Because It Is My Heart

A First Marriage

2007-04-28T21:26:00.000-07:00

People ask me all the time why I married you. I've never come up with a good answer. I wasn't madly in love with you. I had no illusions of growing old with you. There was no romantic blur in which I overlooked your faults. I tripped into marriage with you. I married you because you wanted it so badly, and because... it was something that was happening to me, a wave rushing over me, a train I was riding on over which I had no control.

Our marriage happened to me.

I know what a cop out that is. Nonetheless, there it is. And it's as close to the truth as anything I can come up with. That, and the fact that you were the smartest man I had ever dated. Having a father who was and is the smartest man I've ever known, it was inevitable I should pick a husband by his intellect.

It took you months to get me to go out with you. More months to get me to take you seriously. But we would have conversations that would last for hours or even days, and I did love that. Then I left you for a time and wanted you back and I heard the words fall out of my mouth, "I'll even marry you if you really want me too."

And so I did.

I bought the wedding rings, paid for the justice of the peace, paid for the honeymoon night at a local hotel. And I remember talking to you just before we got married, telling you I was scared to death, and you promising me that I wasn't in this alone.

But I was. In it alone. I had to make all the money. Keep everything organized. Pay the bills, balance the checkbook, go to the grocery store, cook the meals, work overtime to keep up afloat. And you, when you weren't smacking me around, you mostly slept late, and hung out on the couch watching T.V.

You got a couple of jobs. Jobs you never took seriously and which paid subsistence wages. You had your child support to pay, and once it was taken out, there was almost nothing left for us.

I would walk in from a 12 hour day at the office and the first words out of your mouth would be "What's for dinner?" I used to love to cook. I used to be pretty damn good at it. But our marriage killed whatever pleasure I once found in cooking for me. Never again would it be a pleasure.

The worst thing was the violence. I remember the first time you hit me. You had slapped me around some before that, but the first time you really hauled off and hit me, I was in the hospital. I had had a heart attack, and had finally been moved out of CCU to the telemetry unit. I was hooked up to a thousand monitors and after you hit me, my heart raced, my blood pressure went up, and the room was suddenly swarming with nurses. I knew what to do: I knew to ask one of the nurses to call security, have you thrown out, call the cops and press charges. But I just couldn't do it. It was too much to take on. I had just had a heart attack. I was unsure if I was going to keep my job. I was worried sick about money. I just didn't have it in me to take on the violence too.

And I was ashamed. Incredibly, overwhelmingly, ashamed. To think that I, the rabid feminist, was a beaten wife.

The next worse thing was that everything, especially sex, became just another chore around the house. We would have sex and the clock would immediately start ticking counting the time until we had sex again. I suppose few people are fortunate enough to get in a marriage where their sex drive is exactly in synch with their partners, but your constant hovering, your waiting, it made me feel hunted. I hated it. I began to hate having sex with you.

But I learned something. The something I learned was that the desire level for sex with my partner was directly proportional to my trust level. The less I trusted you, the less I wanted to have sex with you. And in the short time it took for our marriage to self destruct, I completely stopped trusting you. Sex with you became a matter of endurance. A matter of "Okay, it's been a week. Let's get this over with."

Good thing too that I stopped trusting you. You were lying to me about money. Setting aside money for fun so I could work a 60 hour week to just pay the bills. You were lying to me about sleeping with other women. And when I needed you most, you weren't there.

That's what kllled it you know. I had surgery. I absolutely, positively could not work for six weeks, and you turned down a job offered by a friend who knew how badly we needed the money. But you thought it didn't sound like fun, so you declined. Fun! As though my corporate job were fun. As though I worked all that overtime for the joy of it. I knew then that if you couldn't be there for me then, you would never be there for me.

And you know what? I'm glad. I could have stayed in the violence, the degredation, for years had you not done that. I was so incredibly ashamed. I bent over backwards to keep people from knowing. Even now, no matter how often I tell another woman in the same position it's not her fault, I feel the guilt and the shame. I still believe on some deep level it was my fault.

After we split up, I fell apart. Completely unstitched. You were kind enough to take the time off to drive me to my first nut house. I was completely undone. The weight of all that had happened had settled on me and squashed me like a bug.

For a while, we had a friendly divorce. A thing that lasted until I found the lump in my breast and you decided that would be a good time to challenge the moral foundation of my life. Because, you see, I honor my obligations. I knew I was about to get in debt, and unlike you, I intended to actually pay it. You took this as yet another sign I was obsessed with money. Easy to accuse me of that. Easy to accuse anyone of that when they've been paying your bills.

We had agreed when we divorced that you owed me at least $3500 for the money you never paid for your share of the bills, for the gifts to your kids that you charged on my credit cards. For the money I'd spent fixing your motorcycle, keeping you in toys. You've promised for years - you with your $70,000 a year job, to pay that back, but the promises have never resulted in a single check. So tell me, just who is it that's obsessed by money? The one who supported you while you lived on the couch? Or the one who'se never paid back a single cent of that debt? How easy to live off of someone else and blame them for the stress of carrying you.

When the post-divorce relationship first went sour I was sad. I also couldn't believe that you would take this so seriously. But I'e come to be glad you're out of my life. I see you a bit more clearly, and in seeing you more clearly, I'm more grateful you are out of my life.

I've let go of the money you owe me. I've let go of the apologies you owe me. I've even let go of trying to figure out what happened. I'm just glad you're gone. Just glad it's over.

I have the broken bones to remember you by. The cigarette burns, and the sideways nose. I have the memory of walking up the stairs to our apartment knowing I was about to get beaten and not knowing how to avoid it. I have the memory of the awful way you played with me head.

You're no longer in my heart except for the bruises. And bruises - even ones to the heart, heal.

Auntie Lil

2006-12-30T18:14:00.000-08:00

I love you with a ferocity that borders on the ridiculous. I remember the moment I first saw you, when you went from being a theoretical human being to an incredibly beautiful and frighteningly real human being. I remember being startled by the realness of you. I remember the way that I knew that my heart was changed for ever.

I have a mental photograph album of your first few years. I remember waking with you, rocking you, feeding you, changing your diapers. I remember when you began to talk and could not pronounce “st” Instead you substituted merely “t”. You came to me once after eating some candy saying, “Aunt Lil, I’m all ticky!”

“You are! You are indeed all ticky! Let’s clean you up.”

I remember your wise eyes when at the age of three you sat down in the habitual seat of my boyfriend and said, “This is John’s chair.”

“Yes. Yes it is.”

Sober as a judge, you looked at me and nodded, “He’s a good man.”

It was all I could do to keep from falling over laughing, but you were so earnest, so incredibly sincere that I felt I must reflect your seriousness of your declaration. “Yes. Yes he is. He is a very good man.”

That same year, I gave you one of those large plastic blow up bunnies for Easter. It was taller than you were, and you were terrified of it. After going through your Easter Basket and gathering up your goodies, you began to walk into the kitchen. You brushed against the inflatable rabbit, and terrified, said, “Excuse me, Mr. Bunny.” Something the entire family now says when someone tries to intimidate us.

You used to sing during the blessing of every meal. I suspect God was delighted.

Your parents marriage didn’t last much past your 3rd month. You were surrounded by bickering, angry, drug abusing adults, but you thrived as a young, young child.. You were happy. Unbelievably joyous. You taught me about the resilience of the human spirit.

You loved the color red and hearts. We had covered your room with hearts. Quilts made with heart patterned fabric. A wind chime made of red hearts. A baby mobile made of hearts. Hearts painted onto your red furniture.

We would sit for hours and just watch you. Watch you discover your tongue and spend the day sticking it in and out of your mouth. Watching you discover that you could put your hands together. Mastering rolling over, then sitting up, then one day – Miraculously! – walking.

Your speech taught us all the quirks of our own Texas accents. When you wished for more of something, you’d ask for a “nudrine” (another one). When we would carry you up the stairs, you’d say “We’re going uppy dairs.”

Eventually I moved away, and my contact with you grew less frequent. I missed the intimacy of witnessing your day to day achievements. I delighted in finding gifts for you. I adored the pictures you would draw for me. I cherished our funny phone calls.

For a while, after I left college and returned to my parent’s home, you came to live with us while your mother was battling her substance abuse issues. You were so tiny, so vulnerable, ad so incredibly brave. One night during National Fire Safety Week, I decided it would be a good idea to teach you about fire and what to do if one happened. I succeeded only in terrifying you. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt such remorse.

One night you were supposed to bathe, and when I came in to check on you, you declared you were all clean. “Did you use soap?” I asked. You nodded. “All over?” You nodded again. I glanced at the completely dry bar of soap next to you and thought, ‘I don’t want to do this. I want to let her get away with it.’ But of course, I couldn’t let you. I had to demand honesty of you. So I pointed out the dry soap, and you began to cry. I cried later. I hated to correct you. I thought everything you did was swell. You were incapable of doing anything short of delighting me.

You’re mother’s unsettled life kept you from attending the same school two years in a row until you were in high school. You learned to be incredibly independent, and to be able to adjust to anything.

On the morning after your father committed suicide, I tried to catch your mother on the phone. She had already left for work. I went to your mom’s office to wait for her. It wasn’t until I came into the office that I was aware of my appearance. In my grief I had failed to even comb my hair. I had just grabbed clothes, put them on and went out to seek my sister. Finally, she arrived at the office. I took her back into the conference room to tell her. It took a long time for her to grasp the information. I kept having to answer the same questions again and again. Finally, I led her out of the office, and drove her home. There, we began the dreadful task of waiting for you to come home to school and telling you. I would have given anything to spare you that pain. I would have gladly died to spare you that. I will be able to see your face in those moments for the rest of my life. You were so hurt, so sad, and yet, so incredibly brave. Braver than any 9 year old had any business being.

The years went by, and I moved away again. I missed a lot of your life then. You made perfect grades, were the paragon of the obedient child, and I worried for you. Oh! How I worried for you. I worried that you didn’t know that it was okay for you to mess up. That you didn’t have to be perfect to be loved.

When you were in high school and began to rebel, I secretly cheered for you. I had been afraid that one of those perfect days you were going to come home to your perfectly neat room with your perfect report cards on your perfect bulletin board and put a perfect bullet through your perfect head. When you began to rebel – even to shoplift – I silently cheered.

You were the maid of honor at my wedding. You were so beautiful that I spent a great deal of effort at the parties surrounding the wedding to keep my husband’s friends from trying to pick you up. I threatened one of them, a heroine addict who was 32 years old. “She’s 17. Touch her and I will kill you.”

A few years ago, I attended your college graduation. I don’t know what I expected, but I know I didn’t expect what happened. The moment I saw you, and you waived up to us, I burst into tears. I was so proud of you! I was watching your life change forever. I was watching the fruition of the wonderful person you were.

Since this is a super secret completely anonymous blog, I can confess to something I can’t say in very many places. I never bonded with your younger sister in the way I did with you. I love her, but not in the wild, unbridled way I love you. Perhaps because you were so much like me as a child, serious, quiet, and avoiding attention with a determined, focused effort. You mastered the art of blending into the wallpaper.

This year for Christmas, I gave you a china box. Inside the box I had placed all my best memories of you, all my boundless faith in you, all my hopes and dreams for you, and all my love, my boundless, boundless love. I adore you. I think you are the cats damned pajamas.

I would risk everything for you in a heart beat. For you are the center and purest part of my heart. You are the love I never dreamed I could feel.

Darkness

2006-12-07T20:13:00.000-08:00

Late at night and I’m frightened to sleep. Frightened for reasons I can’t define. Frightened despite the fact I have to get up early to see the doctor. Frightened in spite of logic, reason, maturity, or simple facts.

I can’t sleep. I can’t wake up. I walk like I’m treading paper thin ice on a wing and a prayer.

What am I doing? Why can’t I stop?

Lily

Divine Secrets

2006-11-18T21:05:00.000-08:00

Lately, I’ve been re-reading The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Last night, as I stretch out in bed turning page after page, it occurred to me that I’m a wee bit obsessed with Mother – Daughter stories. And in thinking about that, I naturally thought about you.

Anyone looking at the history of my life might expect me to be searching for a father. And perhaps I did for a long time. Perhaps that’s what my adolescent promiscuity was about – filling up the male love & attention deficit that had existed so long. But sometime I outgrew that. I quit fixating on that loss. I accepted what happened as what happened and moved on. I even forgave.

But you, on the other hand, you were there for me. If not always in the most appropriate ways or in the most present ways. You were there. There is no mother shaped hole in m soul. But I’m still looking for you. I’m still trying to figure out whole this whole mother-daughter thing works. And it seems to me that this mother-daughter thing, whatever it is, is a fundamental relationship, the thing from which all other relationships spring.

I went through a long time of being angry at you for the things you didn’t protect me from. For sitting in the back den doing needlepoint while I thought, really believed, that this time Daddy was going to beat me to death. I know I screamed, and I know that he frightened me so badly I lost control of my bladder as he held my the neck with my feet not even touching the floor. I know you remember nothing about it. For you it simply did not exist. I was angry for all the nights you left me home alone with him when he was so drunk and completely out of control. I was angry for all the cries for help from me that went unanswered, the suicide attempts, the running away from home, the grades that went from A’s to barely passing. But I understand now that you simply could not hear those things. They were not allowed into your realty. They were too much.

And in understanding, I’ve forgiven.

So why is it now, in the middle of my life, that it’s you I’m searching so hard for? It’s you that I crave when I’m sliding down into the pit. It’s you that I want when I’m afraid. And while you almost invariably come through, it’s never enough.

When I had the lump in my breast, and you came to visit on your way to see your sister, You pulled up to the side of the road and motioned me into your car. No hugs. Your presence, the fact that you took the time to came, stayed with me for a while, all of that should speak louder than the lack of that first hug, but God, how I wanted to fall into your arms.

I always want that. I want you to be one of those mother who holds her children, and you just aren’t. When we do hug, you always pull away first, and always with some sense that you find my clinging to you an invasion, a violation of some sort.

Somewhere in me there is a child who wants to crawl into your lap and be assured that everything is going to be okay I don’t have a single memory of being held in you lap and comforted – those memories all belong to your mother. But the desire is there. Something deep and profound. Something like homesickness. I want to curl up and crawl back into your womb. I want to be surrounded by the safety of you. I want the intimacy and I want that constant attention.

All completely unreasonable. I know. And as you told me once, you’ve tried to be a lot of things to me, but you can’t be everything to me. And of course, you’re right. Both right in the sense that it can’t be done, and right in the sense that somehow that’s what I really want. For you to be everything to me.

