I'm warning you C-town, this one's sad...

Under a flat white box labeled in the corner love notes and other crazies 91-95 there is a plain shoebox. It just says cards/letters. What I am looking for is pictures.

I know my self enough by now to check through this box, it's just my style to shove pictures and movie stubs and what else I can only begin to imagine--quotes scribbled on the back of menus, parking tickets, wristbands from all-ages shows--amid what I would otherwise obliquely label cards/letters.

It's not Fannon I find first tho, it's Molly. And it takes my breath away. But that is for another story.

I am in the attic and it is hot. I dont come up here, ever, to look for anything. I packed this chest up in 2004 when I went travelling, and I have not been in it since 2007 when I added the box I was looking for today. It's for my keepsakes. Memory Lane: I used to expert in memories, swill them like Boones Farm and get all pissy drunk on them like a 15 year old does on cheap wine. But in 2004 I sold all my shit and downsized those scraps. Kept only what fit in this chest. I have now become an expert in this: letting go. Letting go letting go letting go.

And Fannon, you're the one who started that.

Ten years is a long, long fucking time. But so short. Today, ten years ago I was sleeping off a gnarly hangover in my old windowless room here at the Pines. I'd been arrested, again, and had called Jess up to celebrate my big last night out before I cleaned up my act one more time in order to get my family to shut the hell up. How arrogant we were in our youth. How thoughtless, and unaware...I'm pretty sure, Fannon, you changed that, too.

Cuddy called, and that was that. I didn't believe her at first. When I told Jess she started puking. It wasn't until I got Mudd on the phone though that I knew it was real. I could hear it in his voice, the way that sometimes, once, twice, three times in your life, a person can sound exactly the way you've always dreaded having to feel. I had to tell Jeremiah. I had to fucking tell Jeremiah!! He was on base, still in the Marines. So Cuddy, I always understood why you couldn't look at me after that. It took Jere two years almost to look at me again.

We drove to Keith's, Shannon had a little boy walk in on her when we stopped at the Taco bell bathroom in Easton on the long drive from the beach. Ashleigh and Maura were there, and Hupman. I just walked over to Hupman and fell in to his arms and we did not say a thing. It helps to tell, to talk about it now. Last month I saw John again, all these years later, at least 10. And this time as soon as we saw each other we just started to cry...

People dont talk about death. Dont talk about how sudden, unexpected, and especially the untimely ones rip your muscles out, tear apart your very flesh. Seperate the tendons of your self, so that ever after the very beating substance of your self you become wickedly aware of. Like one day you dont know about that, the fabric of yearning and skin and blood and tissue that makes you up, then when it tears so violently and it's all you're left to contend with, well then what? Then you know forever, and from now on it's your job, your choice: am I brave enough to re-mend? Do I have the strength and courage to start to sew? But how most of us, in the aftermath, dont even know that's our choice. We just let the scar tissue build up, and stay numb in that quiet little section of our life...

Fannon we loved you so, so much. You were the fiber at our center, did you know that? You were the one who held us all together. The late night creeps by your house. You'd still be up, watching infomercials, eating nachos or popsicles and bottled sodas crazy ass paranoia eyes darting side to side. You always knew where the party was. The card games, spades and high stakes at Listro's or under your back deck. Parties in the basement at Michelle's, or back of the pizza shop just to say whutup. Backroad driving in the tinted windowed lowrider--remember the time you got stuck in the mud on that farm? And Hupman tried to get you out? And like everyone showed up, just to hang out there? Chilling in beach chairs and shit? How bout all those late ass nights we kept up my mom? My poor, poor mom! The time we told dad, in town for one of his weekend jaunts, that we were having a couple people over to say goodbye to Maura when she switched from Spalding to Arundel and we packed my basement full of heads? And blunt smoke, and dad didn't even know (cars were to the top of Tall Timbers for christ's sake!!!) until Davis showed up at the front door with a thirtypack on his shoulder. Back door dumbass, it was a backdoor party duhhhh. What about those field parties, what the hell was that place called remember the bonfires we had there? The six-foot bong? It was that one summer, no weed anywhere just acid I'm telling you it's a wonder any damn one of us are even half-sane. Wow and sixth street, and the years after that. Bass bass bass thug thug thug. The morning you were STILL UP, after Jess and I got kicked out of Dave Swann's at 7 am for waking everyone up and we came to your place and you were like, Truckstop? Hell yea!! And on the drive you randomly busted out with a deep alto version of Strangers in the Night! Sinatra dude? God damn you made me laugh. I have so many memories, so fricken many. I covered them up though, got clean that year for good right after you died and resigned myself to never looking back. Thank god for Facebook tho, and I guess, shyly, self-consciously, all these years later--thank god for time, and a little bit of growing up.

