ah, the hope of letters...

So I'm sitting on my porch drinking coffee during probably the only cool hour expected today. I wonder if you still take yours light and sweet.
I have been hoping to see you, but I'm not convinced that's going to happen. There are things I believe I need to tell you, but maybe some things are better expressed and received in a letter.
I don't know if I've ever apologized properly to you. I know it was a long time ago & I believe you have forgiven me. (I don't imagine I was important enough to stay mad at.) I try very hard to do the right thing & be honest & maybe now that I've extended an authentic apology to you, I'll be able to forgive myself. I am so very sorry for hurting you. It's something I will always regret.
I was such a broken girl when we were together. I tried so hard to hold on to that chance at something good with you--but my psyche was so fractured that I didn't believe then that I deserved you.
You know I wanted to come see you one day--but Nick told me you had started seeing Julie.
When I realized most intensely how much I'd loved you & what I'd lost was when I had my daughter. I remember sitting with her in the rocking chair--I was 23--and all I could think was that she should have been yours.
It's taken me a long time and a lot of work to achieve some health & wholeness. I still wish I could see you--not for some epic romantic reunion, but just to...oh, I guess I don't even know. To meet again as the people we are now, and with compassion for the kids we were.

The sexual maturation of an octopus is controlled by an optical gland (called that only because it sits upon the optic nerve); this gland "shuts off" the desire to eat once an octopus, male or female, has mated.  And yes, octopi can change gender.  A female octopus will retreat to a cave to lay thousands of eggs: the numbers vary based on species.  The momma protects her eggs and keeps a constant current moving through them, and yes, dies when the eggs hatch.  It's universal that very few of the baby octopi will survive (on average, two will live to maturation).

It's almost better to be the octopus, he said,
when she cursed her son for moving
across the country.
But he thanked her for the cookies
and he loves her from afar
while she worries
that time is running out
for completion of general tasks
like weeding the garden
and solving the Republican government.
He, the speaker, writes about the attitudes
parents squeeze into their children,
like toothpaste in reverse.
He's a gentle Philip Larkin.
He intends better. 
He doesn't change.

No One Expects the Days to be Gods~Emerson

There are many days from my past that I love and long for, but didn't even realize then how much I loved them.  How dearly I hold on to those days when Erin was an infant.  Every day was a glorious miracle: nursing, napping, breathing the same air.
The days when I was so broke and believed I was sad and lonely, when I took Erin to the beach and slept on the rocks in the sun; the days when Cameron was a baby...I felt guilty all the time.  Those days were NOT gods.  I surely did not love them as I should have. 
For a long time, if my days were gods, they were sleeping gods. 
Oh but they awoke when I went home to Vermont.  We were tucked in safe and sound, snuggled in Manchester.  Again Ifailed to appreciate the dark silent mornings when I pulled my stool up to the counter and wore my red sweatpants and wrote.  Always the fear of lack chained me down and kept me from seeing the god-ness of my days.  No love. No money.  General failure. 
My days are gods again now, and I'm sure that later I will fear I missed them.  How does one appreciate?  By being humble and mindful.

Friday nights and Saturdays are becoming difficult for me: I'm so sad with missing my children.  On Saturdays I have been trying to not smoke, then consequently overeating, and then smoking afterwards.
The missingness just feels so vast.

Today I facilitated a journal workshop for the first time.  Armed with a copy of Kathleen Adams' Journal to the Self, which I hadn't read, and a few blank marble notebooks, I set up shop in the glass cupola house.  I expected about 6 participants. Two showed up.
The two guys (men!) did exactly what I asked.  They listened when I spoke.  And then they wrote like fiends.  It was amzing to see.
I wasn't planning on writing while facilitating but with just the 3 of us, what else could I do? I wrote, "They're doing what I ask! Oh my god! They think I know what I'm doing...Maybe I DO know what I'm doing.  Maybe I DO have something to offer...I love to write & I love words.  Why do I deny myself?  I also love to smoke.  And run.  So maybe I'm not the best most traditional Momma.  But there is so much that is good about me."
And bang, just like that, I remembered who and what I am.

Letters

I'm a champion letter-writer.  To wit: what follows is most of a letter I wrote to a man who had been cheating on me the entire time we were together, a couple of years ago.  I'm sharing it here because I am considering another letter, to a different man.

I don’t feel that it is my job to understand you--I just have some things I need to express. Although you wounded me deeply, I was hoping to speak to you face to face. Had you been here to talk to me, I would have tried to convey my compassion, empathy, & understanding. Had you been here to talk, I would have tried to engage you in a conversation about working through this, together. I have to go forward, with or without you; I told you I wouldn’t leave you and that was a true statement. If you have left me, which is what I am left to assume, then I will proceed alone. Because I love you, I want you to be happy. If you are happier without me, if your life is better without me in it, then I wish you well.

