Postcard to myself

Attachment-1(40)Dear 19-year-old Me,

You were SO excited, do you remember? I mean, you were on the move and it wasn’t New York, or even Chicago—but it was somewhere—another state, albeit in the absolute wrong direction, away from the coast, even further from the Atlantic you dreamed of living near one fine day.

I’m writing to remind you of the sheer newness, the joy of that. Do you remember? Learning a new city, by getting lost in its flat expanses, gridded broad streets radiating out from a center point, the grand procession of green-lawned parks marching up Meridian Avenue, dotted with statues, obelisks, monuments of wars long past…one-way streets and diagonals and even a traffic circle!

Remember cruising the city in Georgia McGuire’s shiny red Mercedes Benz—parking with flashers on in truck zones or in alleys to run contact sheets into Ad agencies and design studios? You pretended the car was yours, and Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” played in the sound track in your bubbly young mind.

Back then, it seemed money and a fancy foreign car might add up to happiness, or something like it.

At the end of the work day it was back to your old wood-grained Chrysler wagon, drinking 3-for-$1 beers with Jane and her friend—was it Amy? Angie?—who were in their late twenties, and regulars, so no one carded you even though you looked about fourteen, so fresh-faced, even with makeup on.

There was an air of possibility surrounding you like a bubble that humid Indianapolis summer. Even though nothing really happened—well, there was that brief crush on Georgia’s handsome young son (whose name has vanished now into the summer haze). He was tall and dark-haired and had a sweet slow Alabama drawl and the careless manners of someone born with money. The tobacco-chewing habit—the way he spit the chaw into a coke bottle like that was normal—was a crush-breaker. But still. For a few heart-thumping flirtatious days, you’d dipped into fantasy the way he dipped into Skoal. Imagined being part of the family, rich, unconcerned about the price of a Mercedes or a mansion. Because back then, happiness seemed like something you could maybe buy, if you were lucky. Something you could purchase and keep, like a trinket from some far-off hotel gift shop. Something just out of reach for a girl like you.

If I could really send you a postcard now, I’d tell you to sit and feel the pain of what you were running from, because happiness was folded underneath all along. You just needed to take your foot off that accelerator. Slow down. Unpack.

Love from your future self,

E

 

Note: this was written from a prompt where each person chose (at random) a postcard, and wrote a “postcard” to an earlier version of themselves; we wrote for 10 minutes, and the above is a quick polishing of the fastwrite back to the past.

My mother never called anyone an asshole

crayon drawing of a smiling purple-haired woman, with "MOM" written above it.
A picture of me from some years ago, by my oldest child.
It reminds me of my mother.

 

Today in workshop: coloring back in time

In today’s Amherst Artists & Writers workshop, we finished with a prompt rooted in mindfulness and childhood memory.  Here’s how it goes: you choose a few crayons from a big bowl, make sure everyone has drawing paper, and together we all breathe in the smell of the crayolas.

Now imagine you are sinking back in time, drawing with crayons, when someone’s told you to go color. You have nothing else to do, and busily you begin to draw what you would have drawn then. We have twelve minutes. Draw until you feel moved to begin writing, just noticing the feel of the crayon as you make lines and scribble—as long as you want to, you can skip writing entirely—and then write until the time is up.

…What came up for my workshoppers was wonderfully diverse in tone, ranging from wry to meditative to inspiring. I’m always blown away by how writers can take risks and write from the heart when we relax and get in front of that internal critic. Try it yourself sometime! Playing is fun, and brings out creative ideas.

Here’s what came up for me:

My mother never called anyone an asshole

Orange, I thought it was orange but the name on the label said “scarlet.”

I remember the fatter crayons they gave us in kindergarten, fat like our fingers were. I remember the way the color flowed out onto paper and everyone noticed I could draw what I saw, a gift, they said, pointing. But I just wanted to be small and unseen.

Seen, I blushed like the red crayon and inside turned cyan and chilly like the car on winter mornings on the way to school.

Seen, they said, “Oh, look how cute, she’s so shy!” And how my mother never told them to “stop talking about her as if she’s not here. She’s listening, assholes.”

(My mother never called anyone an asshole, but if she were alive now, I think she would.)

