Feather by Feather

At some point in the middle of last week, while in a particularly low emotional state, I had the thought. It was unexpected, random, and at the time, I didn't take it all that seriously. The thought: "I could always quit this job."

As the days wore on, the thought gained traction, to the point where, today at a baby shower, I found myself sharing it with a complete stranger whose husband works in the same field, and in fact collaborates with our program from time to time. Later, at work, I found myself confiding amidst tears to my favorite co-worker that maybe I wouldn't be able to stay.

We talked for awhile. I learned that some of my observations and feelings about another co-worker, technically a "superior", were in fact shared by many of the staff there. That really helped me feel a bit less isolated. Of course, that was only a small portion of what was really bothering me.

I wondered if my depression was causing my work-life to be difficult or if work was causing the depression to be more marked than usual. I believe it's both. This week has certainly been difficult. I have had to cry pretty much every day for about a week, sometimes several times a day. Today, two different people told me I looked sad. One was my mother; I responded by brushing her off and saying "I'm fine." Another was a client; I responded by saying "I am" to which she responded, "I am too. I'm thinking about my parents, they died in the spring." She went on to describe them as being "child-like and baby-sweet."

She and I went for a walk, around a pond in the park. We watched a pair of male Mallard Ducks quietly vie for a female's attention on a steep grassy hillside. I pointed out tiny blue flowers growing under a pine tree, "I forget what they're called" she said. "Forget-me-nots, I think. How could you forget?" We giggled. She checked to see if she had already told me before that I had "A delicate feminine heart and a delicate feminine frame." She had. She also reported that her "fiance" whom no-one has ever met, told her that he was "overwhelmed by her femininity." Damnit she is precious.

I feel better tonight, even though I accomplished little at work tonight and have tons to do tomorrow. The heaviness and the crying and the gravity of the past days have eased a bit, and I feel more capable. Showing my weakness, expressing my doubt, and accepting the limited control I really have over so many things has helped me get to that point. Why is it that giving up is sometimes what it takes to go on?

Old Post

I posted this about a year ago, on my old blog. There's at least a coupla' people who check in on this blog that have already read this, so I apologize, but I'm lazy, and in retrospect, this isn't a bad post. I titled it: With No-one as Witness:

I've always had my hidden places. For as long as I can remember. One place was so hidden that I realized as I grew older that it didn't even exist in the first place. It was above the ceiling in the attic, near where a pipe ran up the wall. It was filled with pillows and soft things, just a sea of quiet softness. Only the very young were allowed there. No-one older than me.

As I grew, I found more places. Trees were typical. In the area surrounding my school, near the church, there were several with thick canopies. Certain friends were allowed there. One tree was even named "The Spaceship Crest." It was mostly used for stakeouts and eating junk food. The church itself, which was always open, was always ripe with secret locations, inside and out. One day under a dark staircase, Stacy B. showed her young breasts to a small group of boys, and to my utter horror, me, during some version of truth or dare. I remember feeling bad for her afterwards, because I knew the boys would later judge her, even though it was probably wildly exciting to them at the time. She wasn't pretty, and came from a poor, overweight family. I know she thought this would make them happy, make them like her. This moment. When the soul begins to chip.

I knew I wanted to write about hidden places when I got home today. It centered on one memory, and not any of the above. Those came later in my thinking, though not in my life. There was this place, well hidden, yet ridiculously close to people and activity, that I used to visit in my late teens, in the summertime. I would walk there, or sometimes ride my bike. I know now that it was private property, but I never thought in those terms back then. There was a wooden fence along a winding road, shrouded by a bushy bramble of vines and overgrowth. On the opposite side of the fence was a drop of about five feet, the fence running adjacent to and above a stone wall.

In I would drop, in a skirt and a tank-top, wearing perhaps Converse All-Stars or impractical sandals. More vines and scrubby growth, small fruit trees if my memory serves me. And there, not more than twenty feet from the road, a waterfall. It wasn't large, probably falling, like the wall, about five feet. It spilled down over large flat rocks, the water continuing on down a small stream. Down my satchel, off my shoes, down my skirt, off my tanktop, down my panties, off my bra if I happened to be wearing one. And there, on the rocks, wearing nothing but silver bangles and necklaces and long hair, I would lay myself down, the noonday sun flaming over my nakedness.

