There is a man in a purple shirt. I am drawn to the lines of his face. He has a black scarf tied around his neck. He rests his age atop a chair.  He is not alone in this frame. There is another man in the picture, a best friend or possibly a lover. He waits. We all do.

I stand quietly and watch Merce Cunningham blink on film. This is all part of Tacita Dean’s contribution to the Haunted exhibit at the Guggenheim.  As I watch, I know that Merce Cunningham has already passed away. I think. There is a particular sort of poetry in watching a dead man breathing.

So, I put on a ridiculous dress and drink Heineken beer. I make myself dizzy on some ballroom dance floor. I tell stories. I hug friends. I eat a cheese sandwich as tall as the Chrysler building. I ride the subway. I take a cab. I sit on the bus next to a woman with a jar of pickles in her purse. I sing along unabashedly with a shirtless man playing an acoustic guitar in the middle of central park. I blush easily when he winks at me. I carry his smile for three or four city blocks. The skyline becomes punctuation for the conversation I have with a dear friend on a gorgeous New York Night. I laugh with my roommates while taming runaway split ends or slipping on high heel shoes. I spend an inordinate amount of time waiting for the elevator. I feign interest. I clap politely. I use an entire box of Band-Aids. I eat croissants and shop for perfume. I corner women in the bathroom just to thank them. I regret some mistakes. I repeat them. I make a point of going alone to the museum.

Tacita Dean’s work is on the sixth floor of the Guggenheim. Merce Cunningham sits in a chair projected by memory and light. Countless people pass this light and become projected into the art’s frame. We become these beautiful silhouettes against the stillness of the old man. We come in and out of focus. Nothing is permanent.

I have spent a lifetime holding back. I want to use my body. I kneel at Cunnigham’s feet. I brush my shadowy hand against his cheek. It is not enough for me to simply observe. I also need to participate.

I am terrible at math. I had a teacher in 9th grade who thought she knew me. Why does two plus two always have to equal four? I complained to her one day. I hate absolutes. She shook her head. No. You don’t. You love absolutes. You just do not like numbers because they do not bend to your emotional appeals. She stood smugly in the classroom, holding a piece of chalk. She appeared to marvel at the powers of her own perception. I did not agree or disagree, instead, I abandoned the math problem. I left her extra-help session and headed down to the library to read. I knew she would continue to add me up as sum. I did not have to be there to witness.

I hate numbers but I love words. When I was small, my grandfather use to read words out of the dictionary.  Unfamiliar words, weighty and multi-syllabic. He would read a word and encourage me to guess at the meaning. It never mattered if I knew the correct definition. My grandfather believed that words were more than what a dictionary implied. He taught me that the basis of all good stories was to rely on my instinct and leave the rest to chance.

The other day I was driving my car on a road that was punctuated with power lines. These lines looked like a series of raised crosses or the masts of ships. I was open to either interpretation. As I drove, I imagined the plot for a short story. There was a man and a woman. They journeyed together, but remained separate. She sat with her hands neatly folded and wondered what would happen to her body when she died. She wished for more than the maggoty rot of decomposing bones buried underneath black earth.  I could clearly see her profile as she turned to the man, whose hands appeared like risk holding only loosely the steering wheel. She wanted answers he did not have. She recognized her own fault was to admire someone more than she admired herself. She saw power lines dotting the landscape like death. He saw the masts of ships with eyes as rouge as the dream he had of pirates. This man and woman were bereft of words, but not of stories. I write these people down and I think about how their narrative informs my own life.

There are very few things in my life that are absolute. I am a woman. I love my family. I like to tell stories. I write to figure myself out. Yet, I am often unrecognizable. I think it is arrogance to feel you can pin a person down just because they have an aversion to math. I am and I am not the woman in that car. I use to fear worms. I don’t anymore. When I was small, my grandfather taught me to be self-indulgent by affixing my own meanings and interpretations to things that others saw as fact. Imagination is born from just that sort of daring. When I write, emotions and logic sometimes blur. I am okay with that. Some things I write are fiction. Some things I write are fact. What fills the spaces in between are a million interpretations. Me. You.

