Do you still smell like Christmas?

I ask this to an old friend from high school on Facebook the other day. I used to crush on his curly hair. Back when we worked retail together, I used to marvel at the way he could break down a cardboard box in under a minute flat. I used to make excuses to head back into the storeroom in the hopes we would stumble into conversation. Problem was that back then I was so concerned with saying the correct thing, to make a person like me, that I often said nothing.

I like to talk to people I went to high school with, not because I’m harboring secret lust or holding useless grudges, but simply because it reminds me of who I was. I could not appreciate myself then, but looking backwards, I was so painfully awkward that it was tender.

Last night, I went to a writer’s group. I was all anxious bones clattering clumsy against the table I dropped my laptop on. Fill me up. Break me down. Wreck me like a lover. I wanted to fight and fuck and cry all simultaneously. Mostly, I just wanted someone to tell me that the urges all made sense. Let my need and neurosis bloom like flower. Two of the most banal hours later, I was ready to give up. In this most mundane moment, someone dropped an atom bomb.

Have you ever read Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs? Naked Lunch is an explosion. Kerouac described it as, “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” Last night, this tall cuban boy with bones that jangled worse then mine, wearing a bowler hat and carrying a stutter in his pants pocket, blew his own face off in prose. I was witness to this death, and it was beautiful.

An 18-year old undiscovered genius drew me a secret map of words. As I read my short story, he was head down immersed in sketch. There were the lines of my body intertwined with every other body. All the words of the world stacked in sacred prayer, in curious orgy. It was everything we are not allowed to be in the routine of never-ending Mondays. He passed it shyly across the table when I was done reading, and all I could do was nod. How exquisite any given place can be when we give ourselves over to it. I wish that you had been there. I know you would have felt it.

Back at home, my children wear my husband’s socks and jump reckless on the bed. They barely register my arrival so caught up in the business of being children. I would stand forever inside of doorways just to watch them.

I want a banana. NOW!

My daughter suddenly explodes, a thundering stallion of need. She stamps her feet. She throws back her head to expose the soft tender of her neck. She is so beautiful. Inside of her desire, my daughter blooms. We do not have any bananas in the house. I tell her this. I offer her an apple. She shrugs her shoulders and walks away. Climbs back on the bed to resume her jumping.
It is not always the object that we desire. Sometimes it is simply the expression. I want. I feel. I need. I write it down and send it to you. In that moment, I recognize who I am.

There was a house sketched on the back of a restaurant napkin, a Frank Lloyd Wright approximation. One wall was comprised of all glass windows that yielded to the sun. I found this drawing abandoned on the table in the chain restaurant I worked at while trying to pay my way through college. I put it in the pocket of my apron on impulse.

Back at the dorm I smoothed out the wrinkles, and ignoring the grease stains, I pined it to the bulletin board above my desk. In tiny block letters neat and contained, written above the front door that gaped like an open mouth it said, Our Dream Home. I tried for days to remember the stranger who could have sat and sketched something so tender. His or her face was lost among the late day rush of steaks cooked medium rare and microwaved bowls of clam chowder. Someone had thought to architect their dreams but then abandoned them aside the dirty flatware and glasses of Coca-Cola.  This filled me with sadness. I kept that napkin for weeks, until my roommate complained that our dorm smelled like pickles. I ended up throwing the napkin away.

We cannot possess other people’s dreams. We can only bear witness.

Last night I dreamed that I was falling.  I hurtled through space, a body mass drawn by the earth’s gravitation pull. Time, which felt like days, was only actual minutes. I existed in a constant state of agitated trajectory. I woke with a feeling of weightlessness that has stayed with me throughout the day. How does a planet’s mass determine its life story?

I try and moor myself in questions. My mind wanders. I daydream about my seventh grade crush. He raised his hand in science class to admit he worried about falling stars. In that moment, I would have given anything to be one. I wonder about the type of man he has grown into. Does he still have fear when he stares into the night sky?

I worry that I am going to disappear against the history of other people’s stories. What will set me apart? I cannot draw pictures. I just barely passed my science classes, but I have not lost the impetus to dream.

If I discarded myself in a fit of insecurity, a crumpled napkin against the detritus of used plates and the crusts of half eaten bread, would you smooth me out and pin me to your bulletin board? Would you promise to fall in love with me against the worrying of my stars? I feel so silly asking you to bear witness. But here I am.

This is my house of glass and light. See how I yield against the sun. Turn your face and warm with me. The night is heavy with stars. Let’s count them one by one. Forget gravity. Fall blind on your back with nothing but the flat of the earth to catch you.  Read my story, and be dizzy with your own dreams.

