(original posting 5.13.2009
Choptank, MD)
About a month or so ago I went to try therapy.
“Let’s see,” she said. “So you started using drugs regularly at 15. I am sure you have heard that whatever age you start using is the age that you basically stop growing. So we’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s time to grow up. You are still, essentially, 15.”
Hmm. Maybe it’s possible that this woman, who for the first 45 minutes of our meeting did not allow me to talk except to answer her pointed questions, somehow missed the part where I mentioned that for over eight years I’ve been on a committed path of recovery and self-help, learning to take responsibility for me and aiming for emotional maturity.
Of the “adult” skills I’ve actually focused on, one has been the willingness to allow others room to be heard; so normally this helps to curb any immediate reactiveness to asinine fucking comments like the one above. But that day on the therapist couch the blood curled around my neck even as I smiled graciously at her opinion, oh, uh-huh, mmm-hmmm. It was later in the session when the radical, albeit kind, honesty kicked in. When she tried to tell me that my wanderlust and great passion for traveling too were indicators that I needed “to grow up.”
One of the other adult skills I’m really working on is learning to integrate information from various different sources and in the end use them to supplement my own views with all the regularly outputting stimulus of the world. I am learning, in other words, how to trust myself.
Needless to say, therapy, this time, didn’t quite work out.
I was 15 when I first found myself saddled up with my bags and my trinkets, my combat boots and cigarettes, scowling from low down in the passenger’s seat of the blue hatchback my mom behind the wheel, my brother’s perpetual chirpiness behind us his head in the middle between the seats. Up the Baltimore beltway then down 295, on our way to Dr. Lessey in the city. He had an office on Park Ave. On the corner was a soul food joint with bars on the window and a yellow sign for Lake Trout. Across the street and to the left was a store called The Leather Underground.
I had my learner’s permit, I was almost 16, it would soon be my regular, weekly route. Soon enough it was just me in the car. I was never brave enough to try the soul food. The bemused gay men in the bondage store, however, eventually knew this pink-headed purple-booted riot grrl by name. It was the early 90’s and hard to find places like that were ahead of the soon to come piercing trend. Leather Underground was the only place that I knew of that you could go for a belly button ring, and they used a 10 gauge cow-ring, not a bar, and there was nothing girly or petite about it.
Dr. Lessey was soft and gentle with gold spectacles and a sandman peace about him. I always pictured him with a nightcap on, the kind that triangles down one side of the head with a little cotton ball on the end, you know faded cotton-white with light blue stripes. And a candle in his hands.
It was six or eight months that I went to the city to see him. I was touched in a way that I couldn’t get my words to say, I was touched by the kindness of this sweet, quiet little man. I never told him about the pot I was smoking or the drinking that was edging beyond exploratory. I kept us occupied by tales of the girls I hated at school and this new, daring guy who showed up one day by my side, grinning down at me delicious in his eyes, walking me up the stairs to my homeroom. He had just gotten kicked out of public school. I was entranced and a month or so later when the same guy got locked up at Harbour Hospital in South Baltimore, Dr. Lessey encouraged me to go see him. I trusted the good Doctor. I used to bring my friends there to meet him, my brother, my boyfriend even (the boyfriend that I had secured as result of a visit paid to him at South Baltimore’s Harbour Hospital mental ward.) Dr. Lessey looked on in amazement, the only adult who didn’t judge and seemed uniquely interested, when my friend Briana showed up with me in his office sporting her knew Leather Underground navel loop. I loved how much he seemed, simply, to care.
