the Giant, the post count keeps climbing as I uncover more references and pontifications.

I don’t know how to tell him I have to go.

I have written proof of my ridiculousness, which should prevent future me from being ridiculous, but it hasn’t yet.

I had a Sucky as Fuck day yesterday.

And I was afraid.

You see dear readers…I met someone.

I am not in the habit of creating hoops for the new ones to jump through, or handing out tasks like Hercules was given. But maybe I should.

I do so enjoy just being me. Perfection is an unattainable myth, I know this like I know the lines on my palms. I am not perfect, sometimes I am a mess for no reason or all of them.

The Lumberjack would not entertain me on those days, he would not stoop to soothe. On a good day he sent memes about blowies and buttstuff and I considered this balm for my wounds, but it wasn’t. It was all he could give. He wasn’t enough and he knew it. Took me a while to realize this.

The one after him never left me alone long enough for me to have a day. So I suppose that was a blessing, until it wasn’t.

The one between those two got a post on how he handled me, aptly entitled Sucky as Fuck.
https://www.ourladyoflustandgrace.com/sucky-as-fuck.html

He let me dig my fingers into him until I could feel he was real. Where the others would choose fight or flight, he stood still. I needed that. Something to tether myself to when the world started to shake and me along with it.

But he didn’t stay long.

I should thank him for the memory though. At least I know what is possible. Someone that would let me hold on. Who would stay and sway with me. Who would kiss that spot on my forehead acupuncturists call the ‘reset’ button.

I am not ready to talk about the new one yet. Except to say, that despite a geographical inconvenience that puts him 5 hours away, he said the exact right thing yesterday. “I am trying to figure out what is happening so I can help you.”

That was all the help I needed.

I fell asleep peacefully, feeling wanted and cared for, and woke up smiling, way before the sun.