This was the memory. I went to this place frequently, alone, and did just that, all that. I think now objectively of this girl, presuming to be alone, water flowing over her young, bright body, her breasts even firmer than usual under the cold water, water rushing down between her legs, over her head, turning her light hair dark and heavy. Surrounded by green and more green, this dare, allowing the acknowledgement of her first lover, everything that she touched, that touched her. The brilliant sun and water spray, the stone warm and cold and slick. Yes, her first.

Could she have been anything other than beautiful, as from a dream? If ever she was witnessed she was left undisturbed, surely one wouldn't disturb such a scene, and who can know if such a sighting occurred? Left alone, she'll never know anything but the memory of wholeness, and beauty, and peace.

Mirror

All day and night it's been washing over me. For a moment today, while taking minutes at a staff meeting, did the letters become meaningless ciphers, did they start to vibrate and nearly scatter? Yeah, they did. Did a blind start to roll down in slow but certain increments, and did I recede into the shade in silence, hoping no-one would notice that morning became dusk, and thunder rolled in the distance? It did. Did I tell myself in an effort to be a friend to myself, behind the closed bathroom door, "This is nothing, this is easy, this is simple. You just do this and take care of it like any little task, and you move onto the bigger things that happen outside of this place. You know, in that place called your life." I did that.

And tonight, even before having a vodka Midori screwdriver, I let it all crash down, finding sorrow in every small thing, and in every big thing, and wondered if the same could be said for joy.

summer comes

an unfortunate mix
of Midori and an open window
of a photographic memory
of a scar on your leg
"A shark bit me"
your dramatic and necessary lie
my kiss falling
spreading
across the tender chasm
rectangular patches
the trade your skin made
the marks that remind you
everyday
of how you loved, once
of how you paid, forever
my touch
my gaze
my unconditional acceptance
mean nothing
and the suffering
the clash of suffering
how it smashed me apart, again
and how I was grateful,
again.

Low

Ok, I made a mistake today. I didn't eat anything until around 7 pm. Where I work, if you don't bother to bring something from home to eat, good luck finding time to get something once you're there. So as the day wore on I became more and more... uh... hmm... spaced out. Also more and more cranky. I had to meet with a client to go over some paperwork. I stopped to get an iced coffee beforehand so I was at least putting something into my gut. As I sit down in her smoke-filled apartment and start pulling out folders she says "I wish you had brought an iced coffee for me. It's very rude of you to show up here with a coffee for yourself and nothing for me." I pause for about two seconds and retort "I thought you might really find it rude if I showed up with a turkey grinder and ate it in front of you. I haven't eaten all day. This coffee is my breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I figured it would be a polite compromise."

She canned the attitude after that. Mind you, I get along well with this client, even though she is often quite demanding, even imperious. We've had lots of good days together. This is exactly why I decided that today I was not going to put up with her shenanigans. We had a lot of paperwork to muscle through, and I had just a little time to do it in. We managed it. At the end of our meeting I told her I'd take her for a coffee on Thursday.

Later at the office I had to convince a client who was highly agitated, crying, yelling, accusing staff of being racist, certain that a man outside was trying to turn her into a prostitute and that she had to meet her (reincarnated) mother in L.A. tonight at 8:05, to have a cup of tea and an anti-anxiety med. Bringing her back to earth was probably the best thing I helped to accomplish today.

I left work so completely out of it. Stopped and picked up some steamed shrimp and broccoli on the way home. Ate it and waited for my blood sugar to stabilize. That was taking awhile, and as I sat there I could only stare at the kitchen walls that are begging for my attention. Potato vodka, Midori, and OJ are finally starting to set my head straight. Scary, maybe. But the walls are calling and I'm finally ready to answer.

Everything's Fucked

My feelings about the killing rampage in Virginia are... well, all I can think about is the obvious trauma that has surely affected anyone who was associated with Virginia Tech. I have avoided most TV coverage of the event, but this morning I read an article in one of our local papers. They mentioned blood in random places on the sidewalks around campus. Also students lined up and executed. This is a fucked world that allows someone to fall so deeply through the cracks that they become invisible to the point that they can successfully and without impediment carry out such an atrocity.

I don't know what else to say about it. It's another fucked up thing that happens in this fucked up world. My nephew goes to college in D.C. and I think of him. The families of the victims must simply be in hell right now. Total hell.

Maybe it's the potato vodka. But I need to cry now.

