me, as me

When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;—— the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Can you remember a moment in your life when you had life in yourself and it was wholly strange and new? Can you remember the moment when you stopped walking a path of someone else, and started cutting your own?

Write about that moment.

(Author: Bridget Pilloud)

It was a summer sunday afternoon just like this one when i hugged my kids goodbye at camp and instead of driving south, toward home, i headed north. i had never been on this particular road right by myself — had actually never been alone on a trip in fact — and with each mile marker i passed, i knew i was plotting new ground.

a few weeks before, a plain brown box had arrived at my door with books inside. books with my name in 64-point type stretched across the cover. books that as i cracked open the spine, for the first time in my life i knew the plot, the sentence structure, almost by heart.

and on this particular sunday, i was headed out on my very first book tour. first stop, richmond and a radio interview. r-a-d-i-o? with my squeaky voice? (let me say to any of the book writing folks out there: choose radio over the talking heads of tv.)  the pr flack i share bed space with had spent months with me it seemed, rehearsing talking points about the regional history i had put to paper — the people and the houses that had shaped the beach i had loved my whole life. how was it, that i, an outsider to this provincial world had been the one to capture it? or that the 12-year-old girl inside me who had always dreamed of writing had actually gotten an advance check (however small, it was the largest one-time paycheck i had ever gotten... a record that still stands.) that my publisher actually expected to see 7,000 books. Seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d! dear lord. a third of those in hard cover.

yet i had already sold some. many to the very people i wrote about. had a book signing party in an old cottage on the oceanfront on a glorious blue-sky day. and now i was going all over the place, it seemed, all by my little pea-picking self, to talk to strangers about why they should buy it, too.

at the time, it felt as if my whole life's work had come to this moment, me rambling down the highway to THE FUTURE. all those poorly constructed sentences in third grade, all the dangling phrases in 9th, the misspelled words that first year out of journalism school... in time my grammatical ineptitude shape-shifted into something real enough to be clipped and posted to refrigerators in homes of people (not just my mother) i didn't even know. how had that happened?

but seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d books? i had never sold so much as a stadium seat cushion sporting my high school mascot without apology. 

and yet i would not apologize for this book. not the three years it took me to write it or the year it took for me to convince the publisher that my vision was right. (oh well, i would apologize about the cover, just a little because i had no control and i didn't like it at first. but it has grown on me.) and i did apologize to my pr flack for the money we spent just trying to realize my vision. (i do think we have realized about a nickle profit.)

but on that Sunday afternoon, i was thinking about none of that. just that in the back of the car i had a box of books and they were m-i-n-e. my own creation (with the help of many, many others and of course G-O-D) but my words. at least those that lay outside the margins of quotation marks.

on that drive north (well, richmond is not too north) i thought about the summer morning three years before when i sat in the parking lot of the episcopal church across the street and looked at the grand old ladies i was writing about, thinking: what do they look like to me? just to me? and came up with it, right there (G-O-D loves and helps people, even if all they do is sit in church parking lots) staring at the ladies' wide porches and how they are just like wide-brimmed summer hats. they surely surely are, their propped shutters like eyelids, looking out toward the open sea.

that, come to think of it, is just like me. or where i will be in a couple of weeks, celebrating the 10th anniversary of this remarkable experience, remarkable if only that i wrote the damn book and sold those seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d books (and then some). funny that my publisher didn't think of putting out a 10th anniversary edition. but still.

after richmond i drove to norfolk (arriving two hours early for a tv interview. the tv part of this story is a whole nother story...), then back to north carolina through the great dismal swamp with the windows rolled down — a swamp that on that day was not dismal but promising, for some strange reason. it reminded me of a high school girl a few years before that on her first solo drive to and from that marvelous beach in an un-air-conditioned light blue ford maverick, driving down a country highway all by herself but not afraid of anything. oh, how i wish i could connect with that girl again, out on a straight stretch of road, windows open, headed to what yet awaits.