Around the time that I really did start to make changes and work to get my life cleaned up, this would be roughly the spring of 2001, I entered in to another therapist relationship, this time with Father Ed. His was, I think, the fourth “couch” I’d been on by then. He was supplied to me for free by the uber-conservative liberal arts college that I’d already by then dropped out twice from, both times as result of drinking and drugs. Father Ed had me do things like hold fake conversations with the air; the air of course was always a character and usually someone close to me in life. I had to hold pillows tight and close and pretend that they were me. He was the first therapist I ever cried in front of and lord did it make me feel so, so clean. I loved him, Father Ed, for the same reason as Dr. Lessey, he truly seemed to care. That, and one clear, new thing: I was capable, or at least so beginning, of being honest. Truly honest about me. No more hiding the extracurricular’s that were so much a part of my life it wasn’t that I was even purposefully hiding them before, just that I took them so much for granted as a part of how I lived my life. The drugs and the alcohol were, plainly, part of me, of who I was, as natural as air or water or food when it came to the things I did each day. I just never questioned any of it, no matter the consequences or miserable thin vein of fear that seemed to increase with each passing year, feeling like ice in my blood and a cold wall at the base of my heart, steadily growing.
The honesty made all the difference. Clarity is a mixture of willingness, or at least a capacity, to be honest with myself and then trusting me enough to know that my own truth is the one that counts. The therapists that I’ve gained the most from over the years, as I’ve sorted through and grieved out my humanness and wounds, are the ones who’ve made it clear that they care and you can’t fake that, caring is a quality that is or isn’t. I know when it’s true, and more, affront when it is false or faked. In an atmosphere of care one feels safe, and safety is what is required, at least for me, to get to a place where I am willing to get honest with myself—on whatever level, at whatever risk of responsibility it means that I am going to have to take. And good therapy, for me at least, has been no more than the process of showing up to witness that allowing. Good therapists ask the right questions and then let the process of discovery guide its self. I always end up being the one who sees what I need to see just by having a safe place to say it out loud.
So if I’ve learned anything at all over the years, it’s that the answers are indeed within; and that especially it’s not a sign of weakness to sometimes need another’s help in order to get them out. In fact I’d say that empowering oneself like that is all about being Brave. But that other person doesn’t get to tell you what to do. They definitely don’t get to yield control over your ideas. Self-trust is the goal to me, and so it was that over a month ago my life started to turn around at its darkest point: what I thought would be the beginning step in self-discovery when I took the plunge on to a new couch turned out actually to be the exercise I needed to affirm the ending of self-doubt. And now that I am here, doing the Real Work with a book and some close friends as my guides, I am realizing that the two concepts are actually one and the same.
Showing posts with label singing the soul back home. Show all posts
Showing posts with label singing the soul back home. Show all posts
October 24, 2012
October 4, 2012
To tame this head
The Eastern Shore is the rural, country side of Maryland. It is flat but full of agricultural and watermen history, you can almost see its bias and charm in the fog banks that stack thick on a fall day like today. The Chesapeake Bay divides the shore from the stretch of urban corridor between Annapolis, DC, and Baltimore where I am right now. Over there, or the other side is what Shore people call it here.
The last time I was here in this shop I lived on the shore. I had edits due to Erika; her most recent submission of Hemingway's Girl. It didn't have a contract on it yet. She didn't even have an agent then. In such little time so much can change.
My cousin Erin drove us to Annapolis this morning. Last night sort of late we went to Ellicot City, my favorite place to go in the fall. Later of course it was Sex and the City reruns in her bed. We parted ways this morning at her car, she to the State House where she works me to the Hard Bean where now I can write and study and be the Kelly that inside me really is and needs to be. It's been a whirlwind, in San Antonio with mom and dad the Montezuma Cypresses hung over us on the river walk and talked low like they knew our names. A Mexican man fell in love with me and spoke in Spanish about the true ancient heritage of my tattoo. It made me laugh in a gentle way and turn red. It's the first time anyone has done that, ever, in spanish Los Indios, Los Aztecos...not one of my Mexican friends ever knew, not one. Coatalique in the eyes, lore of female divine still living in our unconscious but in the temporal from day to day she is dead. In Austin I stayed on a ranch with 26 other McMullens for the weekend. It was like being a child again at Gram and Pops at the beach. People on mattresses on the floor and every couch bodied. Kate looked like a Grecian princess in the times of the Goddess on her wedding day. We made a circle around them and I couldn't stop the hot tears that ran the whole time. Now I'm here, Maryland where I'm from, time at Uncle Tim's where I slept all night two nights ago, the first time I've done that since Mary went in the hospital. Time with Brian my brother in Canton and my family in Pennsylvania, too.