To be known

and I thought I wouldn't have to be
with you
a magazine

This is one of my favorite lines in a song, ever. It's from Hey Jupiter off the Tori Amos album Boys for Pele. The album was generally more criticized by fans than it was acclaimed, but in my opinion it is probably one of her very best. You have to have patience to get through all 18 tracks, maybe. But it's such a great album with its own bizarre flow and logic, that it requires no patience at all on my part.

But that line. Who hasn't felt that way? A magazine. Interesting enough, for a time. Picked up and put down. Doesn't the average person have only a Reader's Digest idea of what another person is about? There are the rare friends who see you for the great novel or even library that you are. I have a few of those, and am so grateful.

Being known is what we all truly desire, I think, more than "love" or anything else.

I stopped to take a break from working on the kitchen walls and that song came on, so I thought I'd write about it. The sun is starting to slant down, and this beer next to me is goin' down great. In an hour or so I'll try out the potato vodka I picked up earlier today. Will steer clear of the blog after that...

Five Seconds

Your thumb
rubs and pushes
a persistent stroke
a question mark
further inflaming
flushed skin
and pulsing bone
stroking
as if to remove a smudge
a bruise
the sooty result
of days on the lam
the oil from your palm
breaking the surface
dissolving this film
creating
a window
a new view
a switch-up in the no-action
sun-filtered
as deep as I float
down here
off-kilter
amidst
the mournful eyes
of lonely sirens
combing the past tense grasses
smiles turning inward as
the air from your lungs
breaks
the surface
indeed.

Germany vs. Greece: The Philosophers

This made me giggle my brains out.

Inappropriate Love Interests

So about an hour after I left work last night, some delivery guy was stabbed multiple times, um, right outside the door of our building. A group of young men stabbed him and then took his delivery. To quote my sister: What the fuck is wrong with people?

My work office is located within an apartment building, our "office" is technically an apartment. Our staff were basically the first responders last night. Needless to say the staff that were on duty were quite traumatized, having come face-to-face with the perpetrators and having witnessed the immediate aftermath of the assault.

It's really hard for me to say what my reaction would have been had I been there. I can say fairly definitely I'm glad I wasn't there. I don't want to be afraid to go to work, and right now I'm not. The truth of the matter is, this area of town has always been sketchy. A few streets away, where I delivered newspapers as a child, there have been at least a few murders only within the last five years. Mostly drug-related, but still.

On a completely unrelated note: For the last two days, at the entrance of the complex where I work, there has been a group of girls hanging about. They have a long rope attached to a fence on one side of the road, and one of them is "attached" to the other end of the rope, on the other side of the road - they are using it as a skipping rope. That in itself is not so unusual. The strange thing they have been doing is holding up a large, flopping piece of corrugated cardboard every time a driver passes. Bold and sloppy, it reads:

"Honk if You Love Jesus."

I find this absolutely fucking hysterical. I see the girls, and an uncontrollable grin spreads across my face. The girls see it. They grin. We laugh. I honk. Thrilled by the reaction, they hoot and holler. It's ridiculous. They know it's ridiculous, I know they know, and they know I know, and they're a few hundred yards and hours away from a near homicide.

Oh, life is beautiful. Oh, and the title of this post? That's the most I can say.

He Is Risen

Tonight as I sat at the table at my parent's house with two of my sisters, one of them, the school teacher, extracts a crumpled post-it note from her pocket. "Kick me" is roughly scrawled across the aqua blue sheet. My sister goes on to explain that one of her students managed to stick it on her back, another student removed it in short order, and solemnly presented it to her. A gaggle of students soon approached her, conspiratorially suggesting culprits, and wondering if she was going to do anything about it.

My sister sits across from me, and in her dry, inimitable manner says, "It's like the Easter story. I mean, seriously - What the fuck is wrong with people? That's the Easter story."

It's her delivery. And she did basically say that to the kids, minus the expletives. My other sister and I were dying. My sister, the school teacher, deals with some kids who are frankly kind of evil. Not that you can blame them. Their parents either don't give a whit about them or believe their child can do no wrong. Weirdly sometimes both.

I love my sister's sense of humor. She can be so totally inappropriate, and of course that's when she's the funniest. Also this strange combination of being super judgmental/narrow-minded and utterly insightful/incisive. I can imitate it only occasionally.

Speaking of Easter - well, Easter was Easter. There was food and there was wine and there was candy and kids and dogs and bickering and at the end of the day, exhaustion, that's my family and holidays - fucking exhausting. I escaped briefly with my dog, walked off some of the wine, and gathered up some of the late afternoon sun. I have a pure image of my dog, standing alert and at attention on the crest of a long sloping hill of yellowed grass, the orange sunlight illuminating her rusty fur.