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empty chair, empty, there

 

she was supposed to be here, 

sitting in that empty chair there, 

as the dog sleeps behind her on the carpet. 

having eaten her hot dog with her mother's homemade chili, having chatted with her grandparents for the first time in person since last summer,

having had her nails done in pretty princess pink

and found gold slippers that don't hurt her feet,

to go with the dress we bought her in new york last month. 

was supposed to be talking to me 

while her husband ate the marinated shrimp he loves 

while her dad gets her hugs for father's day.

but she didn't get here. 

two canceled flights and $100 cab ride for naught 

left them anxious about trying yet another 

and left me (and her dad) once again more than disappointed 

that sometimes it seems NYC just won't let their displaced southerners 

go

so instead of a house full of people 

and the chance to watch my daughter 

watch her friend since 4th grade tie the knot this afternoon,

i will spend my evening wishing she were here

and wiping my eyes, imagining the two of them in their 

 stoplight halloween costumes 

or as a diamond and spade

in a deck of life-sized cards the year after that.

that will be me, looking at her empty chair knowing

just how much she would love the flowers, 

imagining her smile and her bare feet on the dance floor 

with her husband and her high school friends. 

and she will be wondering and texting and calling 

but will have to wait for my pictures 

to see just how much the groom looks like her husband, 

and how the bride's wedding gown

looks so much like her own.

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good flying weather, part II

when my mother talked about her wedding day, she would say this: we were married on Flag Day. and that made it easy for me to remember. one of my favorite things to do as a child was to open the secretary drawer in the living room and pull out their wedding album, scouring the pictures for glimpses of the parents i knew. my favorite photo has always been the one when they are leaving the church (i wish i could show you that here) — arm in arm, my mother in her ballet-length crinoline — arm in arm with the skinny boy who would be my dad — looking a little stiff and more than a bit pale in his white dinner jacket. (the next day, he graduated from medical school and moved further away from his family with a girl he'd met only six months before.)

but my mother is smiling a hollywood smile as she steps off the porch of the church that one day i would attend. beaming, she is, a real beauty like she has never been happier in her life. i suspect she knew just what she was ahead.

today is flag day. of course that we wave the flag to honor all who have served under it — including my father, who joined the navy a year after that wedding and would deposit his wife (and new son) with my grandparents before he set sail around the world as the 'doc' on a destroyer. for us, it also means that on flag day, my brother and sister and i get to celebrate the fact that because a skinny boy from gates county, n.c., and a city girl from florida with good-looking legs, happened to meet each other at a dance, we got to be.

their union has lasted for 59 years today. (though i haven't yet called them, i suspect neither has walked out the door.) next year we are planning a throwdown with the FAM, but as they pass yet another year betrothed, i just want to fly that flag a little higher, wave it a little more crazily because i mean 59 years? with one person and nary an argument? twice as many years (and then some) than they ever were apart. i haven't even lived that long but i know it's not such an easy thing to do now is it? just sayin'.

when they'd been married for 50 years, i wrote about them. "they've been through what i've come to understand as several marriages," i wrote, "albeit to the same spouse. the newlywed year, when they were alone and getting to know each other. The next a year later when my father joined the navy. the third one came when they finally settled in a town where they didn't know a soul and made a life together. the last one, crowded with church and children and grandchildren," and now great-grands, "began when my father retired. It may be the best yet."  now that my own children are grown, i realize they actually had another marriage, then one when i moved out of the house and got married myself, forcing them to get to know each other for the first time since way back when they were turning 25. they built a beach house that year — my father's dream — and maybe yet another marriage began when they reluctantly sold it.

throughout every stage, they have been an example for many, including my daughter, who wrote about them last year here.

vance and bj are not storytellers, as i said when i wrote about them in 2002 — never outwardly shared their secret to a happy marriage with us. "they've simply lived it, hoping we would learn by watching."

i guess we did learn a thing or two. my brother and his wife have been married 33 years, my sister and her husband 32, and my husband and i will mark our own three decades together this year.

"what makes marriage last, after the kids are grown, the parents gone, the paying work behind you?" i asked nine years ago. i wish i knew. i only know it's not nearly as easy as the couple who married at 24 on Flag Day have made it seem.

their days now are filled with doctors appointments, with worry about the health of neighbors, about grandchildren with new jobs and new babies, and i imagine, about how many more years they have to together.

their favorite days are spent when all or some of the FAM can be together — like this past saturday, when they got to meet our newest member. my own grandparents met every single one of their great-grands, so since i don't have a grand yet, i'm expecting them to stick around for a good long while.

what joy it must have been to them, to look into little LG's beautiful blue eyes and know that because of them, she got to be, too.  and that the grand ol' flag first unfurled 59 years ago today has some good flying weather left in it yet.

