#16: Dear Reader
Never take advice from someone who—
[September, Notes]
My far-away friend,
I write to you now not from the house by the sea but from the house at the edge of the woods. Sprawling acres, nine, and the treeline comprises of poplar and birch, ash, and various evergreens. The poplar feels the most familial to me. Only a few weeks ago, a hawk settled in front of me on the branch. I shouted in shock without thought and it pushed off its weight and flew. “Come back… I’m sorry,” I exclaimed.
It’s the season now where I feel myself slowly unraveling.
Not the earthly season, but the internal. It starts as a quiet and slow hum. I feel unnerved, a small set off and the layers of skin are being pulled back, stripped in large chunks from the carcass revealing the flesh underneath. In the vision, I am both the body and the crow.
Full trite exposure, but I play the same songs over and over again — music being the gatekeeper of my tears and also the unhinging of the gate. I keep replaying the same songs because if the familiar sound stops I feel I may die.
I haven’t cried this much in months. I have small rashes on my cheeks from letting the salty drops dry in place. I stare at the walls, the flame of the candle, frozen. No thoughts, just my breath moving as it does, in and out in a buoyed flow.
There’s a bubble on the outside of my aura.
Inside the bubble is my fullest potential — achievements, power, money, skills, and capabilities. My talents are all in there, the purpose and larger mark and meaning to my life. Yet I don't know how to work with the bubble in communion… in relation.
It’s just there, floating. The beautiful thing is that I can at least see it and I know it’s there. It feels within reach. And yet, it’s ungrounded and it’s not in a working relationship to me.
Another dream. She is a diner waitress.
The heat of the sun in a crowded southern city reflects through the windows like a mirror, the humidity causing the silver hair under her ponytail to stick to her neck. I know without knowing it’s the same diner I’d always go to with him, a respite from the heat and dreadfully long bright days.
She wears a cotton V-neck grey dress and a white apron cinched at the waist, both hemlines hitting her knees. Whispy grey strands frame her once beautiful face. She is still beautiful, but time has worn her. She wears a dainty silver ring on her right hand. She has no family — no living relatives, husband, or children. Like Groundhog Day she appears in the restaurant. The outside windows are flushed with white-hot sun, and everything repeats.
I wake up and feel the cortisol shooting down my arms and into my hands.
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When I first came to the mainland, driving around in the day gave me a claustrophobic unease. All I could see was the two-lane highway, the forests and trees. Where are all the buildings? The high rises, the gas stations, the people? I realized I’d have to drive 190 miles down to Boston to see what I was expecting, out of habit, to see around the corner.
The first time I drove at night I called Mother while gripping the steering wheel in the dark.
“You can see all of the stars, Mom.”
I pulled the car over and opened the moonroof, my mouth agape, witnessing the mass dome of the universe.
I imagined a star or two falling into the car and down my throat, like snow.
[September, Fiction]
“No, like, you really have no idea.” Shay, 25 minutes late, throws her bags on the chair next to her in the coffee shop, the wooden foot loudly scratching the floor. Her curls are strawberry blond and loose today, her cowboy boots peaking through the hem of her white prairie skirt. “This eclipse season is sending me.” I slide the iced lavender oat mocha across the table to her and furrow my brows in sympathy and curiosity.
She’s braless in a strappy tank and the air con is blowing over us so her nipples are on full beam through her top. Her breasts are orbital, the most perfect weighted round shape like full water balloons. Her skin is milky pale and I imagine that her naked must look like a Botticelli painting.
“I don’t think I can marry Stuey,” she says with her chin tilted downward and eyes slanted up to me like a little doe.
“What happened?”
“Okay, so you know how I invited his family over to celebrate our engagement? Well, I literally asked him to do one thing. One thing,” she lifts her pointer finger and her jumble of bangles slide down her arm in a clamor. “And what he did told me everything I needed to know.”
“What happened?”