Easter means summer is coming, only a few more weeks of this weather that sometimes makes me feel like my last post. Tonight after work I went to the hardware store and picked out paint chips for my kitchen in every imaginable shade of... red. Yeah, red. You'll see. I'll post the pics when I'm done. K' bye.

Spill

It's not a taste, because it's here in my chest? Or my spine? But it's like a taste - water tainted with traces of metal. The taste of metal. In my throat. It's in my throat. Or my blood? It's in my brain. Copper-tasting sobs, ringing at a frequency I'm unfamiliar with. Twisting something desperate from some uncharted region between the sacrum and the sternum. A nervous child's tears. Hollow zinc. Distilled water leaching out the body's minerals.

A raw place. A sulphurous cave. A junkyard after a week of rain.

A spring night that found me walking and walking
just to stand for 15 seconds
watching you
oblivious.

But that was then.

Sometimes I feel I'm watching my mind lose itself, it splinters off, broken and confused fractals, and I cast the nets out again and again in a recovery effort, but the cells keep shedding, and the touchpoints are blurry.
Another pot of black coffee
the scattered pieces of an erector set
a bowl of ripe fruit.
A cat.
A shoe.
A bottle of beer.
I don't mean to back away.
But my needs
exceed
my abilities.

Baby Hair

I pull on my jeans
and opening the shades,
I spy the tiny tin box
trapped between the sill and the open air
a brittle shell necklace within
withered velvet
surrounding your memories
hard and crystalline
a salty treasure box
the key deep
the puzzle beneath
the floorboards
the oblivious mice
nibbling at your store.
Bzzzzzzzzzzing and Bzzzzzzzzzing
then I find you
full of grace
before the mirror
golden down
and all around
your back is slack and taut and brown
your silken hair
is as it was
it always was
this confusion
this softness
this halo
of glinting coins
flung,
surrendered
about the sunken blue ships
of your eyes.

"Are you in love with me?"

"Not anymore," I lied.

"Good. I told you right from the start. Don't fall in love with me."

"It's kind of a pointless thing to tell someone."

"How long have we been doing this? Six, seven years?"

"Somethin' like that."

"Why do you put up with me? I treat you like shit."

"Do you mean to treat me like shit?"

"No."

"I see way beyond your shit."

Dang

Wow, I totally am a sucker for that shit! I just watched that clip again after having been away from the blog for a few days and I'm all *giggle giggle*. I know a thing or two about spazzy white kittens attempting to impress their elders.

Sigh. I just got home from work about 10 minutes ago. Beer came first. Then pajamas. Then computer. Tonight was kind of a little bit exhausting. Progress notes. They are due in two days. That plus phone calls from people who are throwing up or pissed at their roommate for leaving loose tobacco in the bathtub etc. I feel totally fucking drained right now, but also wired as hell. I wished there was a bar open at 12:40 a.m. on a Sunday night somewhere in this town, 'cause I totally would've been there. I have totally used the word totally, like, five times. Dude.

I got all kindsa shit done around here this weekend, well, Friday and Saturday up until around 6:00. Mostly storage related crap. I bought a pretty great entertainment center from this family up the street, sadly I think the mother may have been a meth user or something, she had all those weird sores that meth users get all over her face. I could be wrong. I could be totally wrong. In any case, it was only $25, and it's real wood, not that particle board junk that weighs a ton yet supports nothing effectively. And now there's a place for all my stereo equipment, including the turntable. It's beginning to look civilized around here.

I'm going to need to take some kind of lights out pill tonight. 'Cause reasonably I need to get to sleep at... soon. I work in the morning. That's the one and only drawback to my schedule, the getting out of work on Monday and going back into work on Monday thing. A giant not-drawback is that I might have a four-day weekend this week! Holiday stuff.

I did my bi-annual fingernail painting this afternoon. I pretty much always have painted toenails. I just like it. I've had to grow into that kind of girliness. But fingernails - just not practical, and a pain in the ass. But for a few days, my nails are the color of blood being drawn into a vial. Very, very dark blood red, almost black.

I want another beer. But that's not reasonable. But I want... this is where a Coronita would come in handy. This is where a bar open past 1 a.m. on a Sunday would come in handy. Dang.