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son days

my friend katbird posted on facebook this week that friday was her oldest son's last day of kindergarten. in between his first day and this, she wrote, he: "learned to read and write and play the piano. he figured out math." (well good luck with that one, says i) "he grew two hu-normous front teeth. he can tie his shoelaces and ride a bike without training wheels (mostly).  he can smack a baseball and shoot a hoop.  he had his first communion and saved money for a good cause. he teared up for the first time while watching a movie (Kung Fu Panda II, go figure). wow. It blows my tiny mind. how could it not have blown his?"

that's a lot, for one little guy, in just a year. yes it is.

i knew this had been on her mind. she came into my office a few days before, talking about how much she hated Velcro shoes because how can anybody ever learn to tie shoes if all they wear is Velcro? i said the exact same thing into the air when mine were the age of hers. tying those shoes all by yourself seemed to me, as a young mom, the symbol of all there was yet to learn, and the independence of it. if my children could tie their own shoes without me, well, they might just do ok.

"all of a sudden, he could just do it," she said. yes. so sudden it takes our breath away, these things new to our children that we have known so long we can't remember when or how we learned them for ourselves.

i love the fact that, though she visited on the pretense of showing me how to use Illustrator, she felt at home enough with me in the purple office to plop herself down say just what was on her mind. and after we'd gotten our Velcro rant out of the way it was this: should she should jump more fully into her business, or stay in the 'life right now' she had planned as a stay at home mom, with her cool little boy and his cool little brother.

her boys are growing up and eventually away, and that seems a little bit (a lot?) at odds with her dream to embrace the artist she is. what if, as she sinks herself into that creative zone she misses the 12 things he will next learn to do in the next 12 days or weeks or months? "i don't feel like i'm doing any of my jobs well," she admitted. but the mother of the grown up children in me says that if she is thinking about that at all, she is probably doing just fine.

we've both had son days this week. i met mine for lunch at a busy downtown restaurant on a corner in the city where we both live and work. we moved here when he was on the cusp of three, clumping around in cowboy boots we found at a thrift shop. he wore them with jeans, shorts, with diapers probably. back then, he was not even three feet tall and often roamed the house brandishing a wooden gun carved by my father. and now he, actually, is marketing our city to visitors, conventioneers, even film makers. (just yesterday.)

i remember when he was learning some of the things my friend's boy put in his brain in the past year. how at not quite 5 he said: take off the training wheels, and we did and he was off, never turning around, never even wobbling. it had taken his sister three days to learn this new skill. how he would disappear for awhile and show up wearing a robot costume he'd fashioned out of leftovers from a packing box, staplers and tape. how later, his angular fingers began plucking the guitar strings into a tune i could easily recognize. and this: dear kat has many years, thank goodness, until she is on the sidelines of her own son's broken heart.

this boy of ours hates to shop, so when in middle school he found a pair of tennis shoes that worked, we just ordered them over and over. have been doing that since.

my son arrived for lunch this week wearing a crisp white dress shirt and new slacks — (how did the three-foot boy become a six-foot-two man is what i want to know) — he is tall and thin and everything he wears hangs just right, and i couldn't help but think of that boy i sent off to college with a closet full of madras shirts. and bow ties. i taught him that, too, how to tie the bow tie. (now if he had always worn Velcro would he have been asked by his fraternity to teach his new brothers this particular skill as part of his pledge responsibility?)

the new business clothes he has taken to wearing since he started his first post-college job a year ago suit him. but i didn't recall buying the slacks.


"i went shopping," he told me. "my clothes were wearing out." he means the clothes i bought him just as he was about to graduate — two years ago. "i waited until jobanks had a sale." wow. i felt like katbird. how did this happen?

his great-grandfather, who bought all his suits on sale — so goes the legend — would be happy about that. a man who knows how to hang onto his money.


we had a nice lunch (of course, though he makes more than i do, i picked up the tab.) we talked about work with his high school buddy who is now his coworker, how they play trivia every week at a local bar. "do you win?" i asked. "not a lot," his friend said. "hey maybe you know the answer to this one. what's apgar?"

"what do you think it is?" i asked, and they both laughed. "we said it had something to do with engineering," he said, "nobody at our table is an engineer," though both agreed they had heard it before.

well yes, in a way. and then i told them what it was, a measurement, sort of, of how well you are engineered at birth — the first score of many you get in life. "he scored 9 on the apgar!" a new parent will say, like they might years later: "he scored 1600 on his SAT!"

