I'm terrified. I admit it. But I'm moving.
I want your stories and your problems right now. I want to give advice, gather you into me, sit you on my couch, turn on your stories, and make you dinner, bring you a drink. I want to help. I want to ground myself in knowing I can tell you something that might assist you. I'm so aware of what I've taken, and of what I don't know. I have a need, my innate need, and not even a sick, codependent need, but more honestly reciprocal and restorative need to give.
It's usually so much easier to know how to do that, than to go inside, isn't it? But right now it just feels right. It feels like balance. It feels like remembering that I know things, beyond the most obscured and personal, the things I cannot tell myself.
I'm turned inside out, myself, a lot raw, scared, more than a little bit lonely. That's okay, that happens sometimes. I can feel it now, let the current course through my skin, my arns and legs and brain, and move through it like I couldn't for so many years so easily before. There are days like today where I'm scrubbing the toilet because it has to be done, but also because focus is good, and I break. I break in two and sob scrubbing the toilet, because what better time is there to do that? And I stop and try to break the chain in the mirror, regroup, cut this out.
I hear the returns coming in, Wolf's crazed histrionic crush on Palin from the living room while I move from the toilet to the floor, grabbing the new, cool scrubber thing I got to reach the upper parts of the shower the last time I was at Target. And I suppose that I could stop this and yell on the internet about politics some more, make snide comments on Twitter, despair in community and sarcasm. But it came full into my consciousness tonight that that is not going to stop any of what is happening and nor is it going to make me feel any better about this inexorable madness that I feel sliding across our brains, our impressional psyches and our faces, our souls that don't need this shit, right?
Old Adam the crow
He's flying away from your field
And you will never know what makes him run
I dreamed of my father
Who drove me out of his home
And I dreamed I've forgiven my wilder son
I listen to Hem always when I write and that is the song that was just playing now as all of the thoughts moved through, and it keeps wanting to crawl into this post apropos of nothing, maybe, but probably something, as is the way.
I can't tie anything into a bow and I'm learning in the past two weeks -- with all of the questions and the doubt and the wonder and the fear, the love and loss, betrayal and beauty and sadness, mixed in with the normal every day -- that I'm going to have to be okay with that for awhile. Every minute when it seems unbearable is met with the curtain held back from the air through my sliding door to test the rising temperature, a few more minutes of twilight at the end of every lengthening day, a meal I churn out in my very own kitchen that pleases me, as they generally do.
It's minuscule, progress, I'm finding, as I become intimately acquainted with what that means to me in a new context. It's a daily, maddening slog. I've never been through this in this configuration before, but I've been through things that could have been like this if I'd taken them to the wall, and that is the thought that keeps me moving the most, that keeps me from slipping over like I've done before, that makes me know that whatever happens, it was the right thing, even if only just when I thought it was that moment. I didn't know it before, but I can eat that fear. I can swallow it in pretty big bites, just short of whole. I didn't know I could until I did it, I was pretty sure I couldn't, but I did. And I keep doing it in some small way every way, in ways I wish I could fully share right now but maybe someday I can.
I don't have any more. I have what has to be enough for now.
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