Snippets of stream of consciousness. On marriage, parenting, divorce and what may come after.
94: First Waking all over the Planet X Two
The alarm cracks my belly open like a giant jeweled watermelon fallen from the Great Wall, released blankly of angelic arms, sheepish grins. Ah, these cotton eyes open wide, spiteful and wondrous.
I marvel at the clamor and collaboration, the destruction heeding no higher power, the nerves jangled raw like scuttled red fish and now small creatures screaming. It is another soft, worn yarn of accident, the furry underside of morning tongue.
Oh why can’t I move, meteoric, from the deep clean caverns of dreaming? Why can’t I raise the glass rousing, without loon fingers and spindly-legged brain like parts blown in from Earth’s four corners?
– – – – –
Bobbing and weaving to regain perspective, professional boxers get the chance to take a fall, and stay down. Cheeks are eclipsed. Limbs are splintered. Wading muddy through their own blood, they leave the ring. Even winless, someone else cleans up.
Why is it that defeat waits for them with a fistful of consolation green and a thick gray mop’s capacity for soaking up mess? Ah, yes. This is our new age of we who flail like street brawlers. Guise of pretty face. Cracking bones. We lick our wounds scratchy, celebrate small victories, vacuum up hurts. We seek lost treasures: bulging blue marbles on honed trajectories. Hair balls. Cat’s eyes.
– – – – –
These aliens twist and tumble with grace while nearby the father sleeps, holding title in his own container. I am only the contender. See? He does not stir. Light and sound refuse to penetrate. Observe: his muscles tighten then release inside his own airy place pleasing, where coffee brews itself, thighs don’t sweat, and breasts serve as ladies-in-waiting.
Any other snail organ wormy bits of nasty life business – kindly readdress yourselves neatly! That’s it. One, two, three and exit stage left. Surely, at the faraway edge of this universe where life is disconnected I am not expected to play the lone god forever, hapless, and holding court?
* * * * *
97: The Hearth
Picture me home in the white tile kitchen, weeping over burned stew. Not so easy to burn stew, but I can. Most often in the clattering of heathen feet, the anger of weathering fatigue, the sameness, hour by hour and no upturn in sight. I am swallowing coals, swallowing coals, swallowing coals, to keep the peace.
Picture me home in the red bedroom, wailing, flung from the bay where I thought I was safe, deprived of ropes, left to wobbly troubles and embryos of my accountability. I sightsee through other times and lost towns: lingering plagues, canals resigned to commerce and blackened fish.
Picture me home in the mossy attic, the drone of drizzling overhead, malnourished by webs and spittle, choked by sifting slat-lit air swept up into platitudes of nothing much but motherhood, dear. There are rancorous gallstones, smothering pendulous snow packed breasts, and still the desire for another siege. Steely. Battling.
Picture me home, dead in a black box, not long. It could burn, but it will not. Instead, we brew and baste, preserve and protect the good, scorch the orphaned edges of the young-at-heart. The juicy center simmers then reduces over the flame. It is all too fast. I am burned again.
Picture me home – somewhere golden, oil gleaming, in a body I can chant and trill like a silken bird, a body that comes to my calming call, a body that soars and flutters on the soprano’s breeze. This is the flesh I own away from conspiring eyes, literate and holy, left to my own rosy-raw conclusions.
* * * * *
99: Draped
Fresh from the bath, my towel falls to the floor, wanting what I imagined we used to have.
Your back is turned. You survey your face in the mirror, water running into your sink. You could see me if you chose, but you neither glance nor flinch.
I reach to drape myself in white cloth, to cover whatever might have been, to move across the threshold.
* * * * *
01: Contracts, Crimes, Contracts
The unspoken offer is not an offer. The unspoken acceptance is not acceptance. Payment was taken, and not given in consideration. Does this mean there is no contract after all?
Nail and tongue tangle in crimes too minute for precision of penal code. What are these sections and subsections, paragraphs and points where I still labor to read between the lines and find no loopholes?
I am legally blind, where justice has left me. Resigned to petty thievery and grand larceny. Resigned to poverty of a different sort.
The overzealous beggar surpasses his appetites. Once, he was driven by survival. Now, he devours his own with relish – fingertips, knuckles, palm, wrist, forearm. Seed.
Murder seems too strong a term while the victim still stands though it feels apt. I may ransack references for proper definitions of killing off light.
It’s only dissolution of a contract, I tell myself. I wish for softer synonyms in a lexicon of life’s rhythms.
* * * * *
02: Divorcing
My boys laugh. An imaginary game. Now they struggle over a plastic toy, over who gets the last word, over territory: a balloon, a puddle, a corner of the couch in the smallest room of our house, this place where loved ones live the music of minutes that become bits of fuzzy family lore.
My heart is crawling in the opposite direction of promises, away from this laughter that I force up through my throat so we will not be so scared. I am expert at survival: sculpting necessary sounds, assembling them into syllables, manufacturing gestures along with response, though it all seems off pitch and inauthentic.
Where is our wedding day? The birth of our first child? Your smile when it was tender?
Here we face off: Opposing natures and values are blown to the far ends of each galaxy where you stand and I topple with a speed that staggers. I am numb to the war in which we are engaged, to the fact that we become a speck in a set of statistics.
This is divorcing. I had no idea. I am unaware of the expanse of battlefield that awaits.
* * * * *
04: Mediterranean Paint
There is a fine wind blowing, wrapped around the beating sun, slow in its arrival. Damp in this heat, we wiggle our toes in sand. Your hands are the color of dark rum.