But I sit with the Ya-Ya’s and I want to at least know your history. I want to know your stories. I want to know about you and your friends growing up. I want to know about first dates and party dresses. I want to know about Proms, and boy friends, and going all the way to Boston alone for your first two years of college. I want to know what your hopes and dreams have been, and how they’ve survived the trip. I want to know what you felt when you were pregnant with my sister and me. I want to know about all those luncheons and meetings that took you away from me as a child. I want to know when you learned how to make the unpleasant simply not exists. I want to know you. I want to be an expert in you.

Because you’ve always held this huge spot in my heart. Right there in the middle. I want to know the landscape of your heart too.

Long Goodbyes

2006-10-06T21:32:00.000-07:00

I met you at a time when I needed you more than you could possibly know. My life was crumbling. I was newly divorced, and fresh out of the nut house. I had moved to a new town where I knew almost no one. Those I did know were not only bad companions, they were actively dangerous to me. But somehow, you were there. Amazingly like me. A childhood so much like mine we marveled at the similarities. And you were a little bit crazy in exactly all the same ways I’m a little bit crazy. We’ve always seemed like the only two sane people on earth to me.

We’ve always joked that we were each other’s real sisters.  The other ones,  they were mistakes at the hospital.  You’re my real sister.  My real family.

You are the bravest person I’ve ever known.  Also the best.  Everything you do is founded in kindness and love. And you can make me laugh when the world is crumbling around me.

We became so close that we end every conversation with, “I love you to infinity and beyond and back again.” And I do. I love you that much.

When you moved away, I wanted to lay down in front of the moving van. It’s been 8 years and I’m still not entirely sure how I live without you.  There’s email.  There’s unlimited long distance. Unfortunately,  on neither side is their money for air fare. But we write and we talk, and we talk, and we talk.

You’re health has never been good.  About a year ago, it started getting worse.  And worse. You went to doctors who sent you to other doctors who sent you to other doctors, and no one really helped.

A couple of months ago, it all started picking up steam. You were weaker and weaker. Able to do less and less. Suddenly your twenty hour a week job was requiring almost heroic efforts to perform. I started making plans to move up there. To help. To just be with you. You’re the closest thing to real family I have. And I had such wonderful dreams of us doing stuff together again.  Playing scrabble and cards.  Cooking.  Poking around the junk stores.

And then one morning it happened.  You couldn’t even whisper to your husband, “Help me.” You just felt your heart stop, and then a few minutes later it would beat wildly and then stop again. A heart attack. You slipped into a dangerous sleep,  and woke up weak as a kitten. It took days to get into a doctor. More days to get diagnosed. And then more days to put you in the hospital and survey the damage.

What they found, no one counted on. You had two sets of veins and arteries leading to each of the chambers of the hearts. A heart like no other. I could have told them that. That your heart was unique.

They did their tests, and told you the damage was minimal, but then it happened again. And again. So they put you on a 24 hour heart monitor, and finally they saw it. The upper chambers of your heart were beating like crazy, while the lower chambers of your heart didn’t beat at all.

You were lucky enough to die in the doctor’s office. They revived you. Got you into a hospital. Called in specialists from near or far. No one was really sure how your heart worked. No one was really sure how to fix it.

They put in a pace maker and for a day you were like your old self again.  Except then you kept dying. Even with the pace maker,  you’d flat line.  You began to be covered in burns from the defibrillator.

You kept fainting, kept flat-lining. They put you back into surgery, adjusted the pace maker. No good. You were fading fast.

They flew in an electro-cardiologist from New York to work on you. He was interested in your case. At least you have that going for you. You’re heart isn’t just bad, it’s interesting. All the top dogs want a chance to look at it. The electro-cardiologist did some surgery, and again, for a day you rallied. They sent you home.

Since you’ve been home, we’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve lost consciousness. Your blood pressure fluctuates wildly. Your pulse is all over the map. You slip in and out of consciousness and are so weak that the only way you can turn over in bed is for your husband to help you turn.  All you can manage to say on the phone is “Do you know how much I love you?  Will you remember?  No matter what?”

I will remember.  No matter what.  I promise.  I swear it by all I hold holy.

Finally today, I said aloud what I’ve been thinking since the first surgery. “I don’t think she’s going to make it.”

You don’t understand baby. You can’t leave me now. I need you too much. If you’re gone, where do I go? Who will be my family? So I sit here at this computer, and I pray - which I’m not terribly good at – and I exert every ounce of my energy into willing you to live.

Because I love you.

To infinity and beyond and back again.

And if your heart stops, mine will break.

A Secret (In A Blog of Secrets)

2006-08-04T22:14:00.000-07:00

I have a secret vice. Since this blog is the place where I tell all my secrets, I will tell you. It’s The Waltons. Not Sam Walton and the empire of Bentonville, Arkansas. The TV Show. I know what you’re thinking. The Waltons? Yes. The Waltons. I watched it as a child growing up, and I still watch it every chance I get.

I watch it mostly because my childhood was nothing like that, and there is a part of me that wishes desperately that it was. It’s my dream of what life should be. It’s my centering point. My compass.

As a child, I decided I wanted to marry a man just like Zebulon Walton (Grandpa). I’m still looking for him. William is pretty darn close, but without the endlessly laughing eyes and the joyous embracing of life and all that it held.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Baldwin sisters. Miss Mamie and Miss Emily. You remember the Baldwins? The two sweet little old maiden ladies who lived in a fine old house and made bootleg whiskey which they called “The Recipe”? I adore the Baldwin ladies. They are unfailingly kind and generous. They embrace life. They love each other and care for each other tenderly. They welcome people into their home like they were just sitting there doing nothing but waiting for them to drop by.

I wish we could all be a little more like that.

So tonight, I’m aspiring to be a little more like the Baldwin ladies. Not to make moonshine, mind you, but to try to be kind and gracious to everyone who crosses my path. To think the best of everyone until I have absolute reason not to. To be kind and warm and endlessly hospitable.

They had good hearts, those ladies did. And I want that. I want to look at my heart and see nothing but love.

Lily

Now

2006-06-25T22:36:00.000-07:00

I haven’t posted in a while. None of the ghosts in my heart have rattled their chains or pulled at my heart strings demanding their tales be told.

It’s late at night now. Or rather, early in the morning. My favorite time in the summer. When the world is quiet except for the sound of singing crickets, and there is this feeling of being completely alone. Not alone in a bad sense. An aloneness I revel in. I cherish.

I read Edy’s blog tonight, and cried when I got to her speech at the benefit. About the freefalling. It was (and is) beautifully said.

Things are good right now. It’s okay that William is off in the wilds of Washington, and that I’m not waiting for him. I’m even willing to move on, though I haven’t found the next stone to rest my foot upon. But things are good. Just good. The kind of good where you can sit and smell the night air and think, “This. If this were all there was, it would be enough.”

I’ve found in my life that it’s the little things that get me. Both in the good and the bad ways. The smell of night air. Baby ducklings walking on lily pads. The pain of petty incidents adding up like the straw on the proverbial camel.

The big things, I can deal with those, even when they set my life in a whirlwind for a while. Whirlwinds pass.

I think when I’m dying, I’ll be able to look at my life and know I didn’t miss the roses on the path. Of course, I missed some of them, but a lot of them I’ve captured. I’ve kept them in a box in my mind like a pirate’s treasure. And this is good.

Treasures for my heart.

Lily

Foolish Hearts

2006-06-05T20:21:00.000-07:00

William called this evening. Finished the job in Idaho and headed to another in Washington. Doesn’t know when he’ll get back to South Texas, but hey, I’m not getting serious about this or anything am I? Because I really need to just go on and live my life, there’s no future in him. Really. He needs me to know that.

He broke my heart at 16. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.

But somehow it still hurts.

Childhood In Two Part Harmony

2006-05-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

We were so lucky. We lived in the last days of the club’s innocence. A time before fences and landscaped yards. A time before Hermės riding gear and expensive hand-tooled saddles. A time before the water table had fallen so much that the creek which had seethed with the fish that had fed generations of my family and yours had dried up leaving only a large marsh with cat tails and the beginning of grass.

I only vaguely remember meeting you. I mostly can’t remember my life before you were in it. I’m glad. It couldn’t have been nearly as fun.

I remember a thousand morning of getting up with the sun and leaving the house and meeting you at the pool to go swimming, at the cliffs to go climbing, in the back pastures to go walking, with the horses to go riding (which we did bareback and in the same clothes we’d worn for the past three days), or at the creek to go fishing. We were great fisher folk, you and I. Though I think we caught as many turtles and snakes as actual fish. We never left a note saying where we were going, it never occurred to us to leave a note. We were out for the day, playing, and we’d be home by dark. We had our snakebite kits, our knives, our whistles, and we knew basic first aid. Yes, we were lucky. We lived in the last days of Leave it To Beaver innocence.

I told your mother not too long ago that I had learned all of life’s important lessons from you. If you don’t know how to hold a fish without being finned, just slam your sneaker over it while you unhook it. If you’re going up a really steep grade of land, keep your feet turned sideways, and you’ll be less likely to start sliding. One can make a sandwich from almost anything on hand, including hot-dog buns, peanut butter, marshmallow cream and Captain Crunch. I don’t think I’ve had a Captain Crunch sandwich since we were kids. It’s a delicious thing to remember. I’m not sure how delicious it was to actually eat.

We got ditched “snipe hunting” together. We fell into the lake together. Got stuck on cliffs together – able to neither go up or down. I’m sure we got in trouble together, but I don’t remember it. Not even once.

Once when we went to the Mountains in New Mexico, you and I and my father (what an odd group!) went several days earlier than the rest of the families. You and I were playing with toy cars in the back seat of the car, and got my hair caught up in one of the wheels. There was nothing to do but cut it off. I don’t think I gave that shock of short hair a second thought. I was still too young for true vanity, and I knew you didn’t care. And that was all that mattered – that you didn’t care.

We finally arrived at the cabin, and bedded down for the night (you and I naturally shared a bed, no one cared that you were a boy and I was a girl. We were friends. We were children. And the world, like us, was young.). You had eaten something bad at the restaurant on the way, or had a 24 hour bug. I’m not sure. All I’m sure of is that you puked your way through almost every pair of sheets in a cabin that had six double beds, and spare sheets for each bed.

How strange that my father came with us! It was during the worst of his drinking. Did his driving scare you? Did he scare you? I know he scared most of my friends. Some so much so that they wouldn’t come to my house, but only invited me to theirs instead. And what was he doing with us? It’s hardly as though he liked children, could sit back and listen to our children’s noise and be pleased and content. Was he an asshole to you for throwing up so much?

We hiked and played. We found caves and boulders the size of houses. We broke and entered a lot into empty cabins. We found an A Frame cabin with a really fabulous swing set, and played there as much as could. We’d dare ourselves to swim in the snowmelt waters doing down the mountain in torrential streams. Water so cold you’d ache for hours after you’d been in it. We found a cabin with a zip line outside. One end running from a high tree, which you had to use the nailed on boards to climb, running to a smaller tree, almost ground level at the other end. We’d spend hours going back and forth on that line. We hiked up to the old gold mine (It’s all fenced off now), and took the treacherous rotted stairs inside with our hearts beating wildly. We discovered Pez candies and those odd little dispensers.

We were there a month and packed a life time of memories into a single June.

I was with you the day I started my period. We had taken a boat out into the creek, and I had through that wet feeling was just from the water splashing over the sides. You, who had older sisters were a complete gentleman. You never once alluded to the spreading crimson stain on my jeans. You were gone by the time I found out, and I never had time to be embarrassed.

Shortly after that, my father quit drinking, and we quit going to the club. I didn’t see you again until the family reunion in 1991. I met your lovely wife. She was warm and gracious, and she said to me, “I’m so glad to meet you. Mark talks about you so much I feel like I’ve known you my whole life.” I went away for a moment after that and cried. Cried because I had never known if I had meant as much to you as you did to me.

And here, in the middle of my life, you remain the sweetest of my memories. The purest of my innocence. At the center of my heart.

The Piercing Of My Breast

2006-04-29T15:56:00.000-07:00

What follows is terribly long. I almost feel I should apologize, but the length of the experience can only be conveyed by length of narrative. This is a story of my heart. My heart and a lump in my breast.

I met you on cool, Monday afternoon. Winter was enjoying her last hurrahs and the tree limbs hung bare outside my window. I wasn’t looking for you. Expecting you. You were, in fact, the farthest thing from my mind. But my hand brushed across my breast as I reached for something on the far side of my desk and there you were. My breath caught for a moment. Surely I was wrong. I put down what I had in my hand, reached inside my blouse and felt again. You were really there. A lump. Hard. Larger than a pea, smaller than an olive. I guess I would say you were about the size of a peanut outside of its shell. The thought passed through my mind that this was a before-and-after moment. That for the rest of my life I would think of everything that happened before this moment as “before”, and everything that happened after, as “after”.

My heart beat a little faster as I reached for the phone to call my doctor. I was midway into dialing her number when I looked at the clock, 5:05. Of course it was after 5 o’clock. I had just found a lump in my breast and it was after 5 o’clock. My doctor takes Tuesdays off, so I knew it would be Wednesday before she could work me in, if she could work me in. The “if” gave me something new to worry about for a moment.

I tried to call my mother. She was out. I tried to call one of my best-friend. She was out. I tried call another one of my best friends. She was out too. I tried to call my ex-husband. I got his voice mail. I called my sister. I got her voice mail too. So for a while, I was just there. Alone with you. Alone with you and a thousand thoughts that came rushing into my mind like a dam that had burst.

I checked again, to see if you were really there. You were.

My sister called me back in about ½ an hour. The first thing she did was asked me how long had it been there. The question threw me off balance. Immediately I thought, ‘What do you mean how long has it been there? You think maybe I’ve had it for 3 or 4 months and just this evening decided to get worried about it?’ But hot on the heels of that thought was the realization that I had no idea how long you’d been there. Sometime – not too long ago – the AMA or the American Cancer Society, or someone who’s supposed to know about these things, had decided that breast self-examination made very little difference in early detection of breast cancer, and I had stopped doing it. For all I knew, you had been there for months. Or you had popped into existence 10 seconds prior to my finding you. I didn’t know. The possibility that you might go away occurred to me, so I checked you again to see if you were still there. You were. Meanwhile my sister went into a monologue on the importance of breast self-examination. Thank you sister, dear. I think I got that part down now.

Then my sister, the selfless rock of support that she is, started in on me about how terrible it was for her to receive a phone call like this. Had I even thought about this? How much it would upset her for me to call her this way? Out of the blue? With something like this? I knew in that moment that I was talking to the wrong person. I think I made up a doorbell or something. I know I got off the phone with my sister.

Finally, I talked to someone reasonable and actually supportive. We talked about how something like 90% of all breast lumps are benign. We talked about cysts. I’ve had cysts before and none of them felt like you, but I managed to convince myself – at least my logical self, if not my primal self – that you were a cyst. No big deal. I’d see the Doctor. She’d drain you with a needle, and that would be that.