"no wonder we didn't know what it was," my son said. "how would we know that? only parents know that."

what is it with sons and their hold on us? that they share so little of their lives as compared to daughters that we celebrate every single thing they do tell us? probably. 

we welcome them home from that first year of kindergarten, our arms and hearts like sponges, absorbing the minutia of their days spent at lunch, on the playground, at nap and snack time. year by year their sharing becomes a little more guarded, but we welcome them just as hopeful, as we will a thousand times over — after their first great ball game, as they stretch their arms toward the finish in their first swim meet, after their first trip abroad. we hold them in their failures and their broken hearts, as they graduate from high school and college, and as they bury their friends. 

and some of us — as my friend martha did her son a couple of weeks ago — get to hug the whole man after his first experience (and we hope his last) at war. 

we wait for the details, celebrate the rare phone call, the ride to airport, welcoming every single chance we get to be the mother of them again.


this week, my friend lee celebrated her youngest son's high school graduation. the salutatorian talked of his friend, another mother's son — headed for Yale — who died in an accident, the result of a senior prank. he was the fourth mother's son to die in accidents in just two days in our city. (a daughter died, too.) it always happens during graduation week. these mothers do not get this chance again — any more son days — and i can barely breathe just thinking of their insurmountable loss.

to paraphrase, the salutatorian spoke to his classmates about what they each have been given, how our job is to figure out our God-given gifts and use them as best we can in the world. he got a standing ovation — something rare in the high school graduations of my memory.


as i read his words today, i thought about my gifts — my kids —and i wonder how well i have helped them become who they are, launched them out into the world as good people. have i, like katbird worries, not done a good job at mothering because i have been so focused on something else?

a little while ago, my phone jingled like robin hood's men announcing their arrival in sherwood forest.


'are you cooking tonight?' read the text.


sure. 6:30.


k. see y'all then.


k.yes. 

another son day.

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go ahead, pick up the pencil

Your Personal Message by Eric Handler

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is burning deep inside of you? If you could spread your personal message RIGHT NOW to 1 million people, what would you say?

=:=:=:

i prefer pencils. for my calendar (yes, i'm one of those people), for my shopping lists, for chewing on when i need to think. i remember as a kid nothing was prettier to me than a spelling list complete with definitions, all written out on a piece of clean notebook paper. i'm weird like that.

my papers weren't so clean when it came to math class though. there was lots to erase. i think i stopped understanding math along about 9th grade algebra, all those letters and parenthetical numbers scrambled my brain in such a way that i sometimes felt like i'd dropped it into a spin art machine.

then came 10th grade and basic geometry, which for some strange reason i could actually do.  i think it was the fact that i loved all the angles and lines and rays — the arrows pointing off the page assuring me that there was something beyond that page where it lay on my desk in mrs. anderson's math class, something out there, beyond the cinderblock walls of my school, beyond the edge of my back yard, just waiting for me to step my foot outside and figure out what. this may come as a surprise to my mother, whose memory of me is that i wanted nothing more than to build a house in the back yard and live there all of my life. but that didn't mean i didn't want to be something, and to go somewhere to seek what i would be.

i actually loved the triangles, too, how no matter how you drew them, those angles were always pointing somewhere out.

by the next year, i felt pretty confident about the whole math thing, that is until i took a seat in mrs. winfree's trig class. now mrs. winfree was a excellent teacher, who 40 years ago was just out of school and excited to share how much she loved trig with us. but staring at the images on the board i felt fairly confident that there was no way i would be able to take a math i loved and combine it with one i had taken two years before and forgotten already whatever right i knew, and somehow come out with an answer. well, mrs. winfree should have known i could almost never do that.

and then of course there is that moment in college when (i think i have written about this before) — i left my calculus exam in the middle of it — now there's a foreign language for us right brained folks — finding the TA in his office and pleading with him to let me pass. (i did purely on my math skills, though i don't know how.)

through the years there have been many things i wish i could take my pencil to, and even more i wish i could erase. but even what might fall victim to the eraser's rub is something that when i really think about it, taught me something valuable.

something about this magnet struck me when i saw it a few weeks ago. the bluebird with a glint in her eye, the cutout words, the whole math thing. that's me all over. but there's that word "risk", too. plain and simple, there is just no way to figure out how to be anything without risking some of what you already are.