I have never been good at small talk. I go to suburban parties and feel out of place. I feign interest. I stifle a yawn. I want to ask you to tell me dirty things about your sex life. I want to argue with you about the existence of God. Instead, you smile with chemically whitened teeth and pass me a tray of appetizers. I’m not interested in where you purchased the smoked gouda. I want you to put down your platter of cheese, pick up your shirt, and show me your scars. How else am I suppose to learn about the world if not by the map of your body, the tight fist of your skin? Clothing is just a pretty camouflage.

I want to feel things. I want to know things by proximity, by the way something bends or resists against the palming of my hand. I want to lean my head to your mouth and feel your words hot on my collar. I want your whispered breath rotten in my ear. Tell me your secrets.

I have Celtic blood that makes me certain I was a sin-eater in another lifetime, or maybe I was the goddess Tiazolteotl, purveyor of filth and lust. I’d squeeze you wicked between my thigh muscles and make you cum, then whisk away your sin in a hot bath of afterward absolution.

I am not offering you absolution here or now.  What I want is certain and more selfish. I want to know that you feel as much as I do, that you too have carried hurt like a belly full of stones.

So, can we just bypass the small talk? I want every single one of you to just give me your dark. I want access to the things that make you sweat in the silence of your night time.

I need to know if your fear is anything like mine.

I once knew a boy who was swallowed by the sky, just rose like a swollen balloon into the clouds, trailing his string like the tiniest of tears down the soft slope of cheek. Going….going….gone….

Momma. I wish I had a machine that could make me disappear.

Why do you want to disappear, buddy?

Because then no one would see how scared I am.

Bug, my first born. Today was hard. There you stood, the shape of you so small and weightless, floating on the ceiling of that big hall. Your fear was the size of the sky. I wanted nothing but to tie your string to the pulsing of my heart and take you with me, take you home.

We are all afraid sometimes, my love.

Even you, Momma? Even you get afraid?

I once knew a woman who dove to the bottom of the sea, dove until her lungs filled to bursting, fought the pointed sharp of a shark’s tooth, fought off the clutch of an Octopus’s tentacle, to recover the hull of a downed ship, that thing that she most treasured.

Yes, baby. Even me. Sometimes Momma is the most fearful of all.

The phone rings while I’m walking down the streets of Chicago.

Well, how is it? How is Blogher?

The voice on the other end is familiar. A fellow blogger turned family. She is home, nursing a newborn daughter instead of walking arms linked together into ballrooms and breakfast buffets with me.

It’s….It’s….

The city is racing against my pulse. There are fireworks exploding over my head, bursting against the architecture. The river is a mirror to the sky that blooms in multi-color. I am muted against this landscape.

In this last post, I talked about the power of the panel I spoke on, the generosity and candor of the audience, the way I felt transformed. It was not a lie. But, there is more to the story of Blogher. I do not think I understood this more until I was removed from it all and back home.

This morning I awoke to an e-mail from our bank informing me that the house we are desperate to buy is most likely still out of our reach. The laundry that accumulated from last week still sits in a messy pile on my daughter’s bed. My children will still interrupt me 10 to 15 times during the writing of this post with sibling rivalry, and a sudden desperate need for me to scratch their backs, wipe their butts, or pour them a glass of milk. My husband and I will still argue over who wasn’t paying enough attention last night when our son poured chocolate ice cream all over himself and then rubbed up against every single wall in the downstairs of our home. There will still be the risk that my school district will cut my reading program, or that tomorrow I’ll find that the ragged freckle on my back is really not a freckle at all. Despite the panel I spoke on, or the fact that I urged every single women I met to consider the impact we have writing on-line in determining what society deems womanhood to be, I will still google posts and tweets about Blogher, to find drunken pictures of women squeezing each other’s breasts. Today, I have the accumulation of blog posts, but I’m no closer to writing a Pulitzer, at all. 

When I think about Blogher in this context, it feels like a disappointment. It is scary when I explore this emotion further and conclude that the disappointment in the equation is me. Am I alone in this? How many of us go to Blogher with the hope that it will fundamentally change something for us? Maybe, it will bring us much needed money, or feed our weakened self-esteem, or act as a salve against our loneliness. What happens when the carnival ride ends, and your feet touch down on the ordinary concrete of our everyday? How and what do you do to sustain?

I don’t have any answers.

Well, how is it? How is Blogher?

