08.19.06
Bereft
Now is the time everyone writes in this electronic medium no one cares if we read – or do we… i had the loss of the century as my friend left to another town this week. My Friend Left. Seems like it should be simple, as an adult i should be able to manage this. And yet just knowing her unavailability has left me lost, confused, tearstained and alone. Seeking out the friends I’ve known here for so long in an attempt to fill the lonely hole she has left. How did she dig such a space for herself here? I thought I only gave her a small plot in my heartland. Instead she expanded, planted the invasive but pretty ones, sent poppies and wildflowers into my ordered life and asked me to remember when (we used to be sha la la la la la la la la-la dee da, la dee dah, brown-eyed girl). So I feel the loss of possibility and I feel the echos of all the others who left my childlike self, racing after cars and and crying for them to come back come back come back.
I wasn’t this needy as a friend. But when you dive in you think it will be forever.
At first I couldn’t believe it. Then I was angry. I realize now it’s the stages (of grief, not of man)… a psychiatric rather than a shakespearean perspective on life. And I go through them in an obligatory manner, curl up and mourn, yell and mourn, drink and mourn, until I am left with just a mourning. the sun rises on a day without mourning. I drive without drifting into sadness or the other lane. She is gone. My mind’s voice doesn’t choke, though I still can’t say it. She is gone.
She didn’t die. She isn’t even gone forever. She just doesn’t know when she will come back or what will be left here if she does. She’s left for a life in a new town and it’s the right thing for her and her family. The right thing for the future, if not for the present. And she’ll be back. We didn’t say good bye. We said
see you later.
08.06.06
Tongue Untied
Our anniversary last night seemed like the right moment and as he slept I crept into the room and washed my hands and grasped slippery steel and twisted and twisted and twisted until my tongue was untied, loose and free. So I cried, set it down on the counter, and tasted words
unfettered
go to the other
I never believed that inhibiting the articulation of words would inhibit the articulation of self. The moments of first freedom proved me wrong. At the time I didn’t know what I was doing. It had no meaning other than an action, a thing, the placement of New within. But over time it gained its own power, its own significance, and over time it began to hold my selfhood within it. It created the boundaries of who I was, and who I wasn’t. At first did I know boundaries are also limitations? I didn’t even know they were there. I simply knew that before I was Not, and after, i Was. Though I could not articulate what exactly I Was, and what exactly I was No Longer.
So this Thing now weighed my expression, became the secret of my difference, became a reminder to others that I was not like them, but like someone else. All in difference, all in sameness, none in me. The turning point may have been when I saw how It was the ONLY articulation of me, and all else had become a cover story, seen through the Thing as being untrue to the secret of my difference. Is that a life worth committing to? when your truth is only a secret and your whole expression of self is locked in one tiny piece of surgical steel, holding the balance of words and life on the tip of your tongue?
It sits on the counter and I sit on the couch, and I am the only power inside me now.