There once was a girl who liked to play with worms. She liked the way they slithered wet between her fingers, leaving trails of dirt across her palm, like suggestions of what she could grow into when her bones finally decided to make demands of the rest of her body. While all the other girls were fashioning dandelion rings and claiming elementary boys that they would marry behind the swing set at the park, she was busy cutting. She would slice a worm in two equal parts, more out of curiosity than malice. Just to answer the question of what happens when a body splits right down its center and each half crawls away from itself?

I sometimes wonder if I am like the girl or the worm or something more indistinguishable.

***
In English class in high school, we read a story by Joyce Carol Oates. It was called Where are you going, Where have you been? A dark stranger arrives on a doorstep to lure safety away from an innocent girl. After finishing reading it with the class, I raised my hand and asked with curious intent if this story’s theme was love? It seems that even when I was younger, I had a fascination with things that unsettle us.

***
Why am I struggling so much to tell just one part of a story proper, a story that has been growing inside of my head for months? I have these three characters that exist to balance an equation. But one is stubbornly refusing to allow me to write her down. I have a sketch book full of incidents, song lyrics, places this character has been. But, I can not harness the destructive impulse enough to give her narrative flesh. Something inside of me is hollow.

How do we claim the darkness in ourselves just enough to give a story dimension? How do we know when it is too much or simply not enough? If I open my creaking porch door just a little, is it already pre-determined that I would disappear down some dirt road with an ominous dark stranger and the raging wheels of his car?

What happens when your life becomes ordered and practical? What if all the intensity of your decisions rest solely in the choice of what cartoon character to buy for the back of your child’s new package of Underoos? How do you tell the darkness of your story then?

I am suddenly reminded of worms.

****
My son half wakes up in the middle of some meaty dream. Can you help me take these off, Momma? His unconscious self speaks, and he offers me his hands. Take these off? I am fascinated by the kind of dreaming that would cause you to want to expel a vital part of yourself. Why does my son want to eliminate his hands? Rid himself of something so useful? I put my arms around my son and whisper, Momma’s here. Let us dream together. When the flailing of his tiny body stops, there is something so comforting in the quiet.

I wish my own body would be still. What limb would I have to severe to finally make any sense of what I am feeling lately? My head? My hands? My heart?

If I asked you very politely and provided you with the large sharp knife, holding the throbbing metal of a hatchet in the square of your palm, would you be willing to cleave me in half?

No. I didn’t think so.

Who are you falling in love with? I asked a friend this after reading something she wrote. Inside her lines there was a longing I could recognize, a love of mountains and parked cars that did not seem that unfamiliar. She replied with the name of a folk singer, and I was left to wonder why I felt such strange relief.


Who are we suppose to be falling in love with? I wish someone would ask me that question, just so I could think about my answer.

When I was 14, I was accosted in a stairway. A boy name Tommy did a drive-by with his hands. Rammed his fingers right up my skirt without asking my permission, or even stopping to say hello. I remember laying in the pink bedroom of my childhood, listening to the radio and staring at the ceiling in confusion. Is this what a love song is suppose to feel like? I wondered.

The next day in school Tommy stated a rumor that I did not shave my legs above my kneecaps. Not in possession of my mouth, I did not know how to contradict him. I just allowed myself to detach a little and let other people take ownership of my body in the passing on of the lie.

You and I. We might be strangers. However close we get sometimes. It’s like we never met. I’ve been playing these lines of a Wilco song on slow repeat. They remind me of you. Me. If we are talking history here, at one point they would have reminded me of my body.

Do you know that when you drink you lose the spatial relationship to your own body? Where did my legs go? Has anyone seen my hands? Who has stolen my heart? I used to crash into other warm bodies just to convince myself that I existed. I’d wake up the next day and be reminded that I was still a ghost.

This body, it belongs to me. I am so fully present in my skin.

I had three miscarriages. I used to expect you to feel sorry for me when I said that. I used to feel sorry for myself. It helped after I got angry. I let myself get fighting Irish mad at the doctor who sat across from me in a sterile white-washed office. Without ever looking up from her chart to meet my watery eyes, she told me I had a defunct uterus. She might as well have gutted me with a spoon, taken my womb and hung it on her wall like a hunter mounts a deer head. The day they ripped my daughter from between my shaking legs, exhausted, I mouthed a silent fuck you at my former OBGYN.