sure, you might find out that though your diagrammed sentence may indeed look like a work of art, you can't draw a stick figure. or though you can pull together thousands of words into a story, you still have to use the e-z-tip calculator on your phone to figure out how much to pay for lunch.

here is the certainty: there is not one single way to find out if you are good or bad at any of it without picking up the pencil. risking failure can be instead a chance to shine.

so that's what i want to say to those 1 million people who are not (yet) reading my blog (mainly, i want to say it to my children) — don't be afraid to pick up the pencil, whatever form that pencil may take. i mean, how in the world can you know whether you are destined to solve pythagorean's theorem or to discover your own if you don't scribble a little first? how will you ever get to the ending of a story if you don't write the first word?

you may not always choose the right words — and if you're like me, you rarely choose the perfect number — but that's when you can put that trusty ol' eraser to good use.

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seven year itch

June 3

That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? . . . Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Identify one of your biggest challenges at the moment (ie I don’t feel passionate about my work) and turn it into a question (ie How can I do work I’m passionate about?) Write it on a post-it and put it up on your bathroom mirror or the back of your front door. After 48-hours, journal what answers came up for you and be sure to evaluate them.

Bonus: tweet or blog a photo of your post-it.

Start To Finish

The folder sits on my desktop on the bottom right corner. Its name: Cloo's Club Complete. A misnomer, because complete it is not. Inside, some 65,000 words of a novel that I have been working on off and on for seven years. Seven. 47 dog years. the time it takes for a child to grow from birth to second grade. from undergraduate to PhD. the itch.

The last time I even opened the file before today was October 30 of last year. Last year.

I began writing it one sultry June night after whining to my mother on the phone that I had no place to put my writing. A short gig as a newspaper essayist had ended, and it seemed as if nobody wanted to hear what I had to say. (and lord, do i need attention.) My children were grown, and though I had a reasonable part time freelance business, I felt stuck, my file drawers full of wannabees. 

"You need to write yourself a trashy novel," she said. I swear. Now my mother, a pearl wearing devout Episcopalian who has never said so much as Damn, unless quoting someone else, does not read such trash. She didn't even watch soap operas when I was growing up, not even when she ironed. And I grew up watching the Guiding Light (for like 30 years), dreaming of writing for it. (What the Reva and Josh story could have been in my hands.)

I can't even imagine what my mother might think of as "trash," that she would know how to define it except maybe Tess of the D'urbervilles. (Which is sort of trash, but quite literary, of course.) Certainly she didn't read Sweet Savage Love like my sister and I did in high school. Oh, be still my beating heart! (or is it bleeding heart.. I never know.)

But somewhere in the caverns of this brain of mine rests the edict: Do what your mother says do. As in the whole underwear thing, the church thing, the cab cash thing (not "Cash Cab" — and never mind that we didn't have cabs in my home town), because you just... never ... know... and then there was the "don't do anything I wouldn't do, because I am always looking in the window. that kind of thing. (Lord.)

So I did what I was raised to do. I started the trashy novel with my mother's mantra the boot in my back. My friends in Cloo's Club, whom I meet for lunch on many a Friday at a hot dog place called Cloo's, had been after me too. Could it be that hard, to use the words "burgeoning"  and "buxom" and "flummoxed" in the same sentence, then rinse and repeat?

My friends had even gone so far as to ask to be in the book, at least in spirit, giving me clues to nuances of character and who they wanted to play themselves in the movie. (for me, only Meryl Streep.)  At night I sent them chapters, took my words to Friday lunch and to the beach, reading them aloud — and we howled until we just about wet our pants, imagining ourselves in the situations I had created practically out of thin air. The (grammatical) jewels were burgeoning close to ecstasy, or so it felt.

A few months into my little project, I dared share it with my critique group — tough ladies I was sure would laugh me away from the literary table, saying: when are you going to get serious about your craft?

And yet, they didn't. They took each line, each character, each plot point and treated it as seriously as if I were Thomas Hardy — not once thinking: how does she know this stuff? Has she done this before? I mean, how does she know this stuff? (well, at least they never told me if they thought it.) 

And then, after those burgeoning 65,000 words, I  became quite flummoxed, thinking my grammar too feeble, my plot not virile enough to survive.

And so, the excuses. No time. A regular job working for my church is counter intuitive to writing such vim and vinegar, especially because said novel is about women who are members of a certain denomination I know all too well. (They serve on the altar guild for heaven's sake.)