I’ve reached an overpass, emergency sirens are screaming underneath my feet, the sky is bleeding the last of  explosive color above my dizzy head, I’m aching to be heard. I raise my voice and call into the phone.

It’s…It’s….

It has taught me that I want more.

I lied about being raped. How is that for an opening line? This is what is true, and what is not true. This is my story.

Awhile back, I wrote this post. I wrote it pretty early in my bloggy life. I do not know what came over me in writing this. But, I did it. It was like cleaving ice with an axe. Everything that had been dormant and frozen inside of me, split. As terrifying as it was to write that, to wait with my head between my knees, rocking back and forth, anticipating that first comment to arrive with either support or indignation, it was liberating too. I told my truth online. I took the first step in owning it. That post was seminal in the fact that it brought me here, to this ordinary space, where I recognize my own art. Oh, how long it has taken me to say that my history is more than scar.

For years I told everyone, my husband included, a lie. I told people that I was raped by a stranger who shared a cab with me. I needed to tell my story, but I was afraid of the true version. I was afraid the real story made me culpable. I was the one drinking. I was the one who got kicked out of that damn bar. Didn’t that make me an accomplice, willing participant, whore?

In writing the past down, sharing the vague memory of two men in a parking lot, how I woke up the next day with my underwear missing, and an ache between my legs, a foggy black hole where my memory should be, I was able to move forward and share that painful history with the people I love in my real life. I was able to see that no matter what I did, or did not say or do that night, that I was too drunk to give consent. I wrote those words down, and claimed the reality of that experience. It was not my fault.

Why am I telling you this, now? Well, I’ve been thinking about sharing this story at BlogHer. I’m going next week, and I’ll be speaking on a panel about the Transformational Power of Blogging. I want to sit on that panel and let you see that blogging with dignity means forgiving yourself, loving yourself, knowing that your words are enough.

Please stop worrying about the shoes you are wearing, or the size of your waist, the number of blogrolls that link you, put the focus where it belongs, on the power of your own language. You determine your own worth, no matter if your content is cats, technology, food, humor, Mommyblogging, or anything in between. You determine your own value.

I deem myself worthy. Do you? I’d love for you to stop by my panel and tell me. I’d love for you to stumble across me in the hotel lobby, or random hall, and share your life as poem, sing your history as spiritual song.  

I believe that blogging can transform you life, if you let it.  Has blogging transformed my life? My god, yes! It is through blogging that I learned to understand and accept my own narrative. Blogging is the accumulation of all of our stories, all that passes between us in posts and comments, in private e-mails, Facebook, and Twitter. All that we learn, all that we are.

I want to share this story, my story, so that maybe one person sitting out there in the audience hearing it, or you sitting at home reading it, realize. No matter the past you carry in the deep pockets of your own flesh, you have the right to lay it down. We are all scarred. We are all human. I just want you to know that there is someone out there who will understand. There are people that are listening.

I am one of them.

Mostly we love and we lose in small increments.

There is no large detonation when a relationship ends, just an infinitesimal stain on the living room carpet, the last drop to signify the slow bloodletting that occurred over years. You bleed yourself in supermarkets, and church pews, in parking lots, and darkened movie theaters where you both sit with arms crossed, your bodies reclaiming the boundaries your words took in the shape of a thousand and one misunderstandings. At the death of you, no one can even remember just when and where the wound.

Friends of ours are getting divorced. I sit and listen as she shares the fear she has of his moving out. She is not sure exactly what day of the week to take the recycling out. This, like the weekly mowing of their lawn, is something her husband has always done. She shakes her head and tries to laugh at the idea of her soon to be ex having to balance his own checkbook after all the years of her fiscal control. She laughs, but all I hear is sadness. I think about my own marriage. I wonder if David left, if I would become that exhausted cliche, unable to reclaim his side of the bed. I imagine I would sleep forever parallel to my grief.  

Did you know when you married him? I mean, were there signs you just ignored?

I can not help but ask this question. My mouth if full with the meat of my own heart. I wait for her to answer. I want her to tell me that she did, in fact, know all along. I want the end of a marriage to be more than the hindsight of 20/20.

Marrying him was the happiest day of my life.  These are the words that split open her grief. She cries uncontrollably at my kitchen table. I want to comfort her. I reach out, but just before our hands make contact, my skin touching hers, I recoil. It is so much safer on my side of the table. I do not want to reach across. I do not want to become her.

This thought is fleeting and selfish. I cross over to her side. I wrap her in my arms. I whisper.

Everything is going to be okay.Even though, I have lost a certain faith in the order of these words.