Anger smashes down walls so beautifully, doesn’t it? How else would we ever learn to find the secret places that happiness hides if we were not willing to deconstruct. I have complete ownership of my body now. I am giving you a seductive invitation to detonate your bones against this body of work.

I wish that I could exist in the rooms where you read my words. I like to fantasize that I make you sob. I give my body permission to be a vehicle for your comfort. I trace a sonata against your collarbone. You rest your hand in mine. Sometimes our bodies can be so simply free when we allow them to be led by our words.

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 am not the type of woman who is good at remembering birthdays or sending thank you notes on time.  Each day I go to the public library, I owe them another dollar twenty. I wonder what it would be like to live as orderly as a file-o-fax. If I carefully clipped coupons, and always knew just when to purchase the laundry detergent at half off, would my life be any easier? 

Great big balls of dust form on the how to books in our home. The shelf I rest Neruda and Sexton against is always spotless. A woman is nothing without her priorities. I question mine, as the laundry piles up at the base of the basement stairs. I close the door, and pretend I do not see it. I crack the spine of a newly checked out book, inhale deeply.

Let a man go to the bottom of what he is, and believe in that. D. H. Lawrence sends a volt electric and my synapses snap. Go deeper. Go deep. I think. Yes. When all I’m ever really doing is just scratching at the surface.  

Later, a character on the television talks about how fertile her adolescent words. I think of my brother sitting at the kitchen table, laughing at my pre-adolescent attempts at poetry. He used to steal pages from my journal, lock himself in the bathroom, and read me loud in mock baritone. I’m better than I was at 13. Still, I hate the childhood stories some writers tell about the opus they penned at 9, two novels written before they ever sprouted a pimple or had a period. I was too busy playing Barbie dolls as a kid to channel Whitman. When I finally picked up the pen, it was laden with cliched metaphor that would have made Hemingway curse blasphemous from the grave.

 I use to hemorrhage words, the television character says. I look up from the computer screen tickled by the way that sounds.  I use to hemorrhage words. I picture thick black words streaked with red-black blood dangling from between the soft down of white legs. I visualize the crooked letter Z falling to the pavement like a clot.  I see this image in my head and name it proof that I have talent.

I am not hemorrhaging words. I eat them, then shit them out in my very own decomposition. A process this organic must be art, I tell myself. Right?

I want to be an artist. I’m a writer, I claim, then think about the proliferation of coffee houses like Starbucks. Suburban mothers and accountants don somber black berets and sit nursing cold cups of coffee against the hum of their laptops. Art as franchise. The irony of commercialized spaces breeding these fanciful dreams is not lost on me as a blogger. 

I just want to be more than posture, but I’m losing the battle against the dirt under my children’s nails, and the mailbox thick with unopenend letters. The cat hasn’t been fed in days and the dishwasher needs to be emptied. I’m lost among the detritus of this life, claiming artist, when maybe I just need to own up to my own avoidance. Because, how can a person imagine themselves to be a writer when they so rarely write?

Instead, I bake cookies and forget to clean up the crumbs on the kitchen counter. I leave flour fingerprints on the keyboard that I arrive at with the very best of intentions.

I am going to finish the next chapter of my book, I tell myself. Instead, I tumble headfirst and on purpose into the void of Facebook.  When my husband questions why the milk left on the counter has spoiled, I mumble something about suffering for my art.

Really?  The truth of this is not that I have the soul of a poet shaping her life to match romantic. The truth? I’m just a suburban housewife and mother, with a penchant for fucking good literature, wearing a  disguise. I’m sitting here calling my own laziness art, and enjoying how you are all rolling along with me.  Bless you beautiful people for allowing me to live so fully in my own delusion. Bless your giving hearts for pretending this atrophy is not just another way for me to tell a lie.

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.

There is a buzz, a cacophony of sound that fills the space. The click-click-clacking of high heeled shoes, the toast of wine glasses, the sounds of voices mostly foreign fills the air around me. I’m sitting in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel, where I am currently attending the BlogHer conference. I’m trying not to cry. Are you wondering what has reduced me to this pitiful state of almost tears? 

It isn’t homesickness, although I ache after a phone call with my son. Where you be at Momma? I be missing you.