You ever hear this saying? I sure loved the good ol days but I'm sure glad there gone? I think it's a lyric. Whatever. I agree, mostly. But I think in general naming any time period as the best ever, or even the worst or whatever isolates it so you cant really integrate the blessings of the you that you used to be--and therefor praise and enjoy the you who you are today. The me of today, developed in strong, awesome ways over the years happened by looking back on a crew of amazing, wild, funny, nutty characters who still live in me, and who are guideposts to a time back then of innocence and wildness~~when I lived in the bliss moment unafraid. That sweet fresh time of timelessness when it's all possible, when you dont know about the fragility of your heart yet cuz your so busy wildly living out of it. Right out of its center. Life is amazing, there's so much, there's just so much to get to do, to be, to live and experience. And you lived an amazing time with all of us, and also started me on that tip of appreciating my life Brian, first by closing my heart, but more importantly, in the last several years, by forcing me to re-open it, and investigate the secret treasures I had hidden there. The old bones of who I was, they actually have led me wholly and fully to the kick ass woman I get to be today.

I just wish the hell you were still here to get to be the man you could've been, and to see us all kick ass as we still are now. I miss you Brian. I love you, I know I speak for us all when I say we all do. Here's one last memory: You had long hair, to your chin. You were a pizza boy and it was closing time and you had to mop, and Scotty put on Pink Floyd. And you picked up the fucking mop and started playing it like a guitar. Which was funnier, your hair flopping all over the place or the fingers of the wet mophead, sloshing water everywhere? I still pray for you brother and I'm thinking of you today.

Writerly Things, Reflections: Eddie's Place, Crofton & Back in the Day

This man I loved greatly died in the winter when I was 19, about to be 20. It was January, something like the 18th or 19th when he went. I found out on Thanksgiving only two months before, his son Little Dave told tell me Kel, dad's got cancer. I was standing in the basement at mom's getting ready to leave for some kind of impromptu day after Turkey Day family thing like bowling or whatever somewhere in the county with one of the aunts or uncles and cousins. Little Dave showed up, walked down in to the basement with the weirdest smile on his face. You always remember where you are the moment news like that hits.

Eddie was Little Dave's dad, and he owned the pizza shop I grew up working in. The whole time my dad was living in Cali, and my mom and I were fighting like blood and daggers, and my dad and I not speaking unless we were hating and yelling, Ed was a Pop to me. Teasing me, hugging and smiling and also yelling and scaring the shiz out of us and keeping me right, best he could for us anyhow, keeping his look out.

A month later it was Christmas, I was at the community college, had just started waiting tables at a fancypants joint in downtown Annapolis cuz the GM from Jersey came down and fired me from Applebee's, which is what happens when you cuss out a customer. It was before gentrification and the uptown yuppy parts of Naptown weren't there yet, same like Baltimore and the Harbourside condos and three and four star restaurants--none of that was there, just projects and ghettos and old abandoned warehouses no "revitalization," yet.

I was trying to not touch drugs anymore because two things happened when I picked up: I was likely to spin out and go a little crazy, and simultaneously once I started I could not stop smoking or sniffing or popping or whatever else it was I had to do to keep using once I started, no matter what the hell was going on with my body and mind. So it was days before Christmas and I went to Eddie's house, with a poinsettia for him and a letter mapping it all out. What he meant to me.