A needle.

In my breast.

Cross my heart. Hope for the breast. Stick a needle in my breast.

Ick.

The next morning, I called the doctor’s office and got an appointment for Wednesday. Probably some other things happened that day too, but I have no idea what they were. When Wednesday came, I was so scattered, I managed only to shower and dress for the doctor’s appointment. No makeup made it onto my face. No curls were put in my hair. No stockings made it onto my legs. No breakfast was eaten. It occurred to me that I wasn’t certain if I’d eaten breakfast, lunch, or dinner the day before. I had no idea. None.

At the doctor’s office, we talked about the lump for a moment and the nurse said she’d get me a gown, for me to take off my top. I said, “Forget the gown. Since my divorce in 2001, the most physically intimate relationship I have is with the two of you (the doctor & her nurse). I don’t need a gown.” I peeled off my top and sat down on the examination table. I showed you to the doctor, and yes, you were really a lump. The doctor had me move my arm around at different angles, while she felt your contours and your thickness. She called for a needle, and I asked her how much this was going to hurt. She said, “No worse than having your blood drawn.” I thought, ‘okay.’ But it felt worse than getting my blood drawn. That’s because she took three stabs (literally) at trying to drain you and you weren’t draining. The reason you weren’t draining was that you weren’t a cyst. You were a mass. In other words, you were a tumor.

I had to let that word find a home in my mind.

A tumor.

Okay.

I had a tumor.

I got scheduled for a diagnostic mammogram and a sonogram at the hospital on Friday. I asked the doctor when I would have the results from those, and she said Friday afternoon.

I’m reasonably sure something happened on Thursday, but I don’t have the vaguest idea what it was.

Friday was much like Wednesday. I was scattered. I showered and dressed, and I think I managed to do my hair, but no makeup made it onto my face. No stockings made it onto my legs. It even never occurred to me to eat. I may not have eaten on Thursday. Or Wednesday. Or Tuesday. I may not have eaten a single bite since I found you.

As I walked up the stairs leading from the parking lot to the hospital, I noticed the chipped paint on one of the steps and my mind took a photograph. I knew I’d be able to see the paint on that step in my mind for the rest of my life.

In the waiting room, I had a magazine that was 3 years old. Three years! But it didn’t matter, because I couldn’t read it anyway. All I saw on every page was that I had a tumor in my breast. I turned page after page, but that’s all I ever saw. “You have a tumor in your breast.”

The mammogram was like a mammogram, but longer and even more uncomfortable than usual. The sonogram was at least interesting. I got to see you. And you looked amazingly like you felt. You didn’t appear to have any tentacles leading off of you, and I knew that was a good thing. I didn’t know enough to be able to tell anything else about what the sonogram meant. I wanted to ask questions about you, about the way you looked, but I knew they fired sonographers for answering patient’s questions, and I didn’t want the sonographer to get fired. So I didn’t ask. When it was over, I sat up, dropped the gown and realized I should have waited until the sonographer left the room to do that. She looked vaguely shocked. How could I explain to her that I was on auto-pilot, that you had knocked me out of my usual orbit, and I wasn’t quite myself. I murmured an apology and put on my bra and blouse.

On her way out the door, the sonographer told me I’d get the results on Monday.

Monday!

Damn!

I was expecting them that afternoon. But okay. Monday. I could make it to Monday.

I called my sister that evening to let her know it was going to be Monday before I would know anything, but while we were on the phone, another call beeped in. It was the doctor with the lab report. She told me I needed to see a surgeon to have you biopsied, or maybe just removed. She said she’d make the referral and the surgeon’s office should call me on Monday. I asked the surgeon’s name and scribbled it on a scrap of paper. It was the name of a national makers of frozen food dishes. I spelled it wrong.

I got back on the phone with my sister and told her. We talked some more about how upsetting this was to her. I may or may not have apologized.

After talking to my sister, I called my mother. My mother was out of town, visiting her sister who had lung cancer and was in the hospital. When she answered the phone I said, “I have news, but I don’t want to talk to you when your in the hospital room.” I asked her to make small talk with me then, and then call me later when you could talk. So we made small talk, and then I talked with my aunt. She was doing a bit better. I told her how much I loved her, and promised myself that once this was over, I’d go to visit her. To see her one last time, to stroke her hair, hold her hand, tell her how precious she was to me, and tell her all the wonderful memories she had gifted me with in her life-time. Yes, when this was over, I’d go visit my aunt.

Later Mother called and I told her The News. She said that because my aunt was doing so much better, she was leaving tomorrow. She’d fly home, spend the next two days, and then drive to me Monday so she could be with me to visit the surgeon. For a moment, I was just overwhelmed in the relief of her coming. I wouldn’t be alone with you anymore. My mother would be there. We could face you together. It was such a relief. Until that moment, being with you had been such an alone thing.

On Saturday, my dear friend Charlie’s mother died. I wept like a child when I read the news. Tears that made no sense. I didn’t even know Charlie’s mother. I truly didn’t know Charlie all that well. But she was Charlie’s mum, and now she was gone, and crying seemed to be my special skill those days. So I cried.

And then Sunday evening, I got a phone call from my mother that her sister had died. I sobbed, I sobbed, into the phone for just a moment, then excused myself. I got a tissue, blew my nose, and tried to be there for my mother. We talked about hospitals, and quality of life issues, and how my aunt had gotten seven years from a two year death sentence with lung cancer, and agreed it was for the best. And maybe it was, but it didn’t matter, because in my family, everything is for the best.

After half an hour or so, I was reasonably certain I had pulled it together enough to call my cousin and tell him how terribly sorry I was for his loss, what a grand lady his mother had been, and I asked him what I could do to help him right now. He told me how worried he was about me, and suddenly I knew that he knew about you, and damn-it-to-hell, why had Mother told him? But then I knew. She told him because she was trying to balance being there for him and for the funeral, and being there for me. So okay. He knew. I assured him I was fine, and he assured me he was fine, and neither of these things were true, but it was somehow comforting to say them to each other, so we did.

Monday morning came and the alarm went off, but I didn’t get up. In fact, I couldn’t seem to do much of anything but watch the phone, and it keeps not ringing. By 2:00 I called the surgeon’s office myself, expecting a receptionist, but getting instead a voice mail system. I left my name, the name of my referring physician, the fact that I had been referred to have a breast biopsy, and my phone number. By 6:15 I reconciled myself to the fact the surgeon was not going to call me on Monday as promised.

My mother, however, did call on Monday. She calls to let me know that the funeral will be held on Friday, and that she and my father would drive here Tuesday to be with me, and then we could all go to my Aunt’s hometown on Thursday for the funeral. We also agreed I should call my doctor the next day and let her know the surgeon hadn’t called me. Except we were forgetting that the next day was Tuesday, and I couldn’t call my doctor and tell her, so on Tuesday, I called and left the same message on voice mail for the surgeon and got the same response.

Tuesday evening my parents arrived in town. They called from their hotel room and announced that they were coming to get me for dinner. I managed to make it to the shower, get dressed, put on makeup and fix my hair for my parents. When they pulled up outside my apartment, I went down to greet them, and no one gets out of the car to hug me. I swallowed that back, and got in the backseat where I learned we were going to a restaurant I hate for dinner. At the restaurant, the food all seems to greasy and nothing tasted right, but I ate it anyway. I’d been not eating far too much for far too long, and I knew that had to stop. I could feel myself slipping away a few pounds at a time.

Over dinner, my parents did what my parents always do. They announced The Change of Plans.
This is always what happens with my parents. There is a plan, and there is what actually happens, and the latter rarely has much resemblance at all to the former.

Since the surgeon still has not called, they’d decided the three of us should leave first thing in the morning to go to be with your cousin. First thing. To them, “first thing” this means about 7:30. I wasn’t packed. I had a sink full of dirty dishes. I had piles of laundry. I needed cat food. I wasn’t in the least prepared. I had actually thought that this once, this once, they wouldn’t do this to me. But they did, and I felt like a fool for not having anticipated it. And just beneath feeling like a fool was another feeling, and this feeling was anger. It wasn’t reasonable. It wasn’t appropriate. But it was there. I tried to choke it down. I tried to just go on. I tried to talk reasonably to myself about how when I would stop on the way home for cat food, get packed, and it would all be okay.

But it wasn’t working. The weight of the anger settled in with the weight of the grief and the weight of the fear and it all became too much. There was a six year old in my mind screaming that it should matter that I have a lump in my breast. It should matter that I need to talk to my doctor. I should get to be important too, even if I’m not dead.

I reacted in the obvious way: I started having seizures. My attempts at small talk were hollow and edgy. My movements were jerky. I couldn’t concentrate or keep my balance. Little blips were missing from the continuity of time, and I was having difficulty following the conversation. And worse, my mother knew I was having seizures. She wasn’t saying anything but she knew. Then I fell into an old pattern. I got angry about myself about the seizures. This, in turn, made me have more seizures. You’d think that by now, I’d have learned not to do that, get into the angry, seizure cycle. But I hadn’t. I haven’t.

As we left the restaurant my mother turned to my father and said, “Dear, I’m going to drop you off at the hotel and then go back to Lily’s apartment with Lily for a while.” When we arrived at my apartment she asked how I was. I open my mouth expecting to assure her that I’m fine, but what I said was, “I don’t know… I’m all over the place.” And then I started crying and having more seizures. The world was doing somersaults around me. There was no longer even the possibility of trying to hide the seizures.

“You don’t have to go Lily. Everyone will understand if you don’t go. Aunt J. will understand if you don’t go.”

There are a million reasons I wanted to go to this funeral, but there are also a million reasons why my going could have been a bad idea. The biggest of these was the very real possibility that I might get there, fall apart, have seizures, and make the whole thing about me. This felt like the most selfish thing I could possibly do, make my aunt’s funeral about me.

Finally, after way too much melodrama, it was decided I should not go. I should stay home. Talk to my doctor, find the surgeon, find out about you.

Once the decision was made, Mother and I started to talk. The way we usually talk. We started to connect. She read to me what she had written at the hospital while she was staying with her sister the week before. She read about how frail my aunt was, how important it had been for her to be there with her. She read about cutting off the last lock of hair the chemo had left on my aunt’s head. She read. I listened. We both cried.

I read to her what I had written about you. About my fears. About how I felt stopped dead in my tracks. About my anger at the surgeon for not having called yet. I read. She listened. We both cried.

I finally get the hug I’ve been waiting so long for.

And that night I made a strategic decision. I would cope with you by reading Jane Austen. Jane Austen would be safe. Nothing truly dreadful ever happens in a Jane Austen novel. It all works out in the end, and there is much to laugh at. There is the added bonus that I’ve read all of Jane Austen’s novels before, so there won’t even be a worry factor for when things are looking grim. I grab Pride and Prejudice and read myself to sleep.

So Wednesday, my parents left early in the morning for the funeral, and I waited until 8 o’clock to call my doctor. Someone new answered the phone. I asked to speak to the nurse, but she was already with a patient. I ask to leave a message and tell New Girl my situation. New girl had me spell my name and repeat my phone number twice.

I spent the rest of that day watching the phone, and it never rang. I cried. A lot. It began to feel like I was in an episode of the Twilight Zone. You know, the episode where there is a lump in your breast and but you become invisible to all the doctors as they disappear into the mist with the sound of mad laughter emanating from the darkness.

At about 6:30 that evening, my mother calls me from my aunt’s house. “Well?”

“They haven’t called.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No. Not kidding.”

And for a moment we just sat there in silence, stunned at this turn of events. I ask about my cousin and the rest of the family and asked for some reassurance that it was really okay for me not to be there. I’ve only had epilepsy since 1991. I haven’t known what my extended family knows about it. If they know why suddenly, 15 years ago, I stopped attending family events. I found out, finally, that they do know. It’s a relief and an embarrassment. But it’s more a relief. I hung up the phone and cried some more. What the hell?

The next morning, New Girl calls and says, “Now what is it you want a referral for?” For just a moment I entertained fantasies of crawling through the phone and strangling New Girl with the phone cord. So slowly, and with as much guilt as I can possibly lay on, I explain to New Girl that I have a Lump in My Breast, that I’ve been referred to a Surgeon who was supposed to call me on Monday to find out if the Lump is Cancer, and that it is now Thursday and the Surgeon has not called me back, so I need Dr. H. to tell me what to do. Then I ask New Girl if she has any ideas about what I should do? Is there a protocol for when you might have Cancer and the Surgeon’s office won’t return your call? Surely, I don’t need to bother Dr. H. at all. Surely New Girl can tell me what to do?

New Girl sort of stammered and stuttered, and said she’d get Dr. H. the message right away. I hung up the phone and cried. Probably more even than New Girl cried for the way I’d treated her. Crying seemed to be my new talent.

In about half an hour, the phone rang and it was the surgeon’s office. Suddenly they were interested in talking to me. They had an opening on Monday at 3:00. Could I take it? Yes. I could take it.I spent the rest of day reading Pride and Prejudice and crying until my mother called that evening, after the funeral. I told her I finally had an appointment and when. She told me that she would stay at my Aunt’s house until Saturday afternoon to help my cousin clean up, and then she’d come to stay with me until we could see the surgeon.

On Friday, I decided to post the bits of writing I’d been doing about you to the blog. The result was overwhelming. Words of encouragement began flooding my inbox. A cancer patient in Minnesota dusted off her detective skills, figured out who and where I was and called me. We talked. We talked for hours. It was such an incredible relief to talk to her. Especially because she said at the beginning of the conversation, “You must be thinking about the “C” word a lot.” And oh god, I was. And to her, I could talk about the “C” word. She never found it necessary to assure me I didn’t have it. She just let me talk about my fears. And then we made this wonderful discovery: that even without you, she and I were destined to be friends. We had a lot in common, too much in common, things in common I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and we liked each other. We talked, we cried, we laughed. I don’t know if I’ll ever be as grateful to anyone for hunting me down as I am to her. She literally carried me through my affair with you.

The next day I got shaken from the partial coma I’ve been in. Mother was coming. I washed two weeks of dishes and two weeks of laundry. Got clean sheets in the guest room, and set out clean towels. I went to the grocery store an got the things my mother likes to have – fresh fruit, spring water, some special nut bread from the bakery for breakfast. I got more done in that day than I had gotten done in the 10 days before it. I vacuumed the carpet and scrubbed out the tub.

As I straightened up the bathroom, I found the bit of bloody gauze from the attempted aspiration. I started to throw it away, but I instead I kept it. I had also kept the letter from the hospital telling me it was urgent I seek further medical evaluation of the tumor. I kept the bill from the Dr.’s office. I kept the piece of paper where I had written down the surgeon’s name and the piece of paper where I had scribbled “Monday 3 pm”. I wished I could print out the mental photograph of the chipped paint on the stairs. I realized I was starting a scrap book. I wondered if my sanity was going to end up inside the scrap book and not in my head.