Mama got feistier and feistier as she grew older. But back when I was in Kindergarten, she was shrinking pale blue and gray and lots of black skies. There were no petal or dandelion-colored flowers blooming in her smiles. I drew her tulips and daisies and roses. I used all the crayons in the big box, sharpening them with the little sharpener to make the flowers as real as I could make them, but they were never real enough for her to feel them in her heart, it seemed.

She was blue and alone but much later, when I was all grown up and she was dying, she was brave and alone, instead. She would have called an asshole an asshole, I’m sure of it—if only she’d lived a little longer.

She was blooming like a warm summer day, right as she died back.
(I just wish she could come back.)

waiting for the sunshine

painting of flowers in vase with hearts on the table

Waiting for the sunshine

You stood in the kitchen, waiting for the sunshine.

Oh, Mama. You waited.
You waited while the tickle in your throat rattled and rattled. Every phone call, eruptions of coughing. I listened, there was nothing else I could do—and sometimes I’d cut in, “hey, I’ll call you back, how about, when you’re feeling better.”

Now I see it through a backwards lens, time is funny like that, now I’m about how old YOU were then and my daughters are the ages I was then; I was your little last bird flown. Now I know the feeling of that emptiness, that new empty-nest, and how precious those calls become. Now I can feel, all these years later, how alone you must have sometimes felt, in your small kitchen, especially that last winter, coughing, insisting, talking, waiting, insisting that you were just fine.

You couldn’t really talk, but you didn’t want to hang up. It was a tickle, the end of a long lingering cold, a cold-on-top-of-a-cold, it was nothing.

Now I see you, frozen in the amber of that long-ago cold alone kitchen. Me not so far away in miles, but twenty-something me. So busy, busy, busy. A budding Bokonist, junior capitalist, believing that being an adult meant staying on the spinning hamster wheel. And also believing that you were going to be around for years and years, Mama. You were my mother. Life without you wasn’t comprehensible, and I didn’t imagine it, wouldn’t even try.

So I believed you, about the cough being nothing.

And still you coughed. I began to notice the unendingness of it. Worry crept in. I insisted you go to the doctor, but not soon enough. You locked my worries out and I let you. I locked them up, I guess. They were scary. Where did I learn to lock up so well? From you, Mama, you who waited in your small kitchen, vinyl-tiled, traces of avocado green barely visible in the corner, a little spot you missed when you carefully painted over with eggshell cream.

The wall phone is still avocado green in the mists of my memory. The round orb of the pendulum lamp casts a golden glow over the Formica table of the past, littered with bridge hands and newspapers and you, sitting there, smiling. So warm. I wish I could climb back into that kitchen, climb back to you.

I went to a movie with a friend the other day, an art film. Over ice cream afterwards he asked me, wonderingly, did I think the movie meant that all a man really wanted was a mother? I looked into his slate-gray eyes, and I thought of you, Mama.

No, I thought. It’s not just men who want that.

I thought of that horrible Psychology textbook photo, of the poor little monkey in the experiment who could choose, while starving, between a wire-framed “mother” equipped with milk and a nipple, or a fur-covered “mother” to cling to.

The little monkey always chose gnawing hunger and the fuzzy mama.

My friend’s sad eyes after the movie made me slide backwards through all the years. His eyes made me want to find you again, find you and fold you in my arms, to mother you, Mama. Because that is what you must’ve most wanted.

Because sometimes, life is scary, and you just want your mother.

But life is a funny circle, too. Scary and funny. In seeing how I failed you, I found you once again.

You’re here, waiting in the sunshine. Sometimes the darkness covers your shine, like a cloud. But you’re always there.

 

(Fastwrite from a prompt on regret).

 

 

in this one, you’re…

cheetosIn this one, you are standing by the old canal at Holcolm Gardens. The sun has made your hair catch fire, the sun is coating your tanned legs and long arms with a honeyed light, and for some silly reason lost to me now, you are holding up a big red box of Cheetos, holding it proudly, as if you are Carol Merrill and the box of snacks is a glistening prize that a nervous contestant is pondering.

In this one, you’ve driven back east to visit me, with a loaded Magnum 357 tucked under the front seat for company. It was the last time I would ever see you, but I didn’t know that then.

I guess you never really do know?

In this one, you are as I imagine you still are — slender and strong, tough and flexible as a zip tie. I was sure, in the way only a young person can hope to be, that somehow we’d stay best friends forever. That some how the trauma-bond of our shared childhoods and barbed wire moments of our teen years would bridge the miles, bridge the chasm growing between us, already as deep as a Colorado ravine.