“So I ask him to grab some little apps and snacks at the store and pick up bottled water for his dad since he refuses to drink tap. Of course, he forgets the bottled water and decides to conjure up a fucking cheese platter on his own. Fine. Cute, right? But do you know what he did?”
I narrowed my eyes.
“He bought Ritz crackers and arranged them around in a heart. Then he got a tub of hummus and put it in the center of the plate, where he put little cubes of cheddar cheese all around. And then he…” She breaks eye contact with me on the verge of crying or laughing, I can’t tell.
“He put blueberries on top. All over. On top of the hummus.”
I want to start laughing but I can tell she is deeply disturbed by this. I croak out a half gasp-chuckle while she continues.
“…And then I was like, ‘Stuey... Do you even know me? Do you even know me?’”
I keep my eyes locked on her while I sip my coffee. “Jesus.”
“I just… I don’t think I can marry him.”
“Okay,” I pause. “But this isn’t just about blueberries in the hummus, right?”
“No, no… I just…” She takes in a deep breath and looks past me.
“I’m 24, you know? I don’t know if this is the right decision. I do love him, but I just feel… confused. I fell apart and sobbed when I saw the cheese plate and I can tell he just felt so bad. He’s a good guy… I just don’t know what I’m doing.”
I lightly touch her hand from across the table. “It’s ok to not know. You don’t have to rush into anything… You guys can wait a year or so, right?”
“His parents are really pushing for it. I just feel so much pressure on all ends.”
We sit in silence for a moment and I move my hand to flip my hair away from my face. I’m older than Shay, a different generation divides us, and I understand her hesitation. I think about my own marriage, its quiet dissolution, the small moments that painted an entire canvas. We finished the painting and then slit it down the front with a paring knife.
“But you…” Shay says with a half smile, her blue eyes meeting mine. “You are moving! I am so, so jelly. And so proud of you. My little forest-faerie baddie.”
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My ability to give myself to men who don’t deserve it warrants some kind of charity award. A savior complex? A fixer-upper mentality? “Good bones”?? Is there a nonprofit for helping mother-wounded men? Coddle them, cuddle them, feed them, fuck them, suck them. Heal them, hem them, mend them, addendum.
It’s a hell of a job, but some women just have to do it I guess. Who else wants the wounded shelter dog, the caged-fighting dog, the limped, untrained dog? Someone wants him.
Someone wants him willingly, unflinchingly, at her own expense, and with complete and utter surrender.
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I hold up my folder containing my most important documents and a few old photos of me to the back of Hunter’s head.
“It’s just for a little while… I don’t have room in my suitcase and mom’s room is a mess. I just don’t want it to get lost, knowing her.”
I’m standing in my former bedroom, now the room of my younger brother, his 75-inch TV mounted on the wall to my left. His laundry basket is overflowing and it smells like pineapple vape and wet socks.
“I mean,” he sighs as he swivels from his gaming chair to my right, “Hang on Dustin, I’ll be right back,” he quips into his headphone speaker then whips it quickly from his head and grabs the folder from my hands.
“I don’t really wanna be responsible for your shit.”
“I know but it’s just for a little while,” I say as he punches in the code to his 6-foot-tall safe, twice as wide as I am.
It clicks open and he places the plastic accordion folder next to his row of automatic rifles on the shelf underneath his pistols and shells.
I remember when he was so little and silly, cross-eyed with big circular glasses. He communicated mostly through laughter and onomatopoeia. As he got older he took on the secretive and cards-to-your-chest nature of our mom. I didn’t really know my brother, I realized at that moment.
I suddenly feel irritated by the piling stress of moving and packing. I lurch forward toward the shelf, “I don’t want to inconvenience you, so just forget it.”
He lightly pushes my arm back, “It’s fine,” he says, sucking his vape pen and shutting the safe door with a thud.
“As I said,” he exhales a fruity-smelling cloud and drops into the gaming chair, swiveling to face the computer monitor and putting his headset back on. “I just don’t want to be responsible for your shit.”