And now time with me today, before I meet with my brother Sean and Aunt Sue, to write poems and sing this soul of mine back to life. Out the shop front the boat show is setting up, years ago I worked twelve hour shifts at Pussers back to back because boat show weekend brings all the tips. I lived here then and was going to marry a man named Joe. Years after that I came here to the docks on my first date with Brandon, who I would spend six years with in a farmhouse deep in the country of the Eastern Shore. Growing veggies and swapping music and fresh eggs. Years after that I came up here to meet with Erika, begin this phase which has been all about the soul song, all about trusting that there is no arrival, just a path that presses and spirals, and cycles on.
Good for me to think on that today. To tame this head that really wants to know about ...Years from now...? That really loves to wrap up in the different experiences of home.
The last time I was here in this shop I lived on the shore. I had edits due to Erika; her most recent submission of Hemingway's Girl. It didn't have a contract on it yet. She didn't even have an agent then. In such little time so much can change.
My cousin Erin drove us to Annapolis this morning. Last night sort of late we went to Ellicot City, my favorite place to go in the fall. Later of course it was Sex and the City reruns in her bed. We parted ways this morning at her car, she to the State House where she works me to the Hard Bean where now I can write and study and be the Kelly that inside me really is and needs to be. It's been a whirlwind, in San Antonio with mom and dad the Montezuma Cypresses hung over us on the river walk and talked low like they knew our names. A Mexican man fell in love with me and spoke in Spanish about the true ancient heritage of my tattoo. It made me laugh in a gentle way and turn red. It's the first time anyone has done that, ever, in spanish Los Indios, Los Aztecos...not one of my Mexican friends ever knew, not one. Coatalique in the eyes, lore of female divine still living in our unconscious but in the temporal from day to day she is dead. In Austin I stayed on a ranch with 26 other McMullens for the weekend. It was like being a child again at Gram and Pops at the beach. People on mattresses on the floor and every couch bodied. Kate looked like a Grecian princess in the times of the Goddess on her wedding day. We made a circle around them and I couldn't stop the hot tears that ran the whole time. Now I'm here, Maryland where I'm from, time at Uncle Tim's where I slept all night two nights ago, the first time I've done that since Mary went in the hospital. Time with Brian my brother in Canton and my family in Pennsylvania, too.
And now time with me today, before I meet with my brother Sean and Aunt Sue, to write poems and sing this soul of mine back to life. Out the shop front the boat show is setting up, years ago I worked twelve hour shifts at Pussers back to back because boat show weekend brings all the tips. I lived here then and was going to marry a man named Joe. Years after that I came here to the docks on my first date with Brandon, who I would spend six years with in a farmhouse deep in the country of the Eastern Shore. Growing veggies and swapping music and fresh eggs. Years after that I came up here to meet with Erika, begin this phase which has been all about the soul song, all about trusting that there is no arrival, just a path that presses and spirals, and cycles on.
Good for me to think on that today. To tame this head that really wants to know about ...Years from now...? That really loves to wrap up in the different experiences of home.
March 2, 2012
If I came to you tomorrow and said let's run away
Today a week ago I was traveling freeway to freeway, smog traffic sunny heat, going inland to the base of the San Gabriel mountains. There is a town there sweet as a nineteen fifties black and white scene. It's surrounded by what looks to me like desert but lush enough for an every Friday night street festival and a flirty furtive smiling crescent moon hung big as the dream of a child in the setting sun sky. Called Monrovia, where, after a gazillion hour drive from Seattle to Eugene to Socal, my friend Paul was after helping his girlfriend move.
That same morning I left my temporary home at Mike's in Newport Beach to move half my stuff in to my room in this sweet little boho home in Huntington Beach, a town away. The other half I tucked between the surfboards and washing machine in Mike's garage, to be moved after my 24-hour marathon trek to Monrovia to see Paul and his lady, then Hollywood to visit my old homeboy from highschool Dave, then Hermosa to chill with Casey from my recent Ocean City life. It was, so to speak, my last hurrah of a seven month grand hurrah called My Independent Gypsy Queen Road Warrior Days.
