Really, I wasn't expecting this.
Friday night is a cross-quarter though, the last holiday of the harvest year, lunar Samhain (which I still don't get that people dont understand this stuff about life, it's so simple a part of understanding to me it's commonsensical. How can one look at something easy for example as the rising and falling of high and low tide and not get the import of movement of sun and moon?? Anyway. Not here to soapbox or vilify or happily call movement magic, but it makes me roll eyes even so...) And so be Friday what it is, this time of year isn't about a quickening as much as a great still, in order to show what is just plain TRUE: what's before me now is the truth, on every level, try as I wish to or strain as fear causes me sometimes to, in order to see or choose not to see.
I am not the same woman I was when I left last week and yet somehow deeply, clearly, I am, through and through. Sean's wedding was beautiful, out of a story book. Perfection, all the clear crisp colors of love and loyalty and friends and family and Fall. He texted Saturday morning to hug Jamie, his almost-wife, we were getting ready she calm as a kitten her dad cooking for us and bloody mary's and all the girls giddy with hair in curls and make-up half-done running around in our robes. Then he texted minutes later that he was so nervous he was puking. I called Brian ASAP he said dad was freaking told me all the last minute unravelling stuff that was causing dad his red-faced growly take-control wild barking ways which is how he loves, and then Brian said too: Dad took Seanie off under his arm for a walk. And that of course set my nerves in and turned my tears on, too. Little brother, o god my little brother this one thing I can not do for you, I was sick with a twist in my stomach and it was us again in my heart us since he was born and I was three years old him this little perfect angel I would over myself love forever no matter what and take care of and protect, and on the party-bus drive to the chapel Sean called Jamie freaking out where were the rings and Jamie cool and collect handled it and my eyes heavy with tears because this is her job now and thank you life for making her so tender and right for him, so gentle and loving and beautiful and strong. And I swallowed the tears because she said NONE! and I knew that's what she needed, peace not emotionalism but I don't do well with that, quelling my emotions so during the ceremony hives came out on me and I wasn't right the rest of the night, which was ok, because the bubble of pure and love around them was. And not only was Sean always who I vowed to protect, but in older years he was more like a dad: showing me how a man could and should and can be, and so I guess this is how I learned to let him protect me. And he knows this, my gratitude, every chance I can I've thanked him for showing such important roles to me. I love him so, I do I do. And Jamie and her family, the tenderness of it all, how beautiful she was and they all are, how touchingly real and meant to be.
And at Erin's after it was all over and before we found the dark cafe for homemade Sunday dinner, my cousin-sister she let me lay next to her and let me cry and listened to the last two months of my life...Acupuncture school indecisiveness and book-writing and unemployment denied, Josh and closing the door on all that, and Sean too and living with mom and dad and when I woke Monday morning in her bed it was alright, I was peaceful again and felt so sure of my life. I pulled to the bottom of her hill and my logic telling me to drive to Ellicot City but instead, sitting there tree-yellow and red hill with peeks of blue brilliant sky between, I turned right because it felt right and drove Frederick Road the four miles or so the long industry and ghetto-lined old faces on the street sunshine drive in to the heart of the city where it meets MLK; and every song is a love-song when you say goodbye to someone and that morning I don't mean Sean. Which was happily puzzling to me but not in a way I had or have the energy to figure out because timing is what it all comes down to--but for the first time in a long time--maybe since ever? My heart is cleaned out of the people that command it, so maybe I finally am getting to be free and have new chances of the what is really best and meant for me.
I asked mom this morning, if Baltimore is what I really care about, and I do I do I love that city, I love it and know it the way I love how my own feet move or my own blood paces up or slows down...how to explain this other than it is where I was born, not perhaps where I specifically grew up but where I was born and where I went to be with family the first 12 or so years of my life so that is intrinsic enough. But this is shamanistic, also, what I learned for sure when I lived on the road after reading about it so many times in so many different indigenous, traditional writings. The land holds it's own energies, the very elements that make up the environment, and it is this that draws the personality then of the culture and the people: either in a way that draws people to flow with it in harmony, or causes them to fight against it because they are fighting, on an elemental level, themselves, their own "nature"...but anyway soapbox again, but is it? I am suddenly re-questioning that idea of home. I've made no secrets about the Baltimore-trance hold that I've been under, but if that is the case then why aren't I there yet? The whole thing with Brooks and Mike Cades showing up again this weekend and that Warehouse dream imploding how it did...
It is all flat, laid out before me now and I in the center looking side to side, like some book I am in the middle of both writing and reading. And that is all I know to do, keep writing. The only thing. My bills will pile up and my friends will continue to call where are you Kel and Seanie and Jame will come home from Mexico and go back to Memphis and finally have some time to relax and love will sit around me like a halo or some place that is waiting when I close my eyes and dream. I'll write this book til it's done, loooord aunts uncles everyone, dont ask me what's next because right now I am content with I do not know, or at least, I will write my book til the end that is all I know to do.
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