Mother arrived late Saturday night with a car full of my aunt’s fine clothes. She said she was too tired to lug it all up to my apartment for us to go through, but that she’d pick out something nice for me. I said, “I want anything in a size 2 or 4.” She agreed that I was the only one who could wear a size 2 or 4, and so it would be done.

I think we went somewhere for dinner. I don’t remember where. I’m pretty sure we did something on Sunday. I don’t remember what. I want to say we watched a movie. That would make sense. But the truth is I don’t remember. Not a single damned minute of the whole damned day. I just know it passed.

I do remember telling her the name of the surgeon. I remember because we started calling him “Dr. Lean Cuisine.”

On Monday, we managed to arrive at the surgeon’s office on time with makeup and everything, but I had forgotten to print up my medical history (which is extensive), the list of medications I’m on (a list of not insignificant length), and a list of the drugs I’m allergic too (a list of epic proportions). When we got to the doctor’s office, they handed me all this information to fill out which asked for these things. One a good day, I’m hit and miss about this stuff. This was not a good day. I was nervous. I was having seizures. FOX news was blaring in the background, which made all of this worse. Getting this information from my brain was like pulling teeth. I had to do the snapping the fingers of my right hand a lot to stimulate my left brain into remembering words (I don’t know if I got a lot of attention for this or not). The blanks on the forms weren’t big enough for the information they asked for, so I had this whole series of numbers of topics which were covered on the back of the page. Finally I turned in the forms. Immediately upon doing so, I realized I had left off two of the medications I was taking and three of my drug allergies. Carefully, deliberately, I named each of the fingers on my left had after a drug so I would remember to tell the doctor.

The waiting room was small and shared by two other physicians in addition to Dr. Lean Cuisine. It was full of waiting patients, almost all of whom had brought at least one family member with them. Children were waiting in their parents laps or running about the room careening off of furniture, walls, and various patients.

One of the families included an elderly woman (Mamma), her two daughters (bitch and bitchier), a son (Bubba), and two grand-daughters (belonging to bitch). Mamma appeared to have Alzheimer’s and every few minutes would ask where they were. “At the doctor’s, Mamma.” One of her off-spring would yell at her. Mamma is ill kempt, poorly dressed, and clearly dazed. For a moment I entertain fantasies of rescuing Mamma from the horror of her children. Bitchier was Mamma’s Medical Power of Attorney. She refused to sign any of the forms, because she didn’t want to be held responsible for any of Mamma’s bills. Bitch was enormous, I mean truly, horrifically, enormous. She was wrapped entirely in Lycra, and bits of her were falling out. Bits one would have preferred not to be confronted with. Her two daughters sat on the floor in front of her, the eldest one was decked out in Lycra just like Bitch, but her outfit had the added bonus of rhinestone studs which spell out proudly that she is “Mamma’s Girl”. Bubba went in and out of the waiting room between cigarettes carrying a plastic sippy cup. My mother and I decide in whispers that this cup was filled with moonshine made from the still in the back of their house in the woods. A still which is guarded by a couple of well trained blood hounds, and a few sawed off shot guns. Bitch talked incessantly and loudly on her cell phone, a thing which caused the man seated next to us to roll his eyes heavenward in a plea for divine intervention. It was not forthcoming.

FOX news was excitedly covering the news that Zacharias Moussaoui had been found guilty and was eligible for the death penalty. They seemed to have dragged up every the family of every 9/11 casualty they could to see how badly they want blood revenge. Alice Hogland (mother of Mark Bingham, one of the heroes of flight 93) gives an impassioned speech against the death penalty, and I remembered how very much I liked Alice Hogland. Most of the family members simply grieved, both inarticulately and articulately. Eventually, FOX news exhausted the grief of family members and moved on to a commentator who gave a rabid diatribe in favor of racial profiling, slurs alls Muslims and Arabs as terrorists, and took a strong stance in favor of stopping illegal immigration along the Mexican border.

Finally, I could stand it no longer. I looked at the television and said (out loud), “Oh. Shut. Up. You ignorant, paranoid, xenophobic, racist bastard!” I got actual applause from two of the men in the waiting room and my mother.

The only thing to read in the waiting room was a catalogue of chemotherapy wigs and post mastectomy wear. I decided reading was not the best strategy.

Finally, at 4:45 I was led into an examination room. The doctor came in, shook my hand, and introduced himself. I told him the names of the fingers on my left hand, and he made notes in my chart. He asked me if I saw a cardiologist for my heart. (I do.) He asked me if I saw a neurologist for my epilepsy. (I do.) He told me to take off my top and he’d be back with his nurse to examine my breast. He emphasized the “with my nurse” in such a way as to warn me that any law suit against him for breast examination would be doomed to failure.

I took off my top, and put on the stupid paper napkin top.

After a few minutes he re-entered the room, nurse in tow, and examined my breast. He asked me to show you to him. I did. First he grabbed hold of you and attempted to squeeze you out of my skin like a pimple. Then he attempted to take you into another room to examine without the hindrance of my presence. When these things failed, he asked me to move my arms about as he poked and prodded my breasts from a variety of angles and with a variety of pressure. I mentioned that there seemed to be two new smaller lumps. He said there were “several” places that needed investigation.

Then, he got up and said, “Once you’re dressed, go straight down the hall, my nurse will set you up.”

When I arrived at the designated rendezvous point in the hallway, the nurse was deep in conversation with another woman while they rapidly flipped the pages of a calendar back and forth while discussing Good Friday and a wedding. Finally, they both seem satisfied, and announced to me that the doctor would perform a biopsy on me on April 28th at 2:00. I said, “I beg your pardon” and they repeated this information. The world tilted on it’s axis as I calculated the almost four weeks that would expire before April 28th

.“Is it okay to wait that long?”

“Certainly.”

“So it’s not a malignancy?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“If it’s a malignancy, it’s okay to wait this long?”

“There is no such thing as emergent breast cancer unless it is outside your skin and bleeding.”

Well, damn. That was reassuring.

I inquired as to what the biopsy will entail. She handed me a sheet of paper and says, “Your instructions are right here.” I looked at the sheet of paper which says “Core Breast Biopsy” in large print, and saw that my instructions answered almost none of my questions.

“Will I be able to drive myself home?”

“Can you drive?”

“Yes.”

“Well then yes, you can drive yourself home.”

“Will I be given anything for the pain.”

“No. You may take Tylenol if it bothers you.”

I could tell right off that this is going to be a warm and fuzzy experience.

I wandered into the waiting room in a state remarkably like shell shock. I told my mother when the biopsy would be and she assumed a state remarkably like shell shock.

We went to a nice restaurant and had lobster bisque and salad. I remember the lobster bisque was too salty.

I came home and posted to the blog. It’s odd, now, in retrospect. I didn’t call a lot of people who knew I was seeing the surgeon that day. But I did post to the blog. The blog had become my lifeline. My real source of support in this storm.

I also called my father, who suggested I come home with my mother and see his surgeon. My mother and I decide to call my cousin who is also a surgeon and get his take on whether waiting this long is a good idea or not.

My cousin, with whom I hadn’t spoken in over 10 years, was remarkably reassuring. He told me that they’ve found that early surgical intervention doesn’t make that much difference in a patient’s prognosis, and that often he tells women whom he knows to have malignancies to wait a few weeks prior to their surgery to get their lives in order. He also answered a lot of my questions, and told me that he found much reason to believe that you are not a malignancy. He said, of course, he couldn’t be sure, but he was very doubtful that you were cancer.

It was finally decided that my mother, who had been traveling back and forth from her sister’s sick bed, her funeral, and my sick bed for 6 weeks, should go home. She was exhausted. She needed to be at home, sleep in her bed, be with her dog.

For the next several weeks, the days moved slowly by and I was in a bubble called waiting. I ate when I remembered to. I read a lot of Jane Austen. I read Pride and Prejudice five times, Persuasions three times, Sense and Sensibility twice, Emma once, and Mansfield Park twice. I watched A&E’s presentation of Pride and Prejudice twice too. And I talked to my new friend in Minnesota on the phone as often as she had energy for me. I talked to my best friend in Phoenix. I asked her if I needed a place to die, if I could come die at her house. She said I could. So did my best friend in Round Rock. I had options. I had places to go to die, or to have chemo and try to live. This was good. I need contingency plans.

I was outside of time, drifting in an endless now.

Once during this period, I got a call from William who said he wanted to come visit me at the end of May. For a brief moment I saw beyond now to a time called “then”, and thought “Yes. Yes. Come see me.”

On the morning of the 28th, I woke just as dawn was breaking and the birds were first singing their soft songs. Before the abbey bells had rung. I rested there for a moment and then thought that the one thing worse than being rushed that day would be having too much time on my hands that day, so I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Later, the alarm pulled me back into the waking world, and I stumbled for coffee, read the morning news, and cooked breakfast. I burned the toasts, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t taste it anyway. I showered. Fixed my hair. Put on a pair of matching bra & panties, and then wondered what it is one wears to a breast biopsy. I wished their was someone I could ask. I thought about asking my friend in Minnesota, but she was already at work, and I didn’t have her work number. I decided to do makeup before clothes, and I remembered to print out my medical history, complete with drugs and allergies.

My mother called, and I asked her what I should wear. “Your breasts” was her answer. And it made me laugh and I was oh-so-grateful to her for making me laugh.

Finally, I settled on a pant suit which came close to fitting me. Of course, nothing fit me any more, I had wasted away to 95 pounds, but at least this outfit didn’t end up in a puddle around my ankles when I stood up. As I walked out to my car that afternoon, I saw the leaves on all the trees and realized that spring had happened while I was away. I was almost shocked to learn I had been gone so long.

I don’t remember the drive there. I didn’t remember it then. I remembered leaving town, and coming to the next town, and realizing I didn’t remember anything at all in-between. I even checked my car, to make sure it was okay, to reassure myself I hadn’t had a wreck.

I got the waiting room expecting masses of people and FOX news. Gratefully there were neither. I was alone in the waiting room. The television was turned off. I stood at the reception window waiting for someone to show up. Minutes ticked by and I began to panic. I had written down the wrong day, the wrong time… But finally a nurse came, and no, I was expected. She took my medical history from me and smiled and said, “I wish all our patients would do this.” I thought to myself how different she was from the other nurse. I thought to myself how glad I was she was different from the other nurse.

Just as I finished a chapter in my latest perusal of Persuasions, I was called to the examination room. The nurse stepped outside while I put on the paper gown, and then came in to prepare everything for the procedure. I asked her about what would happen, and she gave me a very detailed response. I was really, really, glad she was not the other nurse.

Then the doctor came in. He was more talkative this time. Less disconnected. And he talked me through the procedure, told me everything that was going to happen just before he did it. First their was a bee sting sort of feeling as the general anesthesia was injected into the skin. Then a second, stronger bee sting as the general anesthesia was injected into the breast tissue. Then he got the sonogram machine and found the lump, looked for any other lumps, and found that one of the other lumps had resolved and the second was a cyst and nothing to worry about. Then an instrument that looks like nothing so much as a tiny melon baller in a clear plastic tube appeared, and essentially that’s what it does. It went into you., scoops up a ball of flesh, and extracts it for examination. All told, the doctor took about 7 balls of flesh from you, tiny, tiny balls. Smaller than bee-bees, but large enough to be visible to the naked eye. It did not particularly hurt, but it did feel odd, to you feel my breast being rearranged inside itself. The phrase “pierced your breast” appeared in your mind, and hung there poetically.
And then it was over.

On the drive home, I thought about William coming at the end of May. I thought if the news was bad, I would call him and ask him to come sooner, or I wouldn’t let them do anything to me until he could come first. I wanted to dance one last time while I still had the breath and the energy to dance. I wanted to make love one last time while I still had both my breasts, whole and largely unmarked, and while I still had my long blonde hair to frame my face. And I wanted, violently, to do these things with William. With the first man I had ever loved. With a man who had loved me through it all. With someone I trusted and knew the measure of. I wanted to lose the last vestige of my youth with the man who had known my youth most intimately. I cried a little bit as I thought of these things.

I was told I’d get the results on Wednesday, so I braced myself for not getting them until Friday. They came on Thursday. Thursday afternoon they called and told me you were benign. Life began again. Time began again. The specter of death receded from my doorstep.

I still have you with me. I may always have you with me. In my left breast. Close to my heart.

Dancing

2006-03-20T22:13:00.000-08:00

You have never left me.

I was standing at the counter,
I was waiting for the change,
When I heard that old familiar music start.
It was like a lighted match
Had been tossed into my soul.
It was like a dam had broken in my heart.

It wasn’t so long ago. I mean, of course it was, it was a thousand years ago, it was yesterday, it was, it is – like me – somewhere tumbling in time. I was sixteen and on the phone with a girl from school. She was at her boyfriend’s house. I heard a voice in the background, and interrupted her mid-sentence. “Who is that?”

“Who is who?”

“That guy I just heard in the background.”

“That’s just William. Why?”

“Because I’m going to marry him.”

And like that, I knew. That probably sounds crazy. It probably is a little crazy. But we do that in my family. My grandmother saw my grandfather on a street corner one day in high school, and pointed him out to her friends. “I’m going to marry that boy,” she said. She didn’t even know his name. They had been married for 48 years when he died.  My grandmother always claimed to be something of a witch. I inherited some of that from her.

Somehow, I don’t remember how, we met. Maybe even that day. And somehow, I don’t remember how, we became lovers. And somehow, and this I do remember, I fell in love with you. The first man I ever loved. No, not that. Not exactly. The first man I ever fell in love with. And I fell hard. Didn’t even extend my hands to break the fall. The kind of hard you can only fall at sixteen. When you’re heart is young and un-bruised, when you still believe.

You were older than me (not much) and from the wrong side of town (very much). You had quit school and were working construction. I kept it from my parents that we were dating, knowing they wouldn’t approve. I kept a lot from my parents in those days. It never occurred to me not to keep things from my parents.

We dated all that spring and that summer, and then in autumn, we broke up. I don’t remember why anymore. I doubt you do either. Just one of those silly, teenage things.

I guess something must have happened,
And we must have said goodbye.
My heart must have been broken,
Though I can’t recall just why.

So that’s how it ended.

Except, it hadn’t ended.

I dated another guy for a while. And you dated my best friend, Marla (though I wouldn’t know that for years). I tried to convince myself I loved this other guy. I failed. And finally, in failing, I broke up with him.

And the next day, I mean actually, the very next day, you called. I remember my breath catching at the sound of your voice on the other end of the phone. Was I busy Saturday night? No. I was not busy. Yes. We could go out.