Weeks earlier, when I was still crashing in Sonoma County in my friend's cottage, I called Erika and unloaded about a month of instinct on her. This was early February and the gist of my emotional out pour was me expressing that my gut was telling me it was time to leave Northern California. I was absolutely fear struck, shrunk and constricted, terrified. I had exactly enough money left to start a new life, create a home of my own somewhere special, but this was such a novel thought next to the open-road lifestyle I'd been living since August. I did not want to pay attention to what my instinct was telling me, what my dreams and emotions were saying. It seemed so foreign, so suffocatingly unknown.
At the end of my download Erika said one thing: Call Mike Wallace. He's lived here in Orange County since 2002, in fact, in my dream journal where I write my heart's goals, there is a note from November 2008 when I left Brandon, our six year relationship, Chestertown, our farm. It says: Beach, Sunny, Warm: walking distance. Volunteer/teach ESL. Write! And then under it, call Mike. This was 2008, November, me a week or so out of my six-year-shoulda-married-the-guy relationship.
My brother, Mike's best friend, called while I was on the other line talking to Erika and he literally said the same thing: Well, did you call Mike? Mike, breezy--Southern California--as he is, was like yea totally, no worries. So that was that. The urgency kicked in then, I followed this pressing movement in my blood to get here as fast as I could, and within 36 hours of my arrival had job and house potentials, both of which came through. I finished my move this past Sunday, started my job Monday, just now got the last of my things: my writing materials unpacked, set-up happily at my desk that came with my room.
Last Friday I was sitting on the freeway in standstill traffic on my way to see Paul. I was tired, eager, a little shook. The windows of my car were all the way down, my hair wild with wind, the sun hard and happy on my face and shoulders. Seven months of on the road, and this was it: I was so ready for them to end. The feeling of my life! About, once more, to begin. Anxious tired and excited, at that moment flooding my car came Scotty Avett from the i-pod scrounging out the opening notes of November Blue. A live version from years ago, a song I haven't randomly heard in years. Now The Avett Brothers, long before they played with Dylan and Mumford and Son on the Grammy's, used to play this little backroom bar in Chestertown we all loved called Andy's. Those boys used to crash out on Bran's old floor on the corner of Kent and High after their shows...
Part of my January-February-passing, the emotions of it, the underlying wateriness really going on when I called Erika, was what it might mean to me to settle in to a home again, like I once had with Brandon and all our family-friends in Ctown. To be happy. And the thing is, the night before I moved out of Mike's to go see Paul, I got a call from Sam, who used to live in that old place with Brandon and Russ on the corner of Kent and High, circa 2001...Sam wanted me to know in case I didn't that Brandon is getting married. I didn't. So hearing that song, a song Brandon and I danced barefoot and happy to in the sidestage grass at Floydfest the year before I left, a song that to this day is my song full of regrets about my failures at love and not being able to stay, well it was Timing. It was like Life saying Listen, no matter what, if you just Listen to your self than I promise you I got this. Just listen, and trust, like you always have.
It feels so good to be home now. Forgiveness, you know? Forgiveness of your self, and what seems bigger than your control. Letting the past, which really means regrets, go. There was a moment that that happened, at Mike's before I moved out. The kind of moment you cant manifest, you just have to let happen. The kind of moment that surprises you because you've been waiting so long on it that you gave up the idea that it would ever really come.
So peaceful and fresh, so good it feels to stop moving. And, to move on. To begin, finally, again.
That same morning I left my temporary home at Mike's in Newport Beach to move half my stuff in to my room in this sweet little boho home in Huntington Beach, a town away. The other half I tucked between the surfboards and washing machine in Mike's garage, to be moved after my 24-hour marathon trek to Monrovia to see Paul and his lady, then Hollywood to visit my old homeboy from highschool Dave, then Hermosa to chill with Casey from my recent Ocean City life. It was, so to speak, my last hurrah of a seven month grand hurrah called My Independent Gypsy Queen Road Warrior Days.
