In the trunk, in the attic.

The fortune I got last night said rest was restorative for emotional and physical health.  I rolled my eyes a little and tossed it in the center of the table with the trash.  It was Laura's birthday and her fortune was perfect and auspcious for her new-coming year.   I focused on that instead.  Remember Gac, that slime stuff from the nineties?  That's how I felt Saturday morning.  Like sludge.  Sludge body, sludge brain cells, sludge muscles sludge blood, sludge Kelly totally conformed to the sheets and the bed.  There was no part, not one of me that was even capable of getting out of bed.

Whatever, out of bed I went and about two tables in at the big hotel by the sea the poetry light came on, so like every other genius-waitress ever there was I scooted in to an obscure corner and on my carbon-copy order pad stashed notes and poems all over the page.

This is killing me, I told my mother, the long hours and having again and again to subvert the impulse to write.  I texted Sean last week, in a moment of terrified frenzy, and begged him:  please can I just come straight there to Tennessee when I get on the road and hole up in a room while you and Jamie work during the day--and I will work, too?  I will write, I will write oh god, for days straight:  I will write.

My brother is amazing of course he didn't blink and all I can think is, days with the words and nights with them and their pregnancy.  How much luckier could I get?  Tyler came over yesterday in exchange for beer and pancakes.  He moved all the heavy shit down from the attic: this was what got shoved in the hot dark and dusty corners up there when Brandon and I split up Anngar farm, the bauble trinket stuff and some furniture and keepsakes I didn't have the heart to let go of back then.   80% of it is now boxed and ready for the girls from work to go through before the final trip to Goodwill and the local thrift stores.  There is nothing quite like knowing all your remaining belongings will fit in a 6x5 space.

I went through the trunk I got when I was 18 from the five and dime in Fells Point.  It holds mementos and scraps and I needed to make room.  I added a framed pic of Sam playing the banjo.  Wearing overalls and shirtless and of course no shoes, he was in the backyard at Truslow Road.  A flat black frame with three slots went in, one slot is Cades playing drums in the basement of WAC, one is Josh singing and one is Walsh on guitar, all from the same day.  Lots of little cards and quotes and pictures, too, from Chesapeake College and Katie and Beth and Paul and Kelly and others.  And a little dish I bought once in Seattle with Brandon, and a vase I bought in Delaware the last date I ever had with Josh.

In the trunk under some folders one flat box was tucked and fitted like a beach chair settled in the mud:  Inside the box on the top was Molly, pictures of her from that first trip Brandon and I ever took--to New England when I got sick after lunch on the coast in Mystic from bad clams and Katie's family took care of me, and then we drove all day to get to Molly's parent's hundred-year-old stone cabin on the sound in Ellsworth, Maine.  They fed us lobster out of the pot and pancakes cooked in a cast-iron griddle on top of the woodstove.  Molly took us to scavenge tide pools that afternoon, rowed us out in her little rowboat, taught us words like whorls and periwinkles and dog whelk.  There was a whole envelople of letters and songs Red Chevy Joe wrote me.   This stuff went in there years ago, before either of them was dead.  It didn't even pang my heart, Molly suffered so much and Joe's funeral was enough in November to remind me:  all things pass.  Kelly asked me late Saturday night if looking back on Chestertown was shocking, like seeing that whole other life lived that isn't me anymore did it make me stop in sudden question like woah, what happened?  It did, for a while.  But now, not really.  All versions and visions and incarnations change and re-change again.  It's all I know for sure.  Sure, like the notes from Mike Shue that were sad to see, notes from Geometry class when we were 15, there can sometimes be a pang.  Like it is now, literally right now: Jack Johnson on the radio singing my first ever Brandon-song, it beats a liquidy ache just a second but it is the twinge of life and thankfulness, the twinge of living:  I am living!  This is it!  The gentle acceptance of what is.

I have forgiven myself.  I didn't even consciously know it was something I needed to do, until the ushering moment that it happened.  It was a slow usher, nothing ecstatic.  Just an outbreath, a slight shifting, a barely there shaft of light where there wasn't darkness before but just a nothingness, an absence. 

Now it's peace, and readiness.  And looking forward--to the words, nothing else to be but poet-me and gypsy wild woman me, and nothing to do but write and love, and rest!