You were working 12 – 14 hour days. I was in school, and working as a waitress as night. Somehow we squeezed each other in. We would go to drive-in movies (“flicks”), and you would hold me in your arms, and I would sleep through half of them.

We spent a lot of time in your car on back country roads.

You used to hold me down and wrestle with me, and I would laugh and laugh. You and your friends taught me to play poker. You tried to teach me to dance in crowded bars. I was too shy and self conscious to let you.  We went on walks some nights in the moonlight.  One night, I stretched out on the top of your car and looked up at the stars and thought, “I will remember this moment for the rest of my life.” And I did.

On rainy days, I would skip school to spend the day with you. God, how I loved a rainy day.

And there was a God in Heaven.
And the world made perfect sense.
We were young and were in love –
We were easy to convince.
We were headed straight for Eden
It was just around the bend.
And though I had forgotten all about it
The song remembers when.

By the time I was ready to graduate and move on to college, we were engaged. I had finally let my parents know about you.  They were… skeptical. You spent most of that summer trying to get me to run off to Vegas with you. I’m still not sure why I didn’t. God knows, I loved you beyond reason.

But I think somehow I suspected you weren’t ready for marriage. And maybe somehow I suspected that neither was I.

My freshman year of college, your phone calls started coming less and less often. I tried to call you one night about 3 a.m. and when you didn’t answer, I knew. I had been replaced.

One of your friends started to call me. And I liked that he was calling me.

So that’s how it ended.

Except it hadn’t ended.

Years later, both fresh from a divorce, we found each other again. I was living somewhere else. You sent me a plane ticket, and I spent a week with you, lounging about and reading while you worked. Ironing a shirt you so shyly asked me to iron. You wanted me to move back. And I still don’t know why I said no, except that I suspected you still weren’t ready. And maybe I suspected I wasn’t ready either.

You ended up at my sleepy little town on business, and tried to call me, but I was at a friend’s house and missed you. By the time I got home, the hotel switchboard had closed down. And we missed each other. You called a couple of times after that, and then you didn’t call any more.

And that’s how it ended.

Except it hadn’t ended.

For all the miles between us
And all the time that’s passed,
You’d think I haven’t gotten very far.
And I hope my hasty heart
Will forgive me just this once,
If I stop to wonder how on earth you are.

A week ago last Friday you called me. Your voice was the last thing on earth I expected to hear. But there you were. In the area on business. You would think less than a week had passed since we were starry-eyed kids. We picked up right where we left off, all those years ago. Not where we left off after our first divorces, when we were both bruised and a little wary. Where we left off way at the beginning. I fell back into your arms like I had never left. I fell back into your arms like a sixteen year old.

And my parents?  The ones who had never quite approved of this high school drop-out from the wrong side of town?  They now remember you as “the nicest guy” I ever dated.  Well, they’ve seen me through two bad marriages. They have some perspective. So do I.

We had dinner and while sitting on the couch talking,  I turned to you suddenly, and asked, a little shyly,  “Will you do me a favor?  Will you teach me to dance?” And after all these years, in our bare feet on my living room floor, we danced. We danced and danced, and by the end, I wasn’t half bad. There I was! In my forties, figuring out what to do with my feet!

I had the time of my life.

And William, somehow, no matter all the loves that have passed between then and now, I still love you. Every bit as much as I loved you at sixteen. Though less blindly. With eyes wide open. I like that we’ve both set our feet a little deeper in the ground. I like that we’re older. I like that we’re beyond the need to impress each other or be something that we’re not. I like who we both grew up to be. You grew up to be the man I always knew you would be. I’m enormously proud of you. Proud for you. You are still the man I fell in love with all those years ago. You’re more the man I fell in love with all those years ago.

I know, you’re still not ready. Different reasons this time. Your business takes too much of your time. And you know what? That’s okay. Because – in my way – I’m still not ready either. I have all these ghosts. I need to figure some things out. Your business is going to require everything of you for a few years. My ghosts, my mountain of ghosts, may require everything of me for a few years.

I don’t know how this story ends. Maybe in a few years, it picks back up. Maybe it just ends with us dancing in my living room. If it does, that’s okay.

In fact, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

But I do know this one thing: true love never dies.

And my heart dances.

Musical interludes by Trisha Yearwood from “The Song Remembers When”

Slipping Through My Fingers: Epilogue

2006-03-09T18:11:00.000-08:00

Writing Slipping through My Fingers opened doors in my mind that I’ve kept resolutely shut for years and years. It’s been more painful than I could have begun to anticipate.

It may be a while before I can write again.

Or not. Perhaps my mind will turn to other things, and more memories will come spilling out of the box.

Regardless, I’d like to thank each of you for bearing witness. For seeing the whole story through. For affirming me and hearing me.

Thank you,

Lily

Slipping Through My Fingers Part 3

2006-03-03T22:19:00.000-08:00

Not long after that party, The Hotel closed down. Jeremy, Jay and Erica had all graduated. One by one they got jobs and moved away. Perry moved on. (Much to my grief. I adored Perry.) And you got a little house a block or so away.

Oh! We were all so in each others’ laps in those days! Living in this tiny set of city blocks we all called “The Ghetto.” A single tornado could have wiped us all out! When my car died, and I was walking to class every day, I remember that I knew everything about everyone. I knew whose cars were parked at the wrong houses at 6 A.M. I knew who stayed home alone. I knew who was happily in their lovers’ arms.

And still you wonder
Who’s cheating who?
And who’s being true?
And whose car is parked next door?

Remember? We laughed about that, you and I.

But I’m digressing again. Getting lost in all these tangled threads…

I was with Lena. We were constant, but not exclusive. I still went out with Jessica. Jessica with her lovely Nordic features, and her breasts like over-ripe melons. Jessica who would sit on my lap and kiss me in the University Center in that conservative town in those conservative days. And if I remember correctly, you found Jessica to be rather a fine bit of eye candy too. She’s a doctor now, you know? I lost track of her sometime after her divorce (He was a jackass). Another loose end. Another piece of my heart.

I also dated a friend of Jay’s from back east. Always drunkenly, but never seriously. At least not for me. But I suspect it was quite serious for him. He was waiting for me to recover, to get over what Jeremy had done to me. He was patient and sweet and – I think – quite in love with me. That makes me sad now. He was a good man. I hope wherever he is, that he met someone wonderful, made beautiful babies, and is ridiculously happy. Please let it be so.

I kept seeing Tom now and again. Sometimes he saw Lena. And Lena had another man, Jake, in New York.

And you were mostly, but not always, with Melody. It was always somewhat scandalous when you weren’t with Melody. Fodder for gossip and speculation.

I remember DeAnna telling me one night that she had gotten drunk and made a pass at you. A rather blatant pass. What might once have been considered throwing herself at your feet. She told me she took off all her clothes and offered herself up to you. She also told me you were a gentleman about it. That you refused “to take advantage of her condition.” You can’t imagine what I felt hearing that story. It took every ounce of control to not let the sheer jolt of jealousy and then the relief, show on my face. I actually screamed once I got out of her apartment and into my car. A long, gut retching scream.

I remember sharing ice-cream with you at the University Center. It was obscene, the way we ate that ice-cream together, feeding each other. Dancing our tongues across the spoons we held out to each other. It was passionate and young and hungry. It was everything we never said out loud. Perhaps even to ourselves.

I remember countless meals at that Mexican food restaurant eating machicado and spicy chicharrones. Chicarrones so hot they’d make your eyes water and your nose run. Chicarrones hot enough to kill even the worst of our hang-overs.

I remember walking up to Our Table at the UC one morning wearing a black mini skirt with a slit up the side. You slid your hand along the outside of my thigh, reached the top of the slit, and whispered to me, “You aren’t wearing anything under that? Are you?” I just smiled. I was wearing something under it. But you were so much enjoying the thought of me not wearing something under it, that I couldn’t bring myself to steal that from you. So I smiled. And enjoyed the thought of you enjoying that thought so much.

We danced a paso doble’ that never reached a conclusion. A volcano bubbled under a calm surface. The passion between us could have melted the walls. Yet there was a careful, studied distance between us. A distance I was too afraid to try to cross.

Then one night, inevitably, I found myself at your house. I’m not sure how I ended up there that night. If there was a gathering of courage and a jump, or if you led me there.

I should remember, I really should. But I don’t.

There was, of course, a crowd there. And we were all, of course, drinking. A lot. In the middle of it all, it began to pour rain, and Jonathan saw that his car windows were unrolled. All you guys – you tough, radical guys in your leather jackets and steel toed boots – stood on the porch and did nothing! So I did the only sensible thing: I dashed out into the rain and rolled up his windows. I came back soaked to the bone, with my black dress clinging to me like second skin.

Gradually, much too gradually, people drifted off. Then it finally was just you and me. And when you took me in your arms that night, I wanted the world to stop. I wanted the whole universe to slip away and leave you and me there in that moment.

Our first night together was stolen from Jeremy. This one, almost 18 months later, was stolen from Melody.

And that night, like the first night, as we made love, you asked me over and over, “Will this happen again?”

And over and over – like a damned fool – I said, “I can’t be the one to answer that.”

Why the hell not? You were asking!

What a fool I was! Why, oh why, didn’t I just say, “Yes”?

For twenty years now, I’ve lived with wondering what my life could have been like if I had just summonsed the courage to just say, “Yes.” Yes to you. Yes to all the possibilities of love. Yes to the risk of having something that important to lose. Because Lli, even though I never said it, I was all “yes” to you.

And when you fell asleep near dawn, I stayed awake with you for a few hours, and then quietly dressed and went home. When I saw you the next day at Our Table, I kissed you on the cheek and whispered, “Still friends?”

You answered, “Of course.”

Then you graduated and moved. Left Mel. Left me. And I began to wait.

The telephone became my enemy. It would ring, and it wouldn’t be you. And then one night, I was very ill. So ill, they wanted to put me in the hospital, and when I wouldn’t go, they insisted that I find someone to stay with me that night. I called DeAnne and she came. And that night, you called.

I was too sick to talk to you long, and she talked to you for over an hour. Never knowing that I was hating her each moment she spent on the phone with you. Hating her for stealing what should have been my conversation with you.

And you never called again.

* * *

Years later, I was talking to Wanda one night and she asked me who had been the great love of my life. Wanda and I were close. She knew all my stories, all my lovers, even our story. When I answered, I told her it was you. A man I had spent two nights with. The love of my life.

My best friend now, a friend who has been close to me for 17 years, a friend who is one of the few people who can even keep track of my old lovers, asked me something similar once. I told him it was someone I didn’t speak of.

And I don’t. I can’t even talk about you. I can barely speak your name.

Every since this world began
There is nothing sadder than
A one man woman
Looking for the man that got
away…

* * *

You are married now. You have two daughters. It pleases me enormously that you have daughters. I’ve never known a man who loved women more than you. How lucky these girls are to have you for their father. How lucky your wife is. And I hope, oh god, I hope, you are lucky too. I wish you all joy. I wish you every precious thing my heart can dream.

And me, I look at my empty hands and remember. Remember all that slipped through my fingers.

And my heart – twenty years too late – whispers into the darkness, “Yes.”

Slipping Through My Fingers Part 2

2006-02-25T13:30:00.000-08:00

After Christmas Break that year, Matlin moved out of The Hotel and got a place with Barbara. Erica McFee moved in.

Shortly after she moved in, Erica and I got drunk in the kitchen one night. She was dating David at the time, and while we were drinking she told me things about David I had absolutely no business knowing. I knew right then never to trust her. If she’d stab her lover in the back like that, she’d stab anyone in arm’s reach.

You and Erica had history. Both from the same hometown. You had known each other in high-school. Erica liked to remind me how close the two of you were. Erica liked to… play with people, and I guess she had figured out how to play with me. Erica seemed to make it her life’s work to be certain that you and I were never alone in the same room. God, I hated her.

Sometimes at night, I’d wake up, leave Jeremy’s room, and go and sit in the dark on the stairway. I’d smoke cigarettes and drink whiskey and try to reach out to you in my mind.

That night, that one night, before Thanksgiving was consuming me. In spite of everything else that was going on then.

And there serious things going on.

I became pregnant a few months later. Jeremy had his tantrum, and I had an abortion. A few weeks after that, someone broke into my apartment and tried to rape me. I remember calling The Hotel that morning. You answered the phone, and I managed to stumble an apology for waking you so early. I asked to speak to Jeremy. By the time he got to the phone I was sobbing so hard I couldn’t even talk. Half of that was that I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t been raped. I had gotten away. I couldn’t find the words to describe what had happened.

Jeremy, to his credit, arrived even before the cops did. He also started doing odd things. Sneaking up quietly behind me. Unexpectedly coming into the passenger side of my car late at night. I’d scream hysterically. And still he kept on. Jeremy’s darker side was beginning to show.

I stayed at The Hotel with Jeremy while I looked for a new apartment. You were incredibly solicitous of me. Was I alright? Did I need anything? Did I want you to walk to campus with me? To the corner store? In about two weeks, I found a new place. I moved a whole block and a half away, but it was enough. A second story apartment. A gated complex.

You started dating Jenny. It didn’t take us all long to start calling her “that little sex machine.” Yeah. Jenny was something. And before it was all said and done, most of us got to taste a little of that something.

A long time later, after Jenny had been gone for a while, we were playing cards one night. As usual, I was the only woman in the game. You were there. Jonathan. And Tom. And maybe Mark? I remember Tom mentioned that Jenny was in town. “Man, I don’t want to see her,” Jonathan said. “If I see her, I’m gonna fuck her. And I do not want to fuck her.” We all laughed in general agreement. Jenny was… well, she was that way. Oozing sex and bad, bad, news.

But I’m digressing here. It’s all such a tangled story. There are a thousand other stories weaved into it. Just as tangled as our lives all were back then. Just as tangled as my heart was. Just as tangled as my heart still is.

Time went on. You started dating Melody. It was widely rumored that your fondness for Melody had a more than a little to do with Melody’s fast car and her endless supply of cocaine. I didn’t think much of her then. “All the depth of a muffin tin,” I believe I said.

I feel bad now, that I had so little respect for Mel at the time. Over all these years, Melody has been a friend to me. She still is. Even when everyone else has pretty much faded away. I never dreamed that we would all end up so far apart from each other. I loved all those people so much. I thought it would always be like that. But we all graduated, moved, got married, scattered to the wind. And Mel remains the touchstone for us all. Mel doesn’t let people disappear from her life.

You would drop by to see me now and again. You finally got used to the fact I didn’t smoke grass, and after making one too many bongs out of old coke cans, you started keeping rolling papers at my apartment. I still have what’s left of those rolling papers. In my “box of lovers.” The remnants of a pack of Zig Zag’s. My one and only tie to you.

We would talk about nothing mostly. I would listen, rapt, waiting for you to say something real. To tell me what was in your heart. Once I tried to ask you about that night, but you turned back flips to keep me from talking about it, and I gave up.