Weeks earlier, when I was still crashing in Sonoma County in my friend's cottage, I called Erika and unloaded about a month of instinct on her. This was early February and the gist of my emotional out pour was me expressing that my gut was telling me it was time to leave Northern California. I was absolutely fear struck, shrunk and constricted, terrified. I had exactly enough money left to start a new life, create a home of my own somewhere special, but this was such a novel thought next to the open-road lifestyle I'd been living since August. I did not want to pay attention to what my instinct was telling me, what my dreams and emotions were saying. It seemed so foreign, so suffocatingly unknown.
At the end of my download Erika said one thing: Call Mike Wallace. He's lived here in Orange County since 2002, in fact, in my dream journal where I write my heart's goals, there is a note from November 2008 when I left Brandon, our six year relationship, Chestertown, our farm. It says: Beach, Sunny, Warm: walking distance. Volunteer/teach ESL. Write! And then under it, call Mike. This was 2008, November, me a week or so out of my six-year-shoulda-married-the-guy relationship.
My brother, Mike's best friend, called while I was on the other line talking to Erika and he literally said the same thing: Well, did you call Mike? Mike, breezy--Southern California--as he is, was like yea totally, no worries. So that was that. The urgency kicked in then, I followed this pressing movement in my blood to get here as fast as I could, and within 36 hours of my arrival had job and house potentials, both of which came through. I finished my move this past Sunday, started my job Monday, just now got the last of my things: my writing materials unpacked, set-up happily at my desk that came with my room.
Last Friday I was sitting on the freeway in standstill traffic on my way to see Paul. I was tired, eager, a little shook. The windows of my car were all the way down, my hair wild with wind, the sun hard and happy on my face and shoulders. Seven months of on the road, and this was it: I was so ready for them to end. The feeling of my life! About, once more, to begin. Anxious tired and excited, at that moment flooding my car came Scotty Avett from the i-pod scrounging out the opening notes of November Blue. A live version from years ago, a song I haven't randomly heard in years. Now The Avett Brothers, long before they played with Dylan and Mumford and Son on the Grammy's, used to play this little backroom bar in Chestertown we all loved called Andy's. Those boys used to crash out on Bran's old floor on the corner of Kent and High after their shows...
Part of my January-February-passing, the emotions of it, the underlying wateriness really going on when I called Erika, was what it might mean to me to settle in to a home again, like I once had with Brandon and all our family-friends in Ctown. To be happy. And the thing is, the night before I moved out of Mike's to go see Paul, I got a call from Sam, who used to live in that old place with Brandon and Russ on the corner of Kent and High, circa 2001...Sam wanted me to know in case I didn't that Brandon is getting married. I didn't. So hearing that song, a song Brandon and I danced barefoot and happy to in the sidestage grass at Floydfest the year before I left, a song that to this day is my song full of regrets about my failures at love and not being able to stay, well it was Timing. It was like Life saying Listen, no matter what, if you just Listen to your self than I promise you I got this. Just listen, and trust, like you always have.
It feels so good to be home now. Forgiveness, you know? Forgiveness of your self, and what seems bigger than your control. Letting the past, which really means regrets, go. There was a moment that that happened, at Mike's before I moved out. The kind of moment you cant manifest, you just have to let happen. The kind of moment that surprises you because you've been waiting so long on it that you gave up the idea that it would ever really come.
So peaceful and fresh, so good it feels to stop moving. And, to move on. To begin, finally, again.
November 3, 2010
Harvest-End After-Wedding Thoughts
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.
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.
March 3, 2010
Poem. The men, from when I was wild.