I've been through the stages. Loved it, laughed with it... at first, hated it for awhile. (for the record, the term "burgeoning" is used only twice, and not until page 57.) mourned it. gotten angry at it.

I even took an online class with a woman who was an 'agent' looking for new talent, just so I could finish. (That was two years ago.) She liked it, laughed out loud in many places, but in the end, it felt to me like when I edited based on her suggestions, I also took out the soul of it. And so I hated it again, felt I could never really pull the whole novel thing off. What was I thinking? That I was that good? PA-LEESE.

So into the drawer it went.

Last fall my critique group took a retreat, and before we left, I asked these marvelous ladies to read the whole manuscript as it stood. They did, spending a whole evening with me talking once again about characters and plot points and pacing and all of that, attending to it like I was writing the next great, bourgeoning thing. Oh, how I thank them.

I read the manuscript myself, sitting in an Adirondack chair at the water's edge, wondering if I would ever let my mother read it, published or not. (No. She's 83, and it might give her a stroke.)

My friend since 8th grade has herself a friend who writes erotica. EROTICA. ABSU sent me a couple of short stories and OMG I blushed reading it. Blushed. Flashed. Fanned myself.  How does she know such things? Does she write from her own experience? And then I found out her parents are her early critiquers. Never happen to this former debutante. I'm just sayin'.

My friends at Cloo's Club think I have abandoned it, have discarded these wonderful, quirky women because I can't bear for it not to be a good book. That's partly the case. It's also that what if, like a gazillion other writers out there, I do finish it and then nothing happens. no agent, no publisher, nada. and of course, what if something does happen, and my mother, my children, all those sweet old ladies at church who love me read it, raise their eyebrows and say hummmm...

But there it is, the folder staring me in the face every day.

A few weeks ago, my book club met, and after reading a wonderful winter novel, they asked for a trashy, sexy beach read. When I threw the question of what title to my writer friends, dear Jane said: Cloo's Club. Finish it! Ha.

I must say that I thought about going on Lulu and putting it together under a nom de plum with a buxom heroine on a burgeoning cover, just to see what they might say. only what if they hated it? what if they thought I had done those things I write about, that they thought I was writing about me? and of course there are all the typos to contend with...

So. To the question at hand: what stops me from finishing? It's probably not my mother, nor my daughter (who said one night some years ago that she had found a draft in my closet and read a few chapters.) not those wonderful old ladies at church. and at this point, not my book club. well, not really.

I am afraid of me.

Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

Though I do believe I have a gift, I guess I didn't bargain that God would want me to write a trashy novel. Maybe he meant "literary trash," but so far I've not found an agent who represents just that genre.

So what's my biggest challenge?

Me. Clear and simple. Burgeoning, buxom and flummoxed. Me.

So. How do I overcome me, say to hell with it and dive in — ever blushing, until this too is done?

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Today, well, actually yesterday and the day before

For the month of June, I am participating in Trust 30, a challenge designed to celebrate Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 208th birthday, and to prove that i can trust myself. (really?) One prompt a day, just like in December with Reverb10. Only this one celebrates being the non-conformist. Which i am never been known to be. talk about a challenge. and of course the first thing i notice is how behind i am, already, before i even start.

May 31:

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

 
You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.
1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.
2. Write the story that has to be written.

i'm sorry. honestly. i didn't say that enough. not at all. for all those words that hurt, for the actions that pierced you to pieces, even though on the outside you appeared to remain whole — all those lines that make up the puzzle of you undetectable — as if they didn't exist. 

you may have thought i didn't care, but i was only pretending.

oh, how i wish i could have fixed it, could have mended what's broken inside me and reached for you whole. but i never reached far enough inside myself to find the broken valve, to turn it off. 

but you loved me still. from the first day to this.

and yet, though deep inside me that rusty valve continues to leak, there are a thousand others pumping the good of me out into the world. can i tap into those instead, rerouting and reconnecting the moments when i got it right?

yes, you loved me still, and i didn't deserve it.

june 1:

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. The force of character is cumulative. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

If ‘the voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tracks,’ then it is more genuine to be present today than to recount yesterdays. How would you describe today using only one sentence? Tell today’s sentence to one other person. Repeat each day.

Today I strolled & sweated, wept & rejoiced, embraced & retreated, giggled & sang, watched & waited, complained and supported, sent and received, and then received some more.




up next: today.

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