Jeremy and I were splitting up and getting back together like the swings of a pendulum, all wedding plans shelved, if not abandoned. He dated Wanda for a while, and some other girls I guess. I never paid that much attention. I dated Tom some, started dating Jessica and then Lena. Lovely Lena, with her crown of red hair and her fondness of Janis Joplin.

Jeremy took it hard, my dating Lena. And one night, shortly after he’d graduated and moved away, he came back to town for a party I was helping to throw at the “Frat House” (which, dear reader, wasn’t a frat house at all). But before the party, he downed most of a bottle of Crown. Got so drunk that he passed out in my car. When I finally found him, I took him to my apartment and put him to bed. He didn’t sleep long. Instead, sometime on that dark, awful night, he woke up alone and half crazed. In a paranoid, drunken frenzy he decided I was at that party with Lena, instead of him. Of course, I wasn’t. I was at that party because I was obligated to be, being one of the “designated hostesses”. I was at that party fulfilling a social obligation until I could go home to him.

But that truth didn’t matter. Someone else’s truth never does. What mattered was the madness in Jeremy’s mind that night. It was always a precarious balance, his mind. And that night, it fell hard and fast off the deep end. He drove to the party, took his keys to the paint job of my car before he even walked in. I was standing on the back porch talking to a group of people and he came storming out, yelling obscenities. I led him into the back yard to try to talk some sense into him. He yelled some more, and finally, I just ask him for the key to my apartment and suggested he crash somewhere else that night. He refused. I followed him up to the porch saying emphatically, “Jeremy, give me my keys.” As he reached the door, he turned around and caught me with a left hook. I was airborne. I flew fifteen feet back to the sidewalk and landed so hard it completely knocked the wind out of me. People scattered, and then suddenly you were there.

You grabbed me, and held onto me like a wild animal until I got it into my head that going after Jeremy myself wasn’t such a good idea. Then you got Jeremy, got him out of the house, got my keys back. I’m not sure, but I think you managed this without hitting him. If anyone could have, it would have been you. He was, as I’ve said, so much in love with you.

All through the party, you kept your eyes on me and the door. Each time Jeremy came back, you got him to leave again. Then you and Melody took me home to find the shambles of my ransacked apartment. Papers were scattered all over the living room. A sketch I’d done of Lena was in shreds on the table. You and Mel stayed with me that long night after the party, turned Jeremy away from my door twice. Close to sunrise you and Melody went home, and I went to sleep.

Of course, Jeremy showed up a short time later. Finally sober. Sobbing. Contrite. And when I sent him away, we both knew it was for the last time. It was over.

And his paranoid delusions became a reality. What had been a passing crush on Lena, became something much more. And Lena, of course, had more than a passing crush on you too.

Oh the tangled, knotted threads of it all! I get lost in it! I stay lost in it! How can it be that this was 20 years ago? So much of my heart is still there, caught in all those criss-crossed threads.

So much of my heart lost somewhere in time.

Slipping Through My Fingers Part 1

2006-02-23T14:06:00.000-08:00

I remember the day we met. I remember leaning back against a car as you came around the corner on a yellow bicycle. I remember that you had just purchased a new album. (They were albums then. Not tapes. Not CD’s. Albums.) I remember it registering with me that Jeremy’s breathing pattern changed when you rode up. It was the first time I suspected he was secretly in love with you.

Funny. I never asked him about it. I guess because I knew the question itself could pull his house of cards down like a stray gust of wind. And all these years later, even though we never talked about it, I am sure he was in love with you. There’s not even a hint of doubt.

Right after we were introduced, you asked Jeremy when the two of you were going to swap wives. I said nothing. I might have blushed. But I was… intrigued. Flattered. Okay – let’s be honest – I was game right then. I also knew Jeremy had a thing for your girlfriend, Linda. Though I always suspected that was part of his tangled passion for you.

Did you ever know he was in love with you? Did you ever even suspect? Did you know he had a thing for Linda? Is that why you brought the whole “swap” thing up? Or were you just being charming? Because, you were always that. Charming. Almost to a fault.

God, you were beautiful. Your head shaved smooth, wearing the requisite white T-shirt with the Anarchy “A” scribbled in black magic marker. Jeans and a leather jacket. Young and rebellious. Radical and wild, and you had me from hello.

You were still living in that house with Jay and Barbara. We sat in the living room, listened to that new album, had a few beers, smoked some grass.

By the time I moved to the city, you were sharing a different house with Jeremy, with Jay, with Perry, and with Matlin. I loved that house, the house we all came to call “The Hotel.” You and Linda had split up. Jeremy and I were engaged.

One Tuesday afternoon, just before Thanksgiving, you, Jeremy, and I were playing cribbage at The Hotel and I asked Jeremy to get drunk with me that night. Jeremy said he had a mid-term the next day. You said you’d get drunk with me. It was settled. We would tie one on.

Later I asked Jeremy, “Can I?”

He hesitated.

“Yeah.” He said at last.

We settled into the kitchen, where you had set out gin and tonic. I hated gin and tonic. But that night, I didn’t care. I was nervous as a cat.

“(She) was trying to keep (her) courage up by applying booze…”

Of course, we had a lot of company. No one ever drank alone at The Hotel. I remember Tom and David being there. Erica McFee. Jacob Stein. Jonathan. I think Matlin and Barbara were in for a bit. And maybe Derik and Tresia.

Probably we played cards at some point. And the gin and tonic flowed like, well, gin and tonic.

But then, finally, we were alone. We were conveniently seated close together. But suddenly, we both turned a little shy. More gin and tonic. Or maybe we didn’t bother with the tonic. We flirted cautiously at first, and then with reckless abandon. Finally you kissed me.

That night, as we made love, you kept asking me over and over again, “Will this happen again?”

And each time I said, “I can’t be the one to answer that.”

Why didn’t I just say “Yes”?

* * *

Around 5 a.m. I heard Jeremy in the shower. “I think I’m supposed to go home now.”

“He knows?”

“Of course.”

And when the shower stopped, I got up, dressed, and went up to Jeremy’s room upstairs.

But my heart stayed in your room with you. A part of my heart has never left.

Waiting

2006-02-12T22:10:00.000-08:00

The first time we met, I was warned that you were terribly shy and probably wouldn’t speak at all. Instead, you sat down at my kitchen table with your clove cigarettes and talked my ear off for the next several hours. We knew each other instantly. That sudden shock of recognition, of karmic connection.

You let me read your poetry. You agonized with me over straight boys who had turned your head and at the gay boys who bored you. I taught you to use liquid eye liner and you taught me to use blush to enhance my cleavage.

You used to drop acid late at night and get lost walking in the city. I gave you a card with my phone number, with directions of how to tell where you were, and instructions on how to reach me, no matter where you might end up. I took your calls with no thought to clocks or obligations.

Once, you got smashed at a party as Lena and I steered you to the car, poured you into the backseat, you said to me, “What would I do without you?”

“Easy. You don’t do without me.”

We were almost unbearable in public. At restaurants, grocery stores, pizza joints, we would laugh and laugh at almost everything we saw. You could always make me laugh. Through lovers lost, schemes gone awry, medical humiliations, and far too many experiments in better living through chemistry. You made me laugh through some of the worst moments of my life.

You took me in when the world fell out from beneath my feet.

I took you in when the world fell out beneath yours.

It was at your house that I had my mad, summer affair with Martin. It was largely your doing that the whole mad affair started in the first place. With me, bent over your bathtub, in my ridiculously-short-shorts.

Friends tried to tell me they didn’t trust you. I understood. Your lack of respect for personal property was legendary. But I would answer, “I would trust him with my life. I wouldn’t necessarily trust him with five cents. But I would trust him with my life.”

Ironic, that in the end I stole from you.

During the worst days of the end of my affair with cocaine, I dropped by your apartment in a paranoid psychotic haze and finding you gone, fished out the foiled paper from my cigarettes and wrote a single word on the back of it. “Help.”

You came.

I sat you through the longs months you got stuck in the window seat of your apartment. Days and days without sleep or food, and I would find you there. “Baby. Baby.” I would hold you and rock you and call your soul back to your body from that dark, dark, place.

When we lived apart, our letters flew back and forth like homing pigeons. Funny letters. Serious letters. Mad, stream of consciousness letters with sentences that went on for pages. Letters so voluminous we would inscribe the envelopes with, “Warning: Contents under pressure. Do not puncture or incinerate…”

I still have them all, you know. Tucked into a box. A large box. Some day, when my heart can bear it, I’ll put them in order. Re-read them all. When my heart can stand it.

And in the end?

Your lover became my lover. No one meant for that to happen. But intentions don’t count. It did happen. You refused to be angry at me about it, and like a fool, I prodded you to anger. Looking back, I know how stupid that was. Looking back, I’d give almost anything to take it back. But at the time, I thought it would help. I thought you would yell at me, and we could get it out, talk about it, try to salvage the damage.

Maybe too much damage had already been done.

I look for you, you know. I google you. I search the phone directories and the Social Security Death Index.

It’s been six years now. There are days when I can hardly bear the silence.

I cling to this. We’ve found each other in a thousand lifetimes. And we’ll find each other again. Probably not in this lifetime. But we will find each other again.

Because…

We must.

How else can I be whole except with you?

And so, my heart waits.

Just Spring

2006-02-05T21:57:00.000-08:00

It was just spring (and the world was mudlicious), and on a warm April night I waited for you. For you to beat the city traffic, thread the highways, drive the back roads. For you to come from where you were to where I was. Where I was waiting for you. With good wine, and good cheese. With good jazz on the stereo. With arms wide open. With a heart beating madly and only for you.

You arrived close to midnight. I heard your truck park on the side street. My heart leapt at the sound of that old truck, of your boots on the stairway. I stood in the doorway for you.

Life could begin now. I could exhale.

You took me in your arms and we breathed each other like oxygen. Drank each other like water. Held each other like drowning souls clinging to the last thing above water. Got lost in each other’s eyes.

We sat on the floor in the living room and drank the wine and ate the cheese and talked of our days, our week, our thoughts, our dreams, our love. Words flowing like the wine. Time slipping by like silk in the wind. And suddenly! The sun! It was morning! The night disappeared behind us in a mad dash.

We did the only sensible thing. We left for breakfast. A funny old café where all the town’s old men gathered each morning. Eggs. Extra-thick bacon. Fresh biscuits and gravy. Orange juice just squeezed from the orange. Good, strong coffee.

And then we did the only other sensible thing. We went to the river.

There was river-front property for sale. We made mad schemes of buying two lots, and building in the middle to keep the neighbors at bay. A house high on stilts. Fishing from the back deck. We were young and were in love. The sky was ours for a song! Anything was possible. With love like that, everything was possible.

Spring was rioting around us. Wildflowers bloomed along the highways. As we crouched beside the water, a branch wavered in the wind. But it wasn’t a branch! It was a snake! Lovely and green and swaying so perfectly with the grass. I would never have seen it. I looked at you in wide eyed wonder at what all your eyes took in! You saw each tiny detail. You were part of it all in a way I could never be. I couldn’t believe I had been so lucky as to find you.

I sat down by a tree and watched you skip rocks. Splash! Splash! Splash! Six skips! Ten!

You held your fingers to your lips and motioned me over. I walked over, thinking you wanted to show me the water lilies were in bloom. But there on the water lilies, among all those yellow blossoms, were little blossoms walking from lily pad to lily pad. Ducks! Baby ducks! Hiding in the blossoms!

How had you seen them? Their camouflage was so perfect! Tiny little marching swimming blossoms! Oh, yellow fluff! Oh, my wonderful, magic lover! Oh, how I loved you!

And no matter where you are now,
no matter what you’re doing
or who you are with…

In my heart you will always be in that endless night, that magic day. In my heart you will always be those tiny ducks, that swaying snake. The all seeing eyes.

In my heart you will always be young and perfect and magical.

In my heart you will always be the best of my happiness.

In my heart I will always be waiting –
for the sound of your boots at my doorstep
for the sight of you by the water
for you to come back.

So that life can begin.

Legacy

2006-01-19T18:22:00.000-08:00

You had spent the past three months trying to talk me into going ahead and getting married. You were on a campaign. Each day brought a new reason. A new persuasion.

We both knew our parents had discussed the possibility. We both knew that if we did go ahead and marry, they would have continued to support us until we both graduated. Nothing much would have changed.

Except everything. I mean, marriage does – after all – do that. Change everything. But that’s beside the point. We were young. We didn’t know that. We knew, oh god, so little. So incredibly little.

That day you sat in the bathroom talking to me while I bathed, shaved my legs, dunked my head under and washed my hair. We had been intimate long enough for this to have been casual. I don’t remember what we were discussing. I just remember suddenly you stopped and said, curiously, “Your breasts look larger.” For a moment you almost looked amused.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”

You froze.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

I’m not sure what I expected. Certainly not jubilation, but neither did I expect the anger that exploded from you. I wonder, did you come close to slapping me? Surely you must have. Oh, I know that much about you. Don’t be coy with me. Did you consider drowning me right there in the tub?

Of course, I know what you saw, Jeremy. You saw the possibilities of your life shrink in a single instant. You saw me forcing your hand. You imagined all sorts of sinister plots and scheming. Your barely controlled paranoia ran amok. You forgot entirely that this recent headlong rush to matrimony was part of your agenda. Not mine.

I don’t remember a lot of what was said. I remember volume, and facial expressions, and one single, solitary sentence. “So help me God, Lily, if you have this child I will never speak to you again.” Those words will never fade from my mind. They became the totality of my reality. If I wished to keep the man whom I intended to be my husband, I must give up this child.

I saw a doctor. The doctor not only confirmed the pregnancy, but expressed grave concern over medication I had been taking prior to being aware of being pregnant. “If there is anything even slightly iffy about this pregnancy, terminate it.” His words were final. Dismissive.

I talked to my parents. My parents assured me they would “take care of it.” Their words too, were final. Dismissive.

No one, including me, asked me what I wanted to do.

For all my affectations of rebellion in college, the real rebellion, the real fight in me, had been beaten out of me by the time I was 16. Squashed like a bug. I was a good girl, and I did what I was told. It never even occurred to me I had a choice.

The abortionist was a horror. I remember the office, all black leather and chrome with foil wallpaper. I expected a pimp to come out, not a nurse. I remember her sneer at me for not knowing your blood type ('You would sleep with a man without even knowing his blood type?'). I remember feeling like a whore, being treated like a whore, the condescension, the shame.

And the pain – oh mother of God! I remember hurting so badly that I was fighting to get from one breath to the next. I remember the look on your face when you saw me, white as a ghost, afterwards. When you knew, you really knew, how much they had hurt me.