I woke up from a dream this morning that ever-familiar distant ache of longing and loss too present and I'd been dreaming...about? O yea & then it all comes back, and I am on my knees then & I am praying, but not really praying, but doing that deep silent witness thing that I do that is most meditation but also praying bc I am letting it go, all the waves of thoughts and emotions that are scary or wavery or confuse me or make it hard I watch and feel as they move up and out and I let them go. It is a prayer bc I beseeched the Mystery to please, please be w me now. It was the recurring dream space of basement with all the additional rooms that spread out and out and on and on in the underground and there was a party, and all the guys, all of them, all of them were there all the men from when I was wild. And it left me feeling so weird, and confused. We were having fun, in the first place it started in a pool and me asking these old womyn please to show me, cuz no one ever taught me to swim. Then I am out of the pool and kickin it, smiling, so happy to be w all the boys.
After the prayer I am curling my hair and taking my time getting ready bc it's a fake it til you make it kinda day. And then it hits, the words, and the vision, & holy hell it all comes together. This next part of my memoir. Woooohoooo wooohooooo WOOOO HOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
It all sorta hinged on what was in that dream. So anyway, cuz it's connected in a way that at least I understand and bc it's one of the recent styles that the formatting can be copied as is w/out any probs on to my blog, here is part of a poem that came out wayyyyy late the other nite.
Def having to do w the men, from when I was wild.
the city
I
i’m driving w walsh we’re coming down
new york ave right aftr
it turns from hiwy to city,
ol rt 50. nothin on the radio
i start rappin method man:
you’re all that i need i’ll be there for you
keep it real w me
i’ll keep it real w you
lovin your whole skee i’ll be in there boo
on top a that you got the good, power you
& now I’m looking at Checkers
the black & yllw flags & dark yellw
hang lites the crner right there soon as you come in to dwntwn.
i am rmmbrn phil, all you fools, shaeffer & my baby mudd
who seemed bynd it all or skeeved but who cld tell all
yall boys used to front so hard then. you fuckin fools
in the back a brad’s Cherokee toothless blowjobs for 20 bucks.
& we grew up in the brbs.
now, whn i thnk a you
it’s too bad yer gone.
my hearts a bone yrd but
i aint done in thr yet, not
building or done scowling,
i miss you but it’s not
so weird & hard now,
most times i laugh
& rmmbr thse
wld wndrful eyes it makes
me happy jst to be able to
do that
II
rmmbr
that frst nite you wr gone
your grave site.
i rolled arnd like a virgin
shannon moaned. i thnk i
mghtve been w the drnk
bfr i’d quit for good.
the special brew, tht
fruity juice. hold me
close.
r.kelly.
i lied, o god i lied i do
miss you.
the way you used to hold me
in bed. you’re like a bear
a big blck smky smellin
bear. you were my frnd i
lvd you so mch. i cnt blve
ur gone, even
aftr all this time.
IV
circles & tides
my first memory of lew reed is wild side &
i am in 7th grade. there are lollipops on the boards
for sale so large they take up two of my hands &
the spit down the side of my fist. we lick them
up the center that’s what we grls do.
i was smoking cigarettes, had em in my purse.
we stayed downtown in the belmont-hearne it was
the first time i ever stayed in town jess’ mom single
mine too & jess’ curfew way more late than mine
jamie and fran held hands across the driver &
passenger’s seat in the front. jamie the little sister
of jess. i think about jamie a lot more than i do
jess. it’s funny what gone makes you do.
ltr, this becomes a story. it is called peir one.
kevin is in it he is not dead yet but at the end
of the story he cld die. who knows?
the kids in the lit house get angry it’s not neitzche
it’s not even tom robbins. i don’t want trouble
it’s just, look dumbasses. what dya want from me
it’s all that i know.
After the prayer I am curling my hair and taking my time getting ready bc it's a fake it til you make it kinda day. And then it hits, the words, and the vision, & holy hell it all comes together. This next part of my memoir. Woooohoooo wooohooooo WOOOO HOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
It all sorta hinged on what was in that dream. So anyway, cuz it's connected in a way that at least I understand and bc it's one of the recent styles that the formatting can be copied as is w/out any probs on to my blog, here is part of a poem that came out wayyyyy late the other nite.