 I have to believe that your behavior on Saturday was your default defense mechanism—you were so cruel towards me. I cannot accept that that is who you really are.

Instead, I choose to believe that our connection and our intimate moments were real—the moment I first saw you, the electric jolts your fingertips sent thru me when we walked in the gallery and you said you felt it too & it made you feel good and you think that’s what true love feels like. Kissing face to face, side by side in your bed. Sleeping naked together. The things you said that I held onto: “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” and, “You’ll get that on the big jobs.”

 If you’d been here to talk, I would have considered that we could rebuild from this rubble—that there is much that is salvageable. The connection we had was real—I have to believe that. And that alone would have been worth fighting for.

But you’re not here, so this note and my box of things will be my closure. Throughout my grief over our loss, I have been praying for you. God loves you—you are a child of God as much as anyone else—you’re a man in pain, maybe, or confused—but not a villain. I will remember you as a child of God. It is my sincere hope that if you take anything from this, it’s the knowledge that real love does exist, and you are worthy of it. I hope you remember me always and know that I loved you as well as I could.

Just back from the grocery store...I've neglected my journal for a while but I plan to spend the rest of the day compensating. Lots of things to process.
Joanna's group today was amazing.  Three folks I haven't met before (Morgan, Dan & Rose) who seem SO. COOL. 
Every time I come home and say to James that I am amazed at people's response to what I write, the words that come through me...what a gift to be able to hang with an awesome group of like-minded folks andto share and talk with them.

But here is what I wrote today as a response to an invitation to do some stream of consciousness writing.  It's edited a bit; the prompt was to imagine {myself} walking somewhere and finding a gift.
In case it's not clear, the gift is the ocean. I think.

a section of a Hokusai painting

The power and consistency of crashing ocean waves: my studio home is behind me. I walk along the deserted beach, cloudless blue sky, sun shining, and enormous ocean waves crash, crawl towards the shore and then recede into the next.  The ocean is always here for me.  I retreat into the mountains and trees and snow for misunderstood aching periods of hibernation. 
Christ, is this my life now?  Hiding, safe, repeating old useless patterns?
No, says the Ocean.  Come to me.  Bring your anchor.  When you're ready to bravely expand.  When you are healed.  I am here.
I look back.  I love my studio on the shore with huge windows open to the rolling power of the ocean.  It's been a place of inspiration.  I think of the protected time in the hills on the mountain hidden in the trees overlooking the meadow.  But now it's Mexico or Maine.  Just go.  Trust.  The ocean the ocean the ocean beckons.  I stand undecided on the shore.  I cannot ever be quiet enough to hear anything.  Or I don't believe my ears.  I shuck my shorts my shoes my skin and walk calmly towards my ocean.  This is it.  Safety is loving the fear.  I swim through the waves.  I feel my mother's fingers on my four-year-old bicep.  Her fear, not mine.  I'm not smart enough to be afraid.  I prefer to just jump in and then look back with regret and guilt. 
My father gave me the ocean and then he gave me the mountains.  My mother gave me passive terror.
I swim out out out and the current pulls at me but I breathe into that fear.  Belly and heart working as one.  One big gasp and I dive down down down this must be Mexico or at least not Maine because here are starfish and seahorses and octupi.  I love them.  I am as shy and secretive as they.  My legs bind into a tail and gills neatly tear open and I inhale this beautiful cool water.  Mermaid girl. Strips of sun filter down to us.  Starfish cling to my hips and waist, tickling me, hanging on for the ride.
I want to be a new invention.  My own creation, or God's version of me.

Smoking with Ghosts

The ritual of the cigarette, abandoned for twenty years, comes back easily.  Tap the unopened pack against the heel of your wrist.  Peel off the cellophane.  Select one; withdraw it from its mates.  Clamp it in your mouth.  Tilt your head to the side, spin the wheel on the lighter you found in the glove box.  Inhale. Exhaling is a deeply settling sigh of relief.

I don’t want anyone to see me engaging in this habit, so I take my dog to the empty field behind the shuttered grocery store.  I lean against my truck and smoke, while he trots from bush to hydrant to stump, reading the urine messages from his fellows.  I squint, watching him galloping gleefully through the long wild grass.  I watch him and my brain is silent.  I teeter, a meaningless figure on an accordion of time:  seventeen floods me.  I used to hang out at the edge of fields like this, at quarries, and at people’s homes.  With people who were, I guess, my friends.  I stood around useless and silent, smoking, with nothing to say.  Until I was drunk, the chasm was too vast and no words I could say would bridge it.  I didn’t speak their very foreign language.  Cans of beer would loosen my tongue and then I could pretend, and some recognizable sounds would slip out.