It was years before I learned that an abortion didn’t have to hurt like that. Years before I understood that doctor was punishing me, waging his own vendetta against whores like me, bad girls who slept with their fiancés and committed the unpardonable sin of conceiving a child.

A year later in a drunken rage at a party, you balled your fist up and knocked me off a porch 15 feet back onto the sidewalk. I remember hitting the cement and the endless moments when I simply could not force air into my lungs.

You came to me the next morning. Sobbing. Pleading. But baby, everything I had ever felt for you died between the time your fist hit my face and my back hit that sidewalk. I got off of that sidewalk over you. Finito. The End.

What remains is only the memory of that single line.

“So help me God, Lily, if you have this child I will never speak to you again.”

And to think I cared! I cared!

My god, how many years have passed since we spoke? How many women have been on the wrong side of your fist in those years? Thank god we didn’t marry. Thank god I learned in time.

Four years later, I had my first miscarriage. Another two years later, I had my last. By then I knew that I would never be able to carry a pregnancy to term. I had been too badly damaged. It was too late.

You stole from me my one viable child. Stole that from me with your petty, petulant threat.

And that, my dear, remains in my heart. The only trace of you there at all.

Summer

2006-01-06T21:20:00.000-08:00

It never would have happened had Adam not called me that morning.

He was panicking. I grabbed a cigarette, rubbed the sleep from eyes and listened. His parents had left town. He’d had a party. The house was in shambles. Would I help clean up?

Cleaning. That’s my gig. I can clean anything.

So I put on my ridiculously-short-shorts, an old ragged t-shirt, and went to his house. We gathered trash (lots of trash), drank wine, washed dishes, drank wine, mopped, drank wine, vacuumed, drank wine, and then I was in the bathroom, bent over scrubbing out the tub, and you walked in. I screamed at Adam, suddenly acutely aware of my appearance, of my state of undress. “You hadn’t warned me any men would be here! You hadn’t warned me any heterosexual men would be here!”

I remember vaguely writing a letter to Adam’s father that I owed him a bottle of wine. I remember vaguely all of us ending up at my apartment.

I remember quite well that you kissed me. Slow and sweet. I remember how you looked after that first kiss. There is a photo in my mind. You with your head thrown back against the oak paneling.

And I remember feeling the wine kill my guts sometime in the middle of the night. How romantic. How suave. I was throwing up my toe nails. A certain way to capture a man’s heart! And you! You were so sweet. Got a cold washcloth for my forehead. Dragged your fingernails across my back until goose flesh rose and my body cooled. The very thing, perhaps the only thing, that would make me feel better.

And in the morning, there we were.

You showed up the next evening with a bottle of Crown Royal and a cribbage board. “You’ve done your research?!?” I said. I was flattered. Amused. A little depressed to be so predictable and easily pegged. More than anything, I was thrilled to see you. Did you know? Did you see right through me?

We got drunk. We played cards. You played well. I hadn’t expected that. You also drank well. I hadn’t expected that either. You came over other nights. A lot. Sometimes at 2 or 3 a.m. You came over in the day. Sometimes at 9 a.m. and settled in for the duration.

It was days before you tried to make love to me again. Days in which I wondered about this dance we were doing. But we worked it out. Stepped over the obstacles. Ignored a few rules. You were young and brash. I was young and drunk and what the hell? You were younger, not by much, not enough to send me to jail, but enough. I was a robber. Of cradles. Of conventions. Of my own broken heart. A pirate set loose upon the sea.

Do you know how happy you made me? How much fun I had with you? How when you held my broken heart in your hands it became whole again for a moment, it’s beat strong and true?

Soon, the world fell out from beneath my feet, and I moved in with Adam and his dad. Luckily, I had kept my word and purchased his father that bottle of wine.

We had only that spring and that summer. August was an end for both of us. You going one way. Me going another. So we seized the moment, dashed headfirst like children into sprinklers, threw caution and sense to the wind. It was magic. Time out. No reality. No tomorrow. Only an endless now in which we devoured each other. I’ve never hungered for a lover like I did you that summer. I was insatiable. I was ravenous. I breathed only for you.

Each morning, I would get up and preen myself for you and wait. Would you come? You came! Whole days passed tangled in sheets. We danced and played cards and walked and dined and oh! the summer night against my skin! The endless warm embrace of june bugs and cicadas. Days without calendars or clocks.

At the bar one night Wanda came and was flirting with us both. I thought you wanted to. You thought I wanted to. Finally, I discretely left, leaving you to her. Oh! You were so angry! My trick! No! No! Your trick! Oh bloody hell! More good intentions with which the road to hell was paved. What began as an argument dissolved into laughter.

And one night, that lovely boy – the one Adam was so hot for – broke his guitar string and tied it, ever so tenderly, around my neck, while you growled and glared. Silly, silly man. No boy, no matter how lovely could have stolen me from you then! I was the butterfly on your shoulder, wings beating softly against your cheek.

And then, inevitably, August came. I packed the first truckload and made the first trip out, truck fairly bursting at the load. I returned the next morning for the few final things. Remnants. Not even enough for the trunk of my car. And we met in that vacant house. From 11 a.m. until 1 a.m. we made love in the empty living room, stopping only to go out and gorge ourselves with food.

I never loved you more than I did that day. No sorrow. No regrets. Just joy. Joy and love like a fountain. Gushing, flying, sunlit to the sky.

And when it was time to say goodbye, we smiled our love into each other eyes, and then you! You did the most amazing thing! Took the cross from around your neck, the cross you’d worn for years. The cross you showered in, made love in, never-ever-ever took off. You took that cross and slipped it around my neck. I was almost speechless.

A week later, a letter: “For god’s sake Lily, take off the necklace. I know you don’t wear jewelry.”

But there were drops of your blood after your signature. And I understood. I understood.

My darling lover! My laughter! My joy! My delight!

My heart still bleeds for you, precious drops on bits of paper. Paper carefully folded into love like an origami crane.

Loss

2005-12-30T23:28:00.000-08:00

I’ve wondered if I could even begin to write about you.

All these years later, I still remember the day we met. It was in orchestra class in 7th grade. Of course, we didn’t become friends until later that year. When we had both begun crossing lines and boundaries, rebels against whatever you had.

I remember the first time we got drunk together. I think it was spring. I remember it as being warm, but then, that may have been the wine. Terrible, cheap wine. And we made up a stupid song about “Rubber Leggies” to the tune of Sesame Street’s “Rubber Duckie.” I remember walking up the block to your house in the darkness singing, silly, ridiculously drunk. It’s a moment frozen in time for me. It hangs there sometimes and calls out to me.

I remember when you started running with us. Not the truly bad crowd yet, just skirting the edges of bad. The truly bad came later. I remember that first party at your house, when we all sat on the roof of your garage and smoked marijuana after your grandmother greeted us all like we were demons from hell, and perhaps we were. I remember she sat in the kitchen and chained smoked and we made fun of her sitting there smoking cigarette after cigarette, while we sat on the roof smoking one joint after another.

I remember that you lost your virginity in my bed while my family was on vacation. I still remember the date (December 26th) and I still remember with whom.

I remember a time when we shared everything, including lovers, trouble, and the endless pursuit of the next thrill, the next kick, the next thing.

I remember when you were with… was it Zeek? while I was on my first date with Terrence? The four of us in that tiny apartment, with ZZ Top playing in the background. Throwing our innocence away with both hands. I remember Terrence’s first kiss to me that night, the taste of crest toothpaste. The thrill of being with this older, tattooed and edgy boy. I remember you dating Terrence for a while, and me dating Zeek.

I remember you and I sneaking out one night and going to play foosball. We met some guys and went to have drinks with them. They brought out a joint laced with angel dust. We didn’t know. We had the sense to get out of that apartment before we completely lost our minds, but oh! Didn’t we completely lose our minds? We were walking past a construction site with mounds of dirt coned up all over the place. We thought we were in the mountains. And then suddenly, you were gone! Disappeared! Stark fear grasped me by the throat for a moment until I found you, standing indignant in a six foot hole, and there you were at the bottom! How did we get you out? I don’t know. I don’t remember that part. But we must have gotten you out. We must have, because life went on, and here I am, and there you were, and maybe we shouldn’t have. Maybe it would have been better if time had stopped with you there in that hole and me laughing at the edge.

I remember you fighting Michelle in the park and losing a tooth. Was it over Richie Joe? Was it something else? It was all so long ago. A million years. It was also yesterday. It was this afternoon.

I remember when you and Beatrice and I all became best friends. Sharing everything, even the guys we dated. Driving around in Bea’s ridiculous tank of a car. We had it all, the blonde, the red head, the girl with the chestnut brown hair down her back. It was a treacherous balance for me, though I never told you that. I was always jealous of anything you did with Bea without me. Perhaps Bea was jealous of what you and I did without her. Perhaps even you were jealous of what Bea and I did alone. Three is not an easy number. Even for friends.

I remember how we had it mapped out, the guys two of us would date, the guys only one of us would date, and that no one would date all three of us. Except Jon Earl of course. He charmed his way into being the exception, and exceptional he was. In the end, he broke Bea’s heart, but that’s her story to tell or not. I hope you see him now and again. I hope there’s comfort for you in that, in something old and familiar.

Remember the first time Jon Earl drove me home? You called him and asked him to! I said no at first, but you were emphatic. “Let Jon Earl drive you home. You will like it.” And I did. I did.

I remember one cold and misty morning with you and me and Brant – back from some nefarious sojourn – walking and eating donuts and flirting. God he was beautiful that morning. Oh, Brant! My first lover. My funny friend. Do you see him now and again too?

I remember when Jay Vanzandt came back to town, just back from juvie with that blue Lincoln continental and asked us to take a ride with him. Were we game? Of course! We were always game then! Seizing the day! The moment! I remember driving by a park in the rain, speeding. Not racing, but speeding. The cops were there. Suddenly lights were flashing, and instead of pulling over, Jay gunned the engine and we were off… I remember screaming at Jay to stop, to pull over, screaming that it was “just a goddamned traffic ticket for fuck’s sake!” And finding out – of course – that the car was stolen, there were pounds of grass in the trunk, and ounces of meth. We zigged and zagged back and forth through streets and alley ways. Almost killed an old man taking out his trash. We drove across the lawn of the damned county courthouse! We drove and we drove, and more and more cops were chasing us, and Jay turned a sudden U from an alley into a street, and the cops all lost their balance, skidding in the rain. They ended up in yards with their transmissions trashed and miraculously we escaped!

We went to Bea’s house. Where else? Ditched the car. Calmed our adrenaline with some grass. Chilled.

How stupid of me to not have questioned Jay with a Continental! How young and stupid, and ridiculously lucky we were to have made our way out of that one. I don’t know what became of Jay. I’ve heard rumors, dark rumors, but I don’t know. Perhaps you do. Perhaps you run into him too, now and again.

The last time I saw him was one of the last days I was on the street. We were walking to Bea’s house. We talked. Seriously. Earnestly. “You’re dying.” Everyone was telling me I was dying in those days. Including your older brother.

During the worst of it, your older brother took me to your house. You were gone. Your father, your grandmother, and your younger brother too. Somewhere, I don’t know. I was too sick to know. I weighed 85 pounds and was dying of pneumonia and exposure. Your brother made me licorice root tea with ginseng, fed me herbs, fed me food, burned incense and chanted over me, for how long? Hours? Days? I dozed in and out, and somehow – against all reason – recovered.

I remember the first time you took me to Tim McFarrel’s house. I remember the pine paneling on the walls. The layout of the room. The three of us smoking grass with a fire blazing in the fireplace. Another moment frozen, calling out to me.

In the end, he broke your heart. Treated you like a petty play thing, and I’ve never forgiven him.

I remember getting you a job when I was trying to pull my life back from the brink. You didn’t show up the first day and I had to cover your shift. I was furious with you. It’s good, that I can remember being furious with you now and again. It keeps you in perspective.

And god knows, you could get furious with me. Often did. Especially that night at the movies. Our date dropped us off at my house and you stormed off walking home. I tried to follow you, and you waved me off walking faster. I was floored that you were so angry. Had no idea that I’d pissed you off so much, or even at all. The rules were changing for you, but not for me. You know, if I had known that it was important to you, that the rules had changed with you, things would have been different. I would never have pissed you off like that. I still have a hard time letting that one go. One of a thousand regrets.

I remember when you started dating William during a time when he and I were at a hiatus. I was pining for him, pitifully, loudly, and often to you. You never told me, hinted only that you were seeing someone and were ridiculously happy. He didn’t tell me for the longest time either. Not when we were engaged to be married, not when he was trying to persuade me to run off to Vegas and get married at once. Not until years later, when we’d both been through a marriage or two. Even then, he could barely talk about you.

And remember James? Your real boy? That ended all wrong. Wrong for all of us. But I guess there was no happy ending to be had here. Some stories are set in stone with the first sentence.

There were happy moments though. Lots of them. Meeting you at the park at sunrise to get high and watch the sun come up. I remember, god – who was it? Tom O’Malley? Jon Earl? Someone? – meeting us there, and talking us into going to Denny’s for omelets. I remember he knew the menu blurb for a Denny’s Pizza Omelet by heart, recited it for us, bringing us to tears of laughter.

I remember listening to Iron Butterfly’s Inagaddadavida run through your father’s bass amp, played at a slow, slow speed, so slow the bass ripped through the walls and our drug laden minds.

I remember the “bottles” of our Park? Grass, dirt, bugs, litter and all, stuffed carefully into empty soda bottles. Time in a Bottle. Time stopped. Time.

Time. Time. Time. See what’s become of me?
While I looked around for my possibilities.
I was so hard to please.

But look around.
Leaves are brown
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter…

Hang onto your hope my friend.
That’s a easy thing to say,
But if your hopes should pass away,
Simply pretend
That you can build them again.

Look around.
Grass is high.
It’s the springtime of my life.

Seasons change in their greenery
Weaving time in their tapestry.
Won’t you stop and remember me?

The last time I saw you, you dropped by unexpectedly. We had drifted some around then, though at the time I just considered it a phase. I never questioned that you were my best friend and always would be. That day, you were tripping on acid, said you wanted to see me, to talk, though we talked of nothing consequential. Just drove in your car and chatted. I left puzzled. Unsure of what had just transpired.

Later I learned you had dropped by on us all in that couple of weeks. Never for any reason. Always loaded. Always just wanting to see each of us.

I remember the afternoon I got word. It was our senior year of high school. One of those ridiculously beautiful April days. Warm. Gentle. Daffodils and fruit trees blooming like crazy. I had been on a walk. I came home and my father – my father! the man who barely spoke to me though my whole childhood! – sat me down and told me. He told me that Susan had called. That you hadn’t shown up for work that day. The words after that all flowed together… suicide. A gun. My mind snapped at the first sentence. All I could manage was to screech, “Who is Susan?”