It was the last time I ever saw him. When I left I smoked a joint and circled the Crofton Parkway, and all the Christmas lights clean and glowing, and how could all that be going on normal, all these everylive's, and Eddie's gonna be dead. My mind mindlessly looping I drove the backroads Underwood to St. Stevens and on and on and back and back and Eddie was gonna die you know when the cancer's got someone like that you can just tell and lemmee tell you, I was young still, and fucked up. About three weeks or so later I pulled in to the parking lot of the restaurant, Eddie's Place, for a Sat night shift because I'd volunteered to take shifts again when he got sick. And one of the teens that worked the kitchen like I did when I started a sub girl came running out and said, Did you hear? Eddie's dead.

I was mad at her because she didn't know him like I did and how could you just drop the news like this out here in the parking lot under the grey eyeless sky? She hadn't been there all those years. Soon Maura was there and Mark and I think maybe even Cuddy and Kristen, too, then Billy came up, and we all cried a lot and didn't know what to say it just all happened so quick, then Little Dave called me, and asked me to give a eulogy on behalf of all us, Ed's restaurant kids.

The day of the funeral, or memorial service which is more what it was, I had to miss the first day of my first creative writing class, ever. When I showed up on the second day my heart was locked heavy with grief and little did I know, my Prof Susan, soon to be my first writing mentor, assigned to me a key and essentially said, go ahead, unlock. Unload. We had to turn in a memoir at the end of the semester, an autobiography, responsible for a large part of our grade. The first page of mine was Ed's eulogy.

What stands most out to me that spring was this compelling energy, this literal river that felt real and loving and natural as gold and that I could feel, all the time, like a channel just moving along through me. All I had to do, my only job, was to show up in my boat and then be willing to go. I didn't even need an oar in hand.

I wrote like I'd never wrote before, every afternoon, sometimes starting at 11 in the morning when class got out and not stopping until well after mom had gone to bed. I wrote, and wrote and wrote. It was the easiest, and also hardest thing--when it got to the pain-parts, like wringing an already rung dishtowel sometimes--that I'd ever done. And it was easy, because it was so natural. I just showed up in my boat, like I said, and off I went.

Later, Susan wrote a recommendation letter to Washington College for me, and helped me prepare a selection of writing samples. By the fall of that year I'd moved to Chestertown--hellooooo Eastern Shore, and life of Acadamy, and Institution, again--and then well you know...Here I am and So it goes, so it goes....

That was 11 years ago and all I've ever wanted was that river again. A huge part of the power of that river is merely trust. Trusting the river, but you can only do this if you're strong enough to trust yourself, and your boat, too.

In Chestertown I got sober, and lost a lot of the gleam of who I am. The radical starry-eyed sassy warrior grl I'd always been. I let her go with sobriety because, like the first line of Ed's eulogy says, My name is Kelly, though most you of may know me as that crazy girl from Eddie's Place and funny as this was, it was also true. There's always been a stigma for me of crazy associated to life prior to getting clean because of, well, because of the plain and straight experiences of literally and totally losing my mind. Drug related psychosis and figuring out if it really was cuz I was mentally ill, and the long hard battle all that was back then.

Bit by bit, year by year, I've tried to rectify it. Time and distance and maturity account for a lot.

The Duende is scary because death and crazy are scary. And it is painful, because only the artist knows so intimately the mid-wifing required of creative growth. To have to confront these, to have to be willing to confront it if you want to be brave enough and strong enough to do the work you secretly think you're capable of. And is anything really worth that hurt?

This morning, I was lying in bed and thinking about trust. I thought, you lived like this once, in 98, and again in 02 for that teeny little bit of time til you shut it down becasue of shame. And then, why fight it, this pacing coursing energy you actually feel growing and growing these last weeks, why fight who you are? I started to get up, to come write more on my novel, and then my room, my living room with my bed in the corner so that my bedroom could actually be my writing space, stilled. I stilled, in a moment of discovery which I guess is just acceptance, again, on yet a deeper level.

Acceptance of self.

The gold channel, the river, there it was. There I was, in my boat, on its shore. A small little click of peace happened, or not a click, just more like a feather floating softly to land even less than breathlessly, on the ground. A quiet soft sweet motion of getting my feet wet. Of stepping in.

My river is back. My gold channel is here again, refound.

I've keep looking at my hands and I can't keep from crying these wonderful hot tears all morning long.