Def having to do w the men, from when I was wild.
the city
I
i’m driving w walsh we’re coming down
new york ave right aftr
it turns from hiwy to city,
ol rt 50. nothin on the radio
i start rappin method man:
you’re all that i need i’ll be there for you
keep it real w me
i’ll keep it real w you
lovin your whole skee i’ll be in there boo
on top a that you got the good, power you
& now I’m looking at Checkers
the black & yllw flags & dark yellw
hang lites the crner right there soon as you come in to dwntwn.
i am rmmbrn phil, all you fools, shaeffer & my baby mudd
who seemed bynd it all or skeeved but who cld tell all
yall boys used to front so hard then. you fuckin fools
in the back a brad’s Cherokee toothless blowjobs for 20 bucks.
& we grew up in the brbs.
now, whn i thnk a you
it’s too bad yer gone.
my hearts a bone yrd but
i aint done in thr yet, not
building or done scowling,
i miss you but it’s not
so weird & hard now,
most times i laugh
& rmmbr thse
wld wndrful eyes it makes
me happy jst to be able to
do that
II
rmmbr
that frst nite you wr gone
your grave site.
i rolled arnd like a virgin
shannon moaned. i thnk i
mghtve been w the drnk
bfr i’d quit for good.
the special brew, tht
fruity juice. hold me
close.
r.kelly.
i lied, o god i lied i do
miss you.
the way you used to hold me
in bed. you’re like a bear
a big blck smky smellin
bear. you were my frnd i
lvd you so mch. i cnt blve
ur gone, even
aftr all this time.
IV
circles & tides
my first memory of lew reed is wild side &
i am in 7th grade. there are lollipops on the boards
for sale so large they take up two of my hands &
the spit down the side of my fist. we lick them
up the center that’s what we grls do.
i was smoking cigarettes, had em in my purse.
we stayed downtown in the belmont-hearne it was
the first time i ever stayed in town jess’ mom single
mine too & jess’ curfew way more late than mine
jamie and fran held hands across the driver &
passenger’s seat in the front. jamie the little sister
of jess. i think about jamie a lot more than i do
jess. it’s funny what gone makes you do.
ltr, this becomes a story. it is called peir one.
kevin is in it he is not dead yet but at the end
of the story he cld die. who knows?
the kids in the lit house get angry it’s not neitzche
it’s not even tom robbins. i don’t want trouble
it’s just, look dumbasses. what dya want from me
it’s all that i know.
December 5, 2009
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.
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.
October 26, 2009
Packing: 100% on the go
...and then, she begins to dance. She's practicing. A sense of mastery comes out of her, like a strong shiny shoot, because she's been watching carefully and she knows the shoot is going to flower. And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old. ~Anne Lamott
You're hard to get a hold of, he says. He's told me this before. And on cue, anticipating my coy defense, he continues: It's not a bad thing, you're out there on the firing line. Living life. 100% in the game.
I start to protest, to offer a rebuttal. To use my words somehow to make light of but still identify for him the 12 whole months of silence and alone, of nothing, doing nothing but sitting quiet, listening, crying dreaming writing screaming praying, alone. Way out there on the river, way out there with just Choptank, way out there with no TV and shoddy stolen Internet and often the ringer turned off on my phone. But he cuts me off again.
No no, I mean I know you go home and do your thing and find your silence and take your time to regroup and find your self, but you do it so you can get back out there to do your thing. To get back out there in the game. You like to go, you like to do you like to be. You dont want anybody who's gonna hold you back or down. It's awesome.
I am stopped, stilled a moment within which says a lot because we've been drinking coffee like the caffeine gods are about to go out on the picket line, I mean we've been slamming the stuff like shots all morning. And this is why I like him, why I've always liked him, cuz he's a witness--good at seeing people for what they are, for all of who and how they are. And he calls it like he sees them.
He's a bone collector. A gatherer strong inside and meant for good, deep things. He's always looking for food and women and song and money because he too is hungry, hungry as hell, like me.
We spent the day together while I should have been packing but sometimes that is the best thing you can do: shine the funny light on your otherwise darkened bones. Be with the people who breathe the life over you, whose air energizes your sinew and wraps you in muscle and makes you more whole.