It isn’t the social anxiety I expected, as I’ve surprised myself with the gregarious girl who popped out of my socially awkward skin and danced daringly in her cocktail dress and converse sneakers.

It isn’t fatigue, although I’m certainly tired.

No. My current emotive state is most certainly a product of equal parts awe and admiration.

I was not sure what to expect touching down in Chicago. What would I find at a women’s blogging conference 1,400 strong? What would be the reaction when I took the mic to speak? 

What I found was kinship.

There are women, and some men, of all differing socio-economic, religious, political, and personal history who have come together, fused by the impact and the intent of the written word. We come together truly, at cocktail parties, in intimate conversation, and in front of microphone stands, in hotel elevators, and in walks that wind themselves around Chicago’s riverfront. All of us hungry. All of us hoping. All of us just wanting to be known. Really known.  

ME…

Today I sang the song of self, more Sunday preacher than Whitman styled verse. I told this story. I showed you my scar, and you didn’t turn away. You did not turn away. Even as I write that, I find a ripple of goose-pimpled flesh race up my arms and legs.

US 

Today, I sat on a panel and told you my story. You leaned in. You listened. And then, you gave. Oh, how you gave of yourselves. I want you to know that I carry you, I carry you in my heart, just like those beautiful lines of the E.E. Cummings poem. I carry your stories softly pressed next to my own.

YOU

have a right to despair the struggles of motherhood. Just because you fought long and hard to adopt, does not mean you have to be trapped into a forever box of grateful. All motherhood, your motherhood, is so much more complex than what some people want all of us to beleive.

YOU

were not at fault for what happened to you at 15. Violence against your body is not okay, will never be okay. My heart broke for the bravery you took in telling me.

YOU 

define what it means to be a Daddy, or a blogger. This is your story, all those struggling steps. You define, you, with your humor, and your language, not by the response of the community at large.

YOU

did not deserve to have your words used against you in a court of law. Do not deserve to have your words hurled as weapons when all you ever wanted was the catharsis that should have been your blog.

YOU

will find the place and define the boundaries to write it down, to own more than you ever thought possible today.

YOU

know there is no such thing as a time line for your grief. I will not look away. I will not recoil. I am riveted to you, quite actually.  

YOU, and YOU, and YOU…ME

Today, I partook in all of us and I was, am, full.

Thank you all for that.

I am in the middle of writing it down.

I am elbows deep in the history of us. There are seven pages and no definite ending. 3,598 words dedicated to the way I love my son, how I grew to hate sharing him with another woman. 

My story, the accumulation of how selfish I was, is destined for publication. People are going to be reading this. My son will know the truth.

The process of writing this story, mining up mixed feelings as revelations on the page, makes me overly-sensitive. I sit staring at my computer screen tender as a bruise. I want this story to be the best thing that I have ever written. To be worthy enough it has to be true. The truth can be ugly sometimes. I have been taught that it isn’t lady-like to parade around my scars.  

Yesterday, I celebrated my 34th birthday. My husband had to work late. It was just me and the children. At 4:30, there was a knock on our front door. My parents arrived with helium balloons and the promise of ice cream Fribbles at Friendlys. I found myself overcome with emotion. It’s just ice cream at a chain restaurant frequented by five year olds, some part of my heart was telling me this, but I gave the moment the power to be so much more. My parents did not want me to be alone on my birthday. This was my proof of how much they love me. Suddenly it was me who felt five years old.  

In the restaurant, when Bug is wild and reckless, grabbing hastily for packets of pre-measured sugar, and refusing to sit politely in his seat, my parents shake their heads and ask for the ice cream to go. I apologize over and over for the simple fact that my son is 2 and a half years old. It turns out not to be a celebration at all. On the ride home, all I feel is disappointment.  

I do not want my son to be disappointed. This fear has stalled my efforts to finish this important piece of writing. I stare at the computer screen and I time travel 10, 11, 12 years ahead to our future. I imagine Bug holding my heart bound in hardcover. He recites aloud the paragraphs I have written, before he tells me I am not his real mother, that I never was.

I am his mother now, and apparently for some, I am not doing the best job of it.

I guess it would have been easier on everyone if Bug had just sat calmly in the restaurants and scooped up his applesauce with a spoon.

But this is not how our story happened.

I feel beholden by my love for my son, to tell it all as true.