smoke

I am the cat that crawled under the house, Bleeding and panting and waiting for death. There’s no escape from the smoke. September 2020-season of smoke, breathing that feels like slow poison, I’ll never forget you. My mind feels impaired. I know what I always used to do, before I discovered romance , was romance the page. Writing was the answer for every thing that ailed me. Pouring myself out fully with pen and paper. Working myself free from the snares as words appeared on the page. Right now, I’m the injured cat. I hide and wait. Minutes stretch on while the coffee prepares in the french press. Coffee with heavy cream and sprinkles of cinnamon and cardamom. I’ll just imagine I’m in Maine. It’s fall, and beautifully so, over there. Golden leaves and sweaters, a chill in the air. I actually looked up plane tix to maine two days ago but realizing we’d need negative covid tests to board our flight was enough to put us off. I’ll visit Maine in my mind.

My thoughts race to “Check your phone!” Why? There’s nothing there. “Text that friend..” or I feel compelled to check the air quality for the dozenth time. All distractions from sharing my words, thoughts, feelings. Obstacles to sharing myself and my interior world. I recalled this morning that I was taught how un-seeming and wrong it was to share feelings. Being labeled “sensitive” was not a compliment. I was the embarrassing burden of the family. I could never pass for “normal”. I’ve always had emotion in abundance. As right as it can feel to be open, I have been training so many years under an image of holding back and not being “too much”. The visage can be challenging to shake.

What will it feel like to see so many people and hug? What will it be like to casually touch new friends arms in conversations. I’m very expressive and love to hug and make contact when it’s welcome. How amazing or terrifying will first kisses be? I’ve been thinking these things wile I’m watching LOST and it’s not looking so bad in that fictional dimension, that Island life. I guess it just seems strangely idyllic compared to the reality of Portland Oregon of 9/16/20. Plus I have a crush on Sayid. Aside from being gorgeous, he has a beautiful accent that leads me to imagine he is highly intelligent and articulate. This morning I woke from a very romantic dream about lounging around LOST island with Naveen Andrews (thank you Goddess) eating fruit. Realizing that I may be ready to try and tiptoe back into dating next month (October is my birth month!) but also reserving the right to change my mind 15 times before October arrives. I’ll see how I feel when the smoke clears.

Coffee with heavy cream. I can pretend I’m in an apartment in Paris while I drink this. It’s raining outside… I’m reflecting on Rimbaud and Baudelaire. I was very obsessed with them in 10th grade. Once, when I was 22, my young husband and i were having a terrible fight. In a fit of rage he threw my 4 various Rimbaud and Baudelaire books out our 3rd story apartment window “Life isn’t all French poetry!” he said as he flung them. They landed next to the dumpsters in the alley. I threw myself onto the couch in an outpouring of tears “How could you!?”, he immediately dashed out the door to retrieve them. He returned a few minutes later carrying only “Les Fleurs du Mal”. I looked up at him in horror, mymascara and eyeliner trailed down my cheeks. He kind of laughed “Guess they didn’t want this one.” We were sooooo dramatic. It was practically a play, our marriage. Made for the stage. I’m not resentful (anymore), I honestly wish him well now. I see him often in our sweet sons expressions.

I am the cat crawling out from under the house that’s on fire. I’m the cat walking away and seeking the kindness of strangers to show that I don’t always have to do it all alone… These smoke filled days will, one day, be a distant memory. A small part in the files of my life. Another notch in the belt of hard lessons. Oh Ancestors… Who else feels the echo of hard lessons in their Ancestral line? Damn, my Grandparents pounded that into me. I’m guessing we all feel it. The hardness of life. How hard they had it, how rough their parents and grandparents had it. In bits and pieces, I was told, how impossibly rife with suffering, pain, untimely death and abject poverty our family was when they were in Ireland, the UK, France, Germany and then the U.S. My heart always identified with Charles Dickens tales of woe and Les Miserables felt overly pointed and personal. I was blessed to know my Great Grandparents on my Mother’s side. Vashti & Chauncey Haines, they had a little house that I would visit in my childhood. I’d paint my wrists with fireflies, not realizing that in creating my glowing bracelets, I was leaving a body count of dead bugs. I sat in my Great Grandmother’s kitchen and she made me pancakes. She’d talk on the tales of not having shoes or jackets in West Virginia and my Great Grandfather getting an actual job that wasn’t indentured servitude (but might as well have been) as a teen digging for coal in the mines. Shit was hard. Is hard. These are the rules encoded in my blood.

I do get away from that blueprint. I live my life in a new way. I’m healing myself and through my own transformation, altering the coarse of lives and tending the wounds of my Ancestral line. When situations arise that are beyond my control. I feel such a connection, outside of time, to my family. Everyone who’s dead now, lives in my heart. Unfortunately, the blood family that’s still living are mostly not like-hearted enough to be in my life. I know I can endure and survive. I am so strong. But in moments of overwhelm I fill up the bathtub, light candles, pour florida water and rose petals into the water and cry sacred tears. Wash it all away. We’ve been here before, we will return again and there will always be fresh beauty just on the other side of calamity.