His movement was a symphony from beginning to end; plop, swish, swoop, click. He taps the keyboard once, “I’m back Dustin,” he says into the headset.
“Alright… well, thank you,” I mumble, turning to leave.
“Shut the door,” he exhales out with his back to me, the acrid, tropical vapor rising above his head.
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I ride in my truck, windows down. My hair shines slightly copper in the late sun I am wind-blown and braless which makes me feel wilder than I am. I’m making my way through the hills to the sea, the smell of spruce and seaweed all around now as I draw closer. I think of the guy I saw at the co-op, the shape of his body, and my chest caves in at the ache of missing the warmth of a man’s body.
The way he’ll pull my torso toward him and my whole center of gravity moves into him, like a wave hitting the shore. The kind of kissing that’ll leave my whole mouth scratchy and red from his stubble. The taste of hops and tobacco on his tongue, the most holy of tastes. Salt of the earth. He’ll push my hair back as I have all of him in my mouth while on my knees, my eyes locked with his. Oh my god, he’ll say in a breathy, hollow whisper.
I drive over the curves and hills, the road bumpy and my breasts bounce as the truck moves up and over the terrain. My nipples caress the softness of my shirt, sending an extra zing through my body. When I get out to view the water a small triangle is left behind, wet through my skirt on the seat.
[October, Notes]
I thought of Beth today for the first time in a long time. I thought of her as I pondered on the illusion of “making” it, of getting every dream to come true on the surface.
Beth had everything I could hope for. An apartment in Paris, countless Japanese holidays, a custom home in Tennessee. A husband who doted on her and her beloved baby daughter and wild home birth. The coolest clothes, a loyal following, tiny ceramic cups, and potato-bag-shaped coats. Beth was truly fucking cool. Undeniably herself, a trendsetter in every capacity.
She was a brazen and talented writer, which is rare for me to say in the modern sphere, a sea of social media writers (sorry, the Virgo in me has to say it). Beth was a poet-vivant, an eerie spook of a woman who had what it took to charm the masses. A life of adversity, trauma, and privilege intertwined, she was self-made and a brave heart.
When she died I cried for days. In meditation, in the car. Whispers of suicide and addiction with little understanding, and even less confirmation. She had stopped posting and two years from the last post, she was gone. Her young daughter now motherless. Her husband, semi-vague, barring the poetics of, “My peripatetic soulmate, we are sharks in space.”
What’s left of her is a perfect Instagram, grid after grid of the elements captured in their exquisite mundanity, textiles of incredibly expensive clothes that look like simple swaths of linen and wool, smiling faces of her baby girl and husband, her following over half a million. It is a like a motorcycle with no one on it. Beautiful. Going nowhere1.
There is no message in the telling, dear reader.
Just a thought of a sad heart and the pondering of timelines, of what happens when we get everything we want perhaps without the capacity to hold it and to steward it well.
What happens?
What happens?
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A memory, a dream
It never meant anything
A memory, my dream
Wedding bells ring
A memory/dream
An inescapable feign
A memory or a dream
Did it ever mean anything?
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Remember, I made a deal with God
To never turn away
To bow with devotion
And somehow the token
Is tears streaming down cheeks
In a forest
Near a stream
A soft whistle
moonbeam.
[November, remeberance]
My far-away friend,
So much has been shed, again, in a short time. I still sit with the tension of desire and fear (fear of not doing enough, of being too lazy and undisciplined, of feeling like I’m not living my North Node, of not making the money I desire and should be, of feeling like I’m not honing in my talents, like I’m not sharing my gifts, of loving the wallowing and the longing).
But I lay down in the mossy beds of the truth of the moment — of knowing the brightness of my aura and the fullness and weight of the crown I carry; of the spaciousness in the freedom of a now-regulated system that moves up and down, as it should.
The woods are skeletal now, bearing everything. When I am here, I am the child-daughter and I am also the Queen. The stones and secrets are tucked under the forest floors, alive and breathing. They are not upset by anything.
Dear reader, you are always right
on
time.