Chris tried to teach me the language of innocence and normalcy: he threw me a rope.  I hid my fractures from him.  With one hand, I clung to the pledge he offered; but my other hand clutched an invisible knife.  First I cut myself and then I severed the rope he’d thrown.

We explored leafy back roads in his mom’s burgundy car: we parked and talked.  We drank coffee in the mornings; we watched sunrises together before school.  We held hands.  We were sweet and tentative. He taught me to love pizza with mushrooms on it.  We hitch-hiked back and forth between each other’s houses.  Chris talked about our future.  We would have a house, after he joined the Coast Guard. 

I turned eighteen a month before Chris did and pretended I didn’t know how dangerous it was to go to a bar alone, without him.  We lived in small towns.  My older brother and coworkers from the diner where I washed dishes would be there.  What could go wrong?

When I first met him in the bar, Mark appeared thick and burly.  He was friends with my older brother.  His long hair and beard and moustache concealed most of his face, except for a full bottom lip and twinkly round eyes.  It was November.  He wore a leather jacket and chaps and boots.  He rode his motorcycle all year.  The bar was loud and cheerful against the bruised winter night and it was easy to believe the laughing, loud camaraderie was real.

Mark asked if he could buy me a beer and because I was naïve and newly eighteen, I didn't understand that his offer carried any particular weight.  We drank more than one beer together and he watched me throw darts and laughed when I missed the dartboard altogether. I trusted him.  When he offered me a ride home through the New England snow on his Harley Davidson, I accepted without hesitation. 

The next day he met me getting off the school bus.  I was proud to swing my leg over the back of his bike and we roared off towards his house, where he was going to make me dinner.  No one had ever made me dinner before and I felt very grown up.  When we arrived at his house and he took off the layers of jackets and his chaps, I saw that he was thin and lanky.  He saw me looking at him. 

Bandy motherfucker, ain’t I?

I just smiled.  I didn’t like to talk very much.  Other people’s stories never made sense to me: the things they say didn’t stay in the lines. If ever I pointed out the nonsense parts, they would grow impatient with my stupidity.  Really anyway I was busy worrying that I was too fat and maybe Mark wouldn’t like me and I certainly wouldn’t say that to him.  My heart hissed a distracting static: Chris-Chris-Chris.  I didn’t understand why I was there, at a stranger's strange house, or why I couldn’t feel anything.  I didn’t know where I was; if I’d walked out of the house, I would have been lost.  I felt as though I’d stepped blindly into quicksand.

I sat on a blue plaid couch alone in the living room while Mark made "dinner": chips with chili and cheese melted on top.  We drank beer from cans together and it got easier to relax and smile and not worry about my soft belly and feeling like a foreigner.

It was dark out when we went up to Mark’s room.  It was at the top of the stairs and under the eaves.   His housemates were not home.  I sat cross legged on his mattress on the floor while he squatted beside me and reached into a wardrobe and got out his pistol.  He showed it to me.  He took it apart and he put it back together.  I’d never known anyone who owned a gun before.  He said he would teach me how to use it.  He lay down beside me and kissed me.  His hand covered my breast.  He reached into the waistband of my jeans.  I said, I can’t do this.  I was thinking of Chris.

Mark said, We can’t stop now.

I didn’t say anything else.

When he drove into me, I stared up at the slanted ceiling.  Its skewed angle reminded me of the Batman television show.  The bad guys’ lairs were always cockeyed.  But no one came to rescue me, and I didn’t rescue myself.  Instead I counted dead flies trapped in the webs laced between the exposed beams.   

When I arrived home, my father called from his bed: Who is Mark?
The alarm that clamped down on my lungs was not unfamiliar. What? I stalled.
Chris was here looking for you, my father replied.

I went to bed.  There was nothing else to do then.

·        

I virtually stalked Chris for years after I broke his heart.  I believed that I never stopped loving him. I wanted to apologize correctly and undo the pain I'd inflicted.   I wished I could explain, speak the words I didn't know, that I couldn't say: that something had happened.  I couldn't control it.  {But not a crime, anyway.} I made the choice to get on that motorcycle on that ancient afternoon. And then I didn't know what to do, and it seemed that ownership of my body had transferred to Mark.  How things fell like dominoes.  There's no blame or excuse.  There's only me standing in the slippery stream of my life, delightedly poking myself with my own transgressions.

I heard that Chris married the next girl he dated, the one who’d been waiting in the wings for him.  He joined the Coast Guard.  He did everything he said he would do.

I gave birth to a baby girl when I was twenty-three. I would sit in the rocking chair, nursing her, staring out the bay window, and my heart would insist that she should have been Chris's daughter.