After she is gone, I clean up the detritus of our conversation, the box of kleenex, the half-empty cup of tea with her smudged lipstick on the rim,  the book she brought for me to borrow. I put this all away. I place a fresh table cloth on the kitchen table. I lay out the dinner plates, note their steady weight in my hands. I run my palm over the dull edge of the kinfe. I test the point, sharp. I pull back and watch a tiny droplet of blood flower on the tip of my finger. I place it in my mouth, which fills to copper, as my husband’s key turns slow and familiar in the front door’s lock.

I have stomped my angry feet and, like a petulant child, pounded my fists against the table. Damn, woman!

I want you to be better than you are. I want you to rock your sleeping children in the night, and whisper lullabies that you will never leave them. Tell them that no harm will come, even though you know that the madman is busy busting down the door, charging forth in the form of your own damn heart that beats impostor when you lie between familiar sheets and dream of foreign hands.  

I want you to be better than you are. I want you to stop telling stories that only have heroines with smoky-eyes and size two clothing. No one wants to know about your bruised back from the same mistake you keep making furious against the floorboards. I know that you can be more than Eat. Fuck. Shit. Overly-medicated memories of the rough contours of your father’s hands are nothing short of terrible tragic, but this does not provide adequate excuse for why your own child’s eyes can sometimes appear so hollow. It is not an excuse for why you lie, and lie, and keep on lying.

I want you to be better than you are. I want you to stop spreading your gossip like disease passed from one unwashed hand to another. You need to stop feigning victimization. I want you to have the courage to step outside of the carefully manufactured photo-shopped persona that you have created, and admit that what you really were then, still might be now, is just a scared girl masquerading inside her own womanly skin.

I want you to be. Better? No.  

I want you to be who you are. Even though, I am struggling with what I have come to discover about you, what I have come to discover about myself in relation to you. That I, the women who claims herself to be feminist, is the most judgemental, hypocrite, fucker of them all.

I want you all to be. You. And, I want to be better.

I feel totally lost. Totally alone.

I said this after we disentangled. Our naked bodies, that only moments before were crushed against the seat covers of my Dodge Charger, resumed their boundaries inside of clothes. I lit a cigarette. I offered him one. He declined because he didn’t smoke. There was no way I could have know that. We were intimate strangers, having stumbled into each other in our hometown bar. I was home from college. He was unwinding after a long day on the job. I studied Camu. He worked construction. The previous year we had graduated from high school. Four years without speaking a word to each other. We traveled in different circles. He had been king of the hallways. I had been chubby, shy, slouching in back rows in flea-market blouses.

I’m not even sure how we got to that moment. Sitting in my darkened car in the church parking lot around the corner from my house. We were these awkward, tender moments after almost having sex.

I don’t really want to do this. This isn’t what I need. I had found the courage to speak only minutes before penetration.

He was surprisingly polite about it, not like the college boys who would tell me beautiful lies, insistent on seducing me against the narrow ache of squeaky dorm room bed-springs. No. He climbed right off. He pulled on his pants and laughed inside of moonlight.

REM played on the radio. He asked if he could turn it up, admitted that he loved the song. He surprised me. I remembered the deep throb of bass and lyrical misogyny that thumped loudly from the open windows of the four wheel drive he brazenly parked in the teacher’s lot of our high school.

Everybody hurts. Sometimes.

We could talk. Would it be alright if we just talk? I pulled nervously on my cigarette and worried about what we would actually say to one another.

He nodded his head. Yeah. I’d like to talk. I can’t always talk to my friends, ya know? It’s like we have to do everything together. It’s like I’m trapped back in high school. Same friends, same girlfriends, same bars. And yet, everyone expect so much from me. I’m suppose to figure out everyone’s future. How am I suppose to do that when I have no idea about my own? Sometimes I wish I could just escape it all. Be gone.

I reclined into his words. Leaned my head back. Counted the stars. There were entire worlds, beyond the rolled down windows of my car, that I would never touch.

You won’t tell anyone I said that, will you? His concern was genuine, but unnecessary.

I reached out and touched his hand. I was tentative. He was not. He wrapped his fingers around mine. We sat together, silent as stars. We listened to the song.

When the day is long and the night, the night is yours alone,
When you’re sure you’ve had enough of this life, well hang on

We never talked like that again.  We ran into each other a few months later at that same bar. We made a silent pact. He smiled, and nodded his head.  I waited until he had turned the strong of his back before I mouthed the words, Thank You. It was enough.

