Tomorrow We Can Drive Around This Town

All these things and what to do with them/ we carve up the world all the time.  - Richard Siken

There are parts of me everywhere. Lost in slate along my favorite lake's shore, in the sunshine that sets my hair on fire, at the bottom of a Gin and Club Soda, the crease along the spine of my favorite book, on the curve of every word I write, under my husband's fingernails, balling up on late summer leaves, in the quiet fizz of neon... just everywhere. I'm noticing this more.

I'm doing a thing where I'm listening to those tiny parts of me scattered around this world. It's proving to be beneficial on many levels: heart levels, brain levels, social levels. It is a good exercise on what is right and what is well; I'm excited about what this means for me. But also, sad.

Leaving the winery was not an easy decision; the dissonance is (still) tangible. I learned so much under the guidance of Eric and Dennis,  blossomed with creative freedom,  honed skills I knew I had hidden somewhere, made incredible bonds with people I would have never come across... Two-EEs has been good to me. But lately there has been a fragrant and deafening pull for elsewhere. I noticed when the pull was more of a subtle tug, and now I'm listening.

So. Onward! as they say.  

You're a Human Thing

"I am, thank god, a writer and editor, not a father confessor. But I do believe that our culture is set up to maximize individual guilt, and that one needs to resist it. Whatever happened may or may not have been wise (you have to make that decision), but it is not unusual, or damnable, or changeable. Whenever we mess up--if that in fact is what you've done (I'm not so sure)--the only thing one can do is vow to change; nothing else is useful or doable. I've been married to the same person now for approx. 125 years. We don't think marriage is something ordained by god; it's something that two people decide on because they're happy with one another (despite of course ups and downs).

I've been writing a poem...and in it I quote David Ignatow, who says to himself after a stretch of self-loathing: 'so finally I wave myself back in.' Good advice."

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One day I will die. Right? And hopefully my shortcomings are overshadowed by the good things - I'm not sure they will be, but I have no control over that. I just know that until I can come to peace with my fuck ups and failures, I will try and try and try to surround myself with people who still see me as a human, and a deserving one at that.

The two paragraphs opening this post are two paragraphs from my current professor/mentor. I've read them a million times.  If there was a way to steep my body in these words, I'd do it. And I have a list forever scrolling in my heart of the handful of people who surrounded their wagons around me when I was shivering in the darkness -- one day, when this thing isn't defining me, I'm going to write each of you a love letter. (I've started composing them already)

And here's what I want to say and I mean it: Right now I don't have enough bones in my body to carry what's on my back, but little by little (some days not) I'm learning to.

I'm learning a girl can keep it together.

Sing Loud for the Sunshine

Our hands have dipped in the same mud. We have grown old together for a million years and this year is just one more. We have passed by and, since the sun warmed the earth, breathed the same breaths, maybe just a lifetime away. Ages ago, we built our house with our hands and tore the meat with our teeth. More recently, we let our sweat fall into the dirt, but with a spectacular spirituality that no one (I know) can even understand.

I know you.
My first morning I knew you - I've always known. Somehow.

It Feels Like Independence Day

[This one was hard to write. It may be hard to read]

Once, when I was smaller, I was terrified that my aunt and uncle were going to beat someone up in the big blue van they had. And when I say "terrified", I mean that. Memories of the nervous nausea that comes along with that kind of anxiety never leaves you. And I knew they were serious. A few years before, while we were camping at the Prairie Creek Reservoir, they captured a mole around 10am and stabbed it to death with a screwdriver. I begged them. I remember begging them until I threw up to just let it live. They didn't listen; I locked myself in our pop-up camper and cried until I was delirious.

So, I knew they'd do it. This time I didn't protest.

They lived near the rumored gay park in Muncie where, if you were driving through the park at night and someone tapped his brakes at you, it was invitation to get to know each other better. And this just didn't sit well with them. I still don't know the origin of the hate they had. Queer Bashing became an obsession in many conversations and it all became super aggravated after school one day. My cousin came home and said that a man tried to coerce him into his car. Which, I believe happened. Instead of praising my cousin for staying strong and getting away, and thanking their lucky stars nothing happened to their son, my aunt and uncle were furious. This was the night that someone was going to get it real bad, pay for these sins and get dumped near the White River, bloody and broken. They had a plan and I was this little tiny thing, petrified for another living soul.

Yesterday I was reminded of this memory while I was running. Running affords me a lot of time to myself - and yesterday... yesterday, I felt free. Absolutely and stunningly free. Somehow I got out of terrible situations in my formative years unscathed - save my gnawing anxieties. Somehow, even as a tiny, I knew killing a mole with a screwdriver was a disgusting display of brute and possibly the deepest sin I had experienced.

Somehow, even though I was inundated with the gospel that homosexuality was wrong and needed to be punished, I never believed it. I never believed it and I never understood it.

Yesterday I was reminded that sometimes there's a resiliency that needs to be praised.
I was reminded that even though some people hate, some people love. Some people love. Some people love.

And how lucky I am for a million reasons.