When I got home I made kale pot and chicken broth which is like a chemical thing, or something, deep in the substance of me: it's what Teena fed me the first two months I was here. When I would come home cold and find hot liquid full of nutrient simmering on the stove. It was late when I was done and climbed in to bed, and early, and dark, when I found myself awake and up and ready to fill the boxes. Ready to pack. Ready to move.
I have this creative warehouse of stuff that's gone largely untouched throughout the year I've been at Chop: boxes with papers and card stock and markers and pencils and pastels and paints and canvas and fabrics and ribbons and stickers, brushes, sponges cardboard and glue. I have a filing cabinet and three bags, two boxes, and one shelf on my bookcase full of journals and writings and datebooks and research and facts. Archives. And six boxes of books. And these are the essentials, what survived after the farm. This is something I have always seen as my great problem: my inability to properly categorize and organize my creative "stuff." Thus, my inability to get up and go.
But I get it now, or at least for today. That that's just me, the unorganized which translates as that which is not meant to be contained. Same as the girl jetting over the bridge to Baltimore out late then up at 10 to kick it in Annapolis all day with a friend. Somehow, right now, one thing totally has to do with the other. Right now, they are one and the same.
I am laughing, smiling, quiet. Dancing. My life is spinning stillness, filled with song.
You're hard to get a hold of, he says. He's told me this before. And on cue, anticipating my coy defense, he continues: It's not a bad thing, you're out there on the firing line. Living life. 100% in the game.
I start to protest, to offer a rebuttal. To use my words somehow to make light of but still identify for him the 12 whole months of silence and alone, of nothing, doing nothing but sitting quiet, listening, crying dreaming writing screaming praying, alone. Way out there on the river, way out there with just Choptank, way out there with no TV and shoddy stolen Internet and often the ringer turned off on my phone. But he cuts me off again.
No no, I mean I know you go home and do your thing and find your silence and take your time to regroup and find your self, but you do it so you can get back out there to do your thing. To get back out there in the game. You like to go, you like to do you like to be. You dont want anybody who's gonna hold you back or down. It's awesome.
I am stopped, stilled a moment within which says a lot because we've been drinking coffee like the caffeine gods are about to go out on the picket line, I mean we've been slamming the stuff like shots all morning. And this is why I like him, why I've always liked him, cuz he's a witness--good at seeing people for what they are, for all of who and how they are. And he calls it like he sees them.
He's a bone collector. A gatherer strong inside and meant for good, deep things. He's always looking for food and women and song and money because he too is hungry, hungry as hell, like me.
We spent the day together while I should have been packing but sometimes that is the best thing you can do: shine the funny light on your otherwise darkened bones. Be with the people who breathe the life over you, whose air energizes your sinew and wraps you in muscle and makes you more whole.
When I got home I made kale pot and chicken broth which is like a chemical thing, or something, deep in the substance of me: it's what Teena fed me the first two months I was here. When I would come home cold and find hot liquid full of nutrient simmering on the stove. It was late when I was done and climbed in to bed, and early, and dark, when I found myself awake and up and ready to fill the boxes. Ready to pack. Ready to move.
I have this creative warehouse of stuff that's gone largely untouched throughout the year I've been at Chop: boxes with papers and card stock and markers and pencils and pastels and paints and canvas and fabrics and ribbons and stickers, brushes, sponges cardboard and glue. I have a filing cabinet and three bags, two boxes, and one shelf on my bookcase full of journals and writings and datebooks and research and facts. Archives. And six boxes of books. And these are the essentials, what survived after the farm. This is something I have always seen as my great problem: my inability to properly categorize and organize my creative "stuff." Thus, my inability to get up and go.
But I get it now, or at least for today. That that's just me, the unorganized which translates as that which is not meant to be contained. Same as the girl jetting over the bridge to Baltimore out late then up at 10 to kick it in Annapolis all day with a friend. Somehow, right now, one thing totally has to do with the other. Right now, they are one and the same.
I am laughing, smiling, quiet. Dancing. My life is spinning stillness, filled with song.
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