In this one, I was laughing and my boyfriend was squirting lighter fluid on the grill and you were smiling, that sharp sickle-shaped smile of yours. Behind your mirrored aviators, your sky-blue eyes must have been smiling too.

In this one, I already missed you, even though your were still right there, holding the Cheetos.

(This was a fastwrite from a prompt: imagine a photograph that you have in an album or on your phone; get a picture of it in your mind, and begin with “In this one, you’re…” Write for 10 minutes.)

to seek my level

I was very excited when I saw the latest edition of Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment–which includes a story of mine which won an honorable mention in their annual “Sweet Corn Prize in Fiction.” I’m happy this short but mighty story found such a beautiful home. Lots of other great work at Flyway, check it out.

 

the news scares me

drawing of coffee cup and newspaper with a scared looking creature and an ominous eye in the shadows of the coffee cup

I came across this pencil drawing titled “the news scares me” that I did several years ago. (Seems it’s not a new trend, the news, being scary…) This is a reminder to anyone who’s feeling overwhelmed by the state of things not to despair, but to keep doing whatever you can do to make the world a better place, in whatever ways are within your means. Small actions, large actions—just take action. Do what you can do. Meet the world with love. And laughter. And anger. And hope.
Happy Sunday.

dear iphone

drawing of an iphone, 3:13 am on the screen
“It’s time, Baby, to let that shit go.”

Dear iphone,

We are not so different, you and I, aside from the blood pumping in my veins and our obvious size difference, me so large and pillowy soft compared to your flat hard rectangular slipperiness. Oh, you go everywhere with me, like a shadow or a best friend (but maybe you are more shadow than friend?)

At night, like me, you inexplicably wake, beaming. Sometimes I wake at the same time as you. (We are, I think, linked?) And I see you, wide-eyed, staring at me. I have turned off every notification setting I can find; I have activated the “do not disturb” feature on your very latest OS—yet still, you wake over and over.

You are the sieve, the news-breaker, the heart-breaker of my life, aren’t you? Through your tiny speakers I have seen news that gutted me and heard hard words from people I love. I’ve heard honesty and seen realities that should have shattered your dark face.

But you are a phone. Why do you wake, little one? I wish you could sleep.

Maybe old hard syllables echo in you, something like abandonment dreams or trapped memories?

Triggers of something hard-wired into you by a tired woman half a world away who assembled you in a factory far from her family, thinking maybe of a mother or father or child she would likely never see again, swept by economic suck from home forever?

Is it her that wakes you?

You light up the dim bedroom, again, again. Is it the news? The latest assault or attack that flows through you to me? Do you try, and sometimes fail, like I do, to let it go? Is that it?

The news that rings with nightmare laughter of pussy grabbers, of men (and women, too) with hearts harder than your protective casing. Oh, little one, I understand that. I wake afraid, too.

Rape is a weapon, sexual abuse is a weapon—I’m getting off track, but rape is a weapon, and rape culture is to rape as open-carry is to gun violence. The news! Over and over, the wife or girlfriend shot before the rampage. They are trying to keep us afraid, aren’t they? But they don’t know. I’ve begun these sleepless nights to figure it out.

Maybe this is why you’ve taken to waking me. To make me see that to be afraid is to be human. We humans, all of us—are vulnerable to hurt, to pain. So maybe the trick is to be afraid, and do what you want anyway. Do not comply out of fear.

Complying from fear: that would be like losing yourself.

Like losing your heart and soul.

Speaking of loss, my soft body with its hard bones will not last, my little rectangular friend. In the end, we are both disposable. It’s okay. My soul will, I think, continue on. In some form or another.

Maybe I’ll become some whispered words between lost lovers who find each other on a starry night. Words that unlock something healing. Maybe I’ll be whispered words in a phone like you, words that might push someone else to move, despite their fear, into the stream of life.

Maybe I’ll be reborn a rectangle, hard and sleek, living warm in a pocket.

If I do, I imagine I’ll often wake with a jolt like you do, full of dread and information.

And then, like you, I’ll do my very best to close back down and sleep until it is time to chime awake the lovers tangled together in the bed next to me, to gently tell them morning has come, and the world somehow continues still to turn.

Love,
E

[ Note: much as I love and personify my iphone, we are no longer sleeping in the same room 🙂 ]