Finally I understood, and grief settled down over me like a bad case of the flu. I walked in a stupor for days. Barely understanding anything that anyone said to me. William took me out that night. I couldn’t understand his distance from my grief. I didn’t know then that you and he had been lovers. That this was his loss too. He took me home quickly, retreated for weeks.

My brother-in-law came over and sat with me on the front steps and we held each other as we cried. You were his loss too. A lover long before my sister.

I went to your family’s house the next morning. There was no wreath on the door. For a moment, I thought it was all a dreadful mistake. Then your father answered the door and I saw the truth, the agony, in his eyes.

Your mother came from California. Your younger brother was… a robot. Moving vacantly from room to room utterly devoid of emotion. He had found you. Opened the door to your room, even though your suicide note instructed him explicitly to not open the door. Your older brother was lost on one of his journeys. He did that a lot. Just disappeared.

At your funeral, I sat between my parents, holding hands with each of them. Pete and Kaden sat behind me, both with their hands on my shoulders. I sobbed through the whole thing, with the tears just streaming down my face. No hand free to wipe them away, but what was the use of trying?

Afterwards, Tina Jameson threw herself in my arms and wailed, “I want her back!” I wanted to spit on her, to claw her eyes out. The two of you were never close friends. How dare she belittle my grief by comparing it to hers? I could have killed her in the church parking lot. I could have killed everyone to have eased my pain.

It’s been 24 years, and I still live with that same intensity of grief. It’s never gotten better. It’s only become a part of me. A part of who I am. Each year, I still mark your birthday, the anniversary of your death. Each year I count the years since you’ve been gone, and can’t believe it wasn’t yesterday.

When you died, I had that old blue plaid flannel shirt of yours. I wore it until it was literally rags hanging from my shoulders, and even then it was years before I could throw it away. I tried to throw it out after it became rags. I was cleaning out the closet, took that shredded shirt from it’s hanger, and just stood there and cried. I couldn’t let go.

This year when I met my family for Christmas, I asked my mother to get my jewelry box from the safety deposit box at the bank. I was ready to take it home. My sister was with me when I opened it. Inside was a necklace from Tiffany’s with an enormous garnet that belonged to my aunt Lily, my name sake. My grandmother’s platinum and diamond wedding ring was there, the wedding rings from my marriages were there, along with a few gold coins. And there, in that box of precious gems, was a cheap silver ring with an obviously fake turquoise stone. My sister asked, “What is that?”

“That was Marla’s.”

“Oh.”

In my mind is a perfect picture of you walking towards me in the park, your long brown hair flowing behind you. You are young and unspeakably beautiful. And there is no time. No distance. You are close enough to almost touch.

Almost.

I dreamt one night, long ago that I found you. The dream shifted through alternate realities in which you were alive, dying, dead, gone, here, and then finally at last, I was holding you, clinging to you, crying like a child, and then my arms were suddenly, agonizingly empty. After a moment, I felt something on my shoulder and turned to see a cardinal. The bird looked at me for a trice, cocked it’s head and flew away.

Oh fly sweet Marla! Fly somewhere safe and kind. Fly into the warmth of the sun. Fly to all the others I’ve left to their graves. And fly back to me someday.

In my heart there is a vacant room, reserved just for you. It shall never, ever, belong to anyone else. And it aches in it’s emptiness. It aches.

Oh god, Marla, I loved you so.

Innocence

2005-12-25T09:46:00.000-08:00

You taught me to play chess.

Each summer, your family would load up in that wonderful VM Microbus with the pop-up sleeping tent, and make the long drive from Minnesota to Texas to spend the summers.

Your younger sister, Laura and I had been good friends for years. A flutter of letters migrated north and south across the country during each school year. I had watched your younger brother learn to walk and talk. Seen your grandmother through a stroke. Seen your dog give birth to a litter of puppies, and seen those puppies grow into dogs.

But it seems that summer, I spent more time with you than your sister. Or at least as much time. You taught me to play chess and to do a back flip of the diving board. We talked, it seems, a lot. But I can’t remember what about. We fished, we swam, we hiked, and rode horses. And we played chess. I think chess became our way of flirting; of shrinking the world to include only the two of us.

And one night at the end of that summer, your mother decided to let all us “kids” sleep in the van. There was certainly plenty of room, and we were all used to camping out. Sleeping in the van was fairly tame. Except it was just the four of us, instead of a whole gang of kids.

And that night, while your younger brother slept, and your sister kindly pretended to, you kissed me.

I remember the whole “where does the nose go?” and “am I doing this right?” dialogue running through my head. A dialogue known to every child embarking upon the adventures of flirting and kissing and learning about love. I was twelve and you were a sophisticated fourteen, how daunting to me that distance of age! How flattering that I had turned your head.

I carried a torch for you at least through November that year. From that single first kiss. A tribute due any first kiss.

By the next summer though, I had transformed. I had discovered drugs, was dating the “cool” boys, older boys on motorcycles with long hair . And my family had quit summering in our quiet little riotous spot in the country, with it’s wild running dogs and wild running kids, with the horses, the swimming pool, the steep cliffs, and the gentle creek.

My childhood left behind me in a sudden single year.

At 38 you died of lung cancer. You! Who had never smoked a cigarette in your life! I heard you died quickly, ran the race from diagnosis to death at breakneck speed. I heard you died an hour or so prior to scheduled surgery. Skipped the anesthesia and slipped instead into death’s cold embrace.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose…

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

- To An Athlete Dying Young
A.E. Houseman

I still don’t know how to say goodbye to you. I had thought somehow that first kiss made you immortal.

That kiss still lives in my heart.

Immortal after all, I suppose.

Rage

2005-12-18T12:24:00.000-08:00

There were three of you. Young and strong. Evil and ruthless. And one late April night, you removed a screen, broke out a window, and entered into my grandmother’s house.

She was awakened, blinded, struggling for air, with a pillow thrust down over her face. She didn’t die. In frustration, you tried to strangle her. Wrapping your young, strong hands around her frail, thin neck, and still she did not die. The three of you then tried to merely beat her to death. With a length of pipe, with a baseball bat, with you fists, you beat her until she was almost unrecognizable as a human being. And when she still lived, you tied her, at last, to a chair, and then went on to ransack her house.

You stole her jewelry. You stole her silver. You stole gadgets and memories. You were such idiots you stole original artwork. And at some time in that awful night, you stole my grandmother.

You fools! What threat did she pose to you? This tiny 74 year old woman? Had you awakened her and asked, she would have served you coffee and told you where the good jewelry was. The jewelry you didn’t find.

Long after you left, she freed herself. After finding the phone lines cut, she crept her way to a neighbor’s house. A neighbor she had known for 30 years didn’t recognize her. Wondered who was this black woman heaped on his doorstep at 4 a.m. Once he heard her voice, he knew. She wasn’t black. She was merely beaten black. He sprang into action. Called the police. Called my parents. Rushed her to the hospital. Stayed with her until my parents arrived.

I got the phone call at 7 a.m. I barely remember throwing things into a bag, rushing to my car, driving the long highway home to be at her side. When I arrived, she was with her minister. Telling him every wretched detail. A thing she would repeat over and over with each new visitor.

The very sight of her shook me to my core. I have never seen someone so badly beaten. Never before and never since. Her misshapen face was cole black with deep maroon beneath. Her cheekbones and nose were broken. Even in the deep blackness I could see the clear handprints at her throat, the bruises dripping down her chest to her broken ribs.

You were caught, of course. All three of you. The jewelry and the silver and the things were all returned. A deal was struck with the D.A. and you spent three years in prison. Three years! For the utter destruction of a woman. For a life destroyed beyond repair.

She did not die that night, but she was never the same. The woman I knew as my grandmother vanished, and in her place was a bitter, mean, old woman. Given to flaring tempers, and averse to company of any sort. She tolerated my visits from then on, but I don’t think she ever again enjoyed my company.

As a child, she had been my one safe place in a world that was horrifically, wholly unsafe. She had been my friend, my confidante, my playmate, the heart and soul of all my best childhood memories.

She is long dead now. She died alone, she died a wreckage of the woman she had been.

And if I ever see one of you, catch even a glimpse, I will hunt you down and I will end you.

My heart is bitter and vengeful. My heart is full of rage.

Stormy Weather

2005-12-17T16:56:00.000-08:00

Janis Joplin was singing “Summertime” the first time we kissed. Remember? That moment when our hands brushed across each others at the table, and we stopped – frozen in time –and the moment stretched thin, taut with tension and unanswered questions, and then our lips found each other.

But that’s another story for another time. It’s Janice that’s important now. She was the sound-track to our… what? Affair? Nothing so tawdry as that. A fling? For you perhaps, but for me it was deadly earnest. I loved you fiercely and wildly. And Janice’s voice soared and dipped and pulled the blues out of the sky through it all.

It was Janice that I heard in your voice that night when I came in to find you drunk and naked, draped only in my black lace shawl. Your breasts gleamed in the moonlight and your soft white skin shone through the lace. You were sitting in the window, glass of whiskey in hand, singing “Stormy Weather”.

Don’t know why, why, why, child, don’t know why…
There’s no sun, no sun, up in the sky. In the sky. In the sky.
Stormy, oooh, stormy weather.
Since my man and I, oh, my man, my man, and I,
aren’t together, aren’t together, together…
Seems it’s raining, raining, raining, child,
all of the time, of the time,
all…
of the…
time.

Pitch perfect blues improvisation.

You were never more beautiful than that night in the moonlight. My red-headed muse. My funny duchess The only woman to ever creep her way into my heart.

And all this time later, my heart still sings the blues.

One Story

2005-12-15T16:20:00.000-08:00

An old lover left this at my door just after we broke up.

There is only one story.
He loves her
And she no longer loves him.
There is only one story.

There is only one story.
She loves him
And he no longer loves her.
There is only one story.

My heart is full of stories.

Desire

2005-12-14T19:39:00.000-08:00

I saw you at a convenience store late at night. I was filling my car with gas while you and your friends were buying beer and talking by your car. It was deep summer, and you weren’t wearing a shirt. Your bare chest shone in the florescent lighting of the parking lot. Years too young for me, you were perfect. Young, virile, tan, lightly and tastefully tattooed. Something untamed raged in you. Something like the ocean. Salty. Wild. Powerful.

For a moment you caught my eye, and on a sudden whim, I let you in. I let you see into my eyes. See yourself. Your perfection. See me, the raw sexual desire radiating off me like a fever suddenly spiked.

You started to walk towards me. I smiled and shook my head and got in my car. Thinking, “Oh no baby, you’re way too young.”

That look, that was a gift. I just wanted to let you know.

Did you get it? That it was a gift?

It’s not a gift I give lightly or often.

My heart is fickle and stingy. But for a second or two, I let you in.

And you’re there still.

The Kiss

2005-12-12T18:08:00.000-08:00

It was December 1983, the end of the fall semester, the end of your final semester. You were graduating, going home and getting married. All in rapid succession. Your life spread out before you like a lover’s welcoming embrace.

I was in the kitchen at “the hotel.” Playing cards and drinking and celebrating the end of final exams. I’m not sure how well I was playing cards, but I believe I succeeded quite brilliantly in drinking. But then, it was college, I did that a lot. Drank, I mean. We all did. We were all, I believe, quite good at it.

I was smitten with you from the start. Amazing now, to think of how open my heart was in college, how many of you crept your way into it.

I remember talking with you at parties and at odd nights of spontaneous gatherings at “the hotel” and “the frat house” (which wasn’t a frat house at all), or even that dreadful red-velvet wallpapered bar by the University. I remember you laughing at me for not realizing you were Jewish, for merely finding your last name Germanic.

I remember sitting with you at a party one night on a stairway. We were speaking of something intense, as everything is intense when you’re young and in college. I remember finding our bodies leaning too close to each other, and pulling mine back. I remember my eyes focusing on the shape of your lips, the dark and endless depths of your eyes, the timbre of your voice, the line of your jaw. I remember your eyes staring deeply into mine. I remember, in short, wanting you.

That night in December, you were in a hurry, rushing from place to place, tying up lose ends before you left us. I hated to see you go. When you came back into the kitchen, I was watching you. Between drinks and card plays. And then you called me over to you by the stove. I remember it so clearly I can still see the way the light over the kitchen table spread out to you, the shadows dancing against the back of the ancient stove. I walked over, expecting… I’m not sure. Almost anything but what happened. With a thrown apology to Jeremy, my fiancé, you took me suddenly in your arms and bent me backwards and kissed me. Long and deep.

And then – much too soon – it was over.

I did not want it to be over.

“Give me a kiss to build a dream on
and my imagination will build upon that kiss.
Oh, sweet heart, I ask no more than this,
a kiss to build a dream on.

Give me your lips for just a moment
and my imagination will make that moment live.
Give me what you alone can give:
A kiss to build a dream on.”

For 22 years I’ve built dreams upon that kiss.

I’ve searched for hints of what happened to you. I know your marriage to Katy didn’t last. I know you run marathons, and kayak, and I know you married again. I don’t know the fate of your second marriage. The last time I spoke to Perry he said that last he heard from you, it was on rocky ground, that you talked of running off to Austin. Is your second wife, too, gone from the picture?

In dreams I walk through the mist until I reach and tell you, at last, that I love you. As if it’s the most natural thing in the world to say to someone you haven’t seen in 22 years.

My heart remembers.

Boxes

2005-12-10T23:41:00.000-08:00

L., my love, with all your locks…
Keep your lovers in a box.
With all that you’ve got stored away
One thinks it just might rain someday.

Written to me, by a lover, years ago.

And I do have a box of lovers. An old ornate box which contains a cigarette a lover never got around to lighting. The bent top to an opened bottle of beer. The wrapper to a Hershey’s bar made into a lovely valentine. A guitar pick. A lock of hair. A cork to a bottle of wine. A jack of diamonds. A stone. A seashell. Bits and pieces of other times and other places. There’s only one rule. The thing must have no monetary value.

My heart is a collector.

Prologue

2005-12-06T23:38:00.000-08:00

This is the last prayer in the book
of black prayers a last
passionate yes

Against bad timing & bad luck

So begins one of my favorite poems, “No Heaven” by David St. John. I suspect I am one of the four people in the world who has read it. The poet, his editor, Mrs. St. John (if she exists), and myself. And now you.

Come closer, won’t you? No. All the way over. There now. Lean in. I shall whisper to you a secret.

I have another blog, a blog I shan’t mention or link here. It is for… well, let us skip that, shall we? It seems it really doesn’t really matter, after all.

This blog is to explore the landscape of my heart, the flesh, the shards, even the ice. I won’t promise to tell you facts, but I will promise to tell you the truth. A truth which often has little, if anything, to do with facts.

This is my heart.