A year later, he died. He got into a fist fight in front of that same bar. He stumbled, fell, split open his head against the concrete. Our hometown was shocked. They mourned, hung brightly colored wreaths of flowers, lit candles, and put homemade cards along the sidewalk next to the imperceptible stain. It was a reminder. We are all breakable.

Our entire graduating class showed up at the funeral. His friends sat, dazed and bereft, in the pews next to anonymous girls who told stories like writing his name in ink-stained hearts across their notebooks in English class. The girls wept loud and obvious. Boys, who hated him for his ability to seduce their girlfriends and beat them in every sports, bowed their heads in dramatized prayer. The crawl of over 100 cars trailed behind the hearse like a slow line of dirty tears.

I did not return home for the funeral. Why would I? We were not friends. Instead, the day they put his body into the ground, I waited for the sun to set. I walked out to the man-made lake of my college campus. I spread my blanket on the ground. I put my headphones on. As Michael Stipe crooned, I laid myself back, head tipped towards the heavens, I did not cry. Instead…I pointed a crooked finger at the sky. I counted stars.

If you feel like you’re alone, no, no, no, you are not alone

I was standing on a bridge that was wooden and sun-warm in the middle of what appeared to be an innocuous afternoon. There was another woman standing next to me. Our bodies were slung causal against the railing of the bridge. Our feet were firmly planted against the slats. We shared our stories.

I knew she was a mother, although I could not see her children anywhere. Bug, my son, was playing just out of reach of my arms, a mere feet away. I watched him out of the corner of my eye.

Do not climb on the railing. It is not safe.

I thought this before I said it. By the time I was able to release the words from where they sat weighted on my tongue, it was too late.

I started walking calmly towards my son, as I watched him climb the railing of a bridge that held itself high over a river. I just knew that I would reach him. I believed that I had time. Nothing was going to happen to my child.

Last night, I had a dream that I lost my son.

One moment we were standing on a bridge, playful and sure. The next moment I watched him dangling one handed. I fumbled and grasped desperate to save him. I watched my first born child plummet soundless and quick. I saw his tiny body break itself against the glassy surface of the water that only yielded to swallow him whole. One moment I had my whole life beside me, in the next instant it was gone.

I woke up disoriented by my fear and my grief. The silence of the darkened bedroom only unsettled me further.

Where was my son? I needed to get to him quickly.

I groped blindly down the hall, knocking my toe into the laundry basket.  My son’s favorite grey sweatpants and Diego Underoos sat folded and fabric soft clean, reminders of our afternoon spent digging out in the yard. I could not move myself fast enough. I crashed through the nursery door, my breath catching. There he was.

I could see his silhouette in the dim light of the nightlight that cast blue and green stars against the ceiling and walls. When I tucked him safely into his bed, only hours before, his wish had been to go fishing with his Grandpa.  I crept to his bed. He lay in the fetal position, legs tucked near to his chest, arms gently circling. The moonlight ringed a halo around the baby fine blond of his hair. His mouth was hanging open. I leaned in close to smell the lavender bath that clung to his skin, milky and translucent. My boy was all there. I climbed in bed beside him, careful not to wake him, I drew his body next to mine and silently wept.

There has been too much death. A two year old girl died in a daycare. She choked on a carrot she snuck from the bag her teacher had kept hidden in her desk. She chocked on a carrot and died. Her mother was only a few feet away, teaching in a classroom next door. I read about this story, and I tried to tell myself,

This can not happen to me. We childproof all our cabinet doors. We do not let strangers watch our children.

I tell myself this family is not like me. Mistakes were made at this daycare. Someone must have been to blame. I tell myself this blatant lie so I can sleep through the night, and still I do not sleep well.

I asked a good friend what the reason for death. Why does a mother have to lose a child? What sort of God can allow that? She had no answer.

 I want to believe the universe has order. I want to believe that if I can just figure out the mythical equation, I can spare myself this type of trauma. I want to know the secret password that stays the hand of death. Even though, I know there is not one.

A woman lost a child because of a carrot, another mother lost a daughter to addiction, and still another to disease.  Millions of mothers mourn daily the folded sweatpants and clean pairs of Underoos lying in a sliver of moonlight in a hallway outside a bedroom door. These mothers were no different from you or me. They did not make mistakes. They are not to blame. The frightening truth is that we can not always protect ourselves from death and despair. 

Sometimes, we do not make it to the railing on time. Sometimes our hands are too slippery to grip. Sometimes the height is too high, the force of the water too strong.

Sometimes we do our dreaming at night, and nightmares creep into our waking world.

For all those mothers, including this wonderful woman, I know there are no words, but still… I want you to know I am so very sorry.