Sky blue runs under my nails. Stones stipple my feet as we stroll. You love the silver of moon, the murky riptide, this night churning, turning me at will as I remember this. This abandon.
Now we paint, selecting tones from a box: Brown nipples, pink petals of the cavern. Your gypsy eyes.
Waves shimmer, even as I wake.
…
I feel like this is closest I’ve ever come to walking in your shoes.
What an amazing post about the little moments, the little memories that survive that then represent the whole.
It must have been an interesting mental trip writing this piece.
Thank you for sharing.
This was an interesting walk through selected memories in a long marriage, and parenting. I actually dug through drawers for bits of writing done during those particular years. Pieced and edited into a patchwork. And now, I look at my babies – two fine young men, 17 and 18, both home (rare). They laugh around the dinner table, tease each other, tease me, seem so solid. The best of both parents. What more could we want than that? (Except perhaps a little more of the Mediterranean paint, for oneself.)
Thank you so much for stopping by from Five-for-Ten, and for taking the time to read and comment.
The intensity and precision of your details in this piece are almost too much to bear. I found the 1999 section, “Draped,” particularly heart-breaking and especially this: “You could see me if you chose.”
Thank you for this insight into all of the battles you’ve survived, and for this reflection on the way in which (selective) memory continues to inform the present.
Ah Kristen. And tonight, the three of us eating a great steak and stuffed potato around the dinner table – laughter and delicious food – I realize how far we’ve come. The struggle is part of life, and remains part of life. But the light those two boys bring with them is worth all of it.
As for “draped,” that moment is imprinted in my mind. Even now. Every detail of the room, those few minutes. The emptiness of it. But that’s how we come to grips with our realities. Those tiny incidents accumulating, until change is inevitable.
BLW, that’s what it’s all like, isn’t it? Our life ends up fleeting moments when realizations hit us, fleeting snapshots when our thoughts don’t match what the outside’s supposed to look like. “Picture this” is particularly finely done. So surprising, with the paragraph about being dead in a black box.
Glad to see you up and running again.
Yes. Snapshots in memory, and feelings lodged in the body.
Up and running and THRILLED! Thanks!
You are so brutally honest in your writing, sometimes it hurts to read it. Probably because it strikes a nerve within us. A nerve we either have chosen to ignore or one we didn’t know was exposed until someone else brings it to our attention. Either way, it serves as insight worth pondering. Your journey is one of survival, and courage, and reinvention. I applaud your tenacity and strength (even when you don’t think you have any more).
Thank you Lisa. That means a lot. I realize that sometimes I write things that readers simply don’t know how to respond to. I write from my life, not a daily transcription of it. And yet – as you say – it has been a struggle, for a very long time. Not without its joys – and many lessons. For those who give no voice to the pain they feel, I hope these words may help. For those who are fortunate in their relationships and circumstances, I hope these small glimpses offer another view.
We never know what is really going on inside a marriage, or a household, or a life. Something to keep in mind when we meet others.
I appreciate your reading, and commenting, very much.
BLW, I find myself wanting to be there for you in those moments. Wanting to walk there with you, know you, feel you, hear your voice, your pain, your longing, your discomfort. I find myself knowing and not knowing more about the you that is tucked inside these wicked ups and downs. I find myself thinking, time and time again, damn, this woman can write.
You know Sarah, I think of memory as a kind of creation and recreation of personal myth. It is fluid, pocked, potent, pleasurable. Sometimes it’s gone missing. Chunks of my memories from childhood have gone missing, and I suspect it’s a sort of psychological safety net, and actually – I’m fine with that. For this exercise, I wanted to see if the way I remember things – specific events and feelings both – is close the reality of the way I lived them. So I purposely dug through drawers and files to find writing I’d done over the course of 10 years (I found writing I’d done over the course of 30+). I plucked through bits of prose and poetry to match up to very specific rooms, feelings, moments – and found them. Reading the words, even 16 years later, brought me immediately back to the experiences that led to writing the words.
That was reassuring. Those ups and downs that I seem to recall are more than my personal mythology – I wrote them as they were happening, like a snapshot. While it is painful to revisit – or to live – certain episodes, finding them on the page as proof that I hadn’t imagined them was anchoring. Of course, then I took all those words and edited the hell out of them (laughing?) – because they seemed sloppy and vague. And I put together selective pieces of memory cloth. Including post-marriage, when I finally got to taste what it was to be free, to be a woman again, even for a few moments.
It is my story. The patchwork of love clinging and love dying, and my boys, always, love gleaming – even with those god-awful early mornings of toddlers fussing and little faces appearing, expectant and hungry for everything you’ve got, when all you want to do is sleep a few hours. . . Thank you for your good words, and wanting to be there with me.
“This is divorcing. I had no idea. And I am unaware of the expanse of battlefield that awaits.” Your words are spoken out loud and I hear them loud and clear, like a bell outside my door. Do we ever have any idea what something is like until we are in the thick of it, the proverbial battlefield? A moving and beautiful quilt of words.
Thank you, Joely. Amazing how we think we have an idea what something may be like, only to find we are completely wrong. One of the life lessons that taught me to never assume. And that you only know what a situation is like when you’ve walked in another’s shoes.
Do you have any idea how incredibly talented you are? Your words flow like poetry with innuendo and vivid imagery. This incredible story, this story, your story, your life…in beautiful words, what a gift. This is bittersweet, poignant, powerful, and much more than I can begin to tell you. You touched me deeply. Thank you for sharing your lovely prose and this life of yours filled with wonder, pain, love, and hope.