Note to my future self

Above all, remember this: change is scary... and perhaps at its scariest when it's the most necessary.

Remember the feeling you felt in Boston some seven years ago now--that feeling that life was no longer living but sustaining. That the friendships you held highly, were solidified enough to last across state lines. That your job had become a too-tight shell you were eager to leave behind. Remember the feeling swimming in your gut--that feeling that told you that you knew what you had to do, that there was nothing in the city left for you. The city you had run with open arms to, eager and naive. In which you attended college, developed a passion for writing, watched teenage dreams come to life. The city that you always felt was all yours, even when no one understood you. It was your life, it was your Boston. Remember the feeling you had, that moment you made the phone call to your mother, the feeling that you were ready to stop running from all that you left behind. You were coming home.

But it would take you sometime before it all would make sense. Remember that you will feel as though you made the biggest mistake of your life. That you never should have left everything you knew, this person that you were, to come home and try endlessly to prove yourself--in a new career, in a new city, to your family. Remember the nights you cried yourself to sleep, scared, unsure if this is really what you were supposed to do. After all, you were now 26, and people so old don't listen to their gut instincts anymore--the childhood romantic who tells you that you were destined to live in a city because there was a treasure for you to find. But before you were a graphic artist, you were first a poet, after all.

Remember how it took you a good year to find your way, to settle into your skin. Remember the loves you gained and the loves you lost and know that it's not geographic misfortune--sometimes it's just bad timing and bad luck. But remember these men still, because they were all important lessons. Hold the goodness in your heart and let go of the hurt.

Remember that the only sure unconditional love you will ever have in your life is your family. And that like anything, the people, the landscape, it all changes over time as we grow. In a family where your only ally was a man you lost ten years ago, you learned there are no favorites after death. When you came home, you used the time to build relationships with your mother, grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins as an adult now, rather than a child. Remember when it will be hard for a while, until they learn who you really are, and while you form these new bonds. You will fight, you will cry, but never leave.



The truth is, I have no idea if I am making the right decision. That little voice in my head, the feeling in my gut, has all been stifled by age and misfortune. This last two and a half years of my life, draining, because I wasn't really living. I was just getting by. Because that's all I really could do, all you can do, when someone like me is a part of something like that and in the end, loses.

I tried to stay positive -- hold onto the few years of happiness that were the happiest I have ever felt in 32 years. I decided to be happy. I kept friendships that were important to me--I smiled through baby shower after baby shower--I truly celebrated in the lives of people whom I loved, putting myself aside. Convinced I had healed, because little by little, it hurt less each day. Through it all, I would have moments of clarity--moments where it all became clear. And I got by, I kept living.

Until I realized one day--these friends, that saw me everyday and balked at the idiocy of someone who could have something so perfect and throw it all away--were the same friends who stood by him and let him ruin his life. None of us were friends. We were all just waiting for him to walk through a door and snap back into his life, attracted not to each other, but to the romanticism of it all. This boy who had never been truly happy or loved or motivated, now destined with purpose. And the girl who loved him, for everything he was and all that he wasn't--in all of his broken places.

It was when the last puzzle piece fit into place that I had my final moment of clarity, and it came swiftly and unexpectedly, and unfortunately with an audience. At a dive bar on the beach one night, I had met a group of friends -- two couples, one who knew use together and one who did not, but all parties know the individual. I showed up, ordered my drink, enjoying the chance to get out of the house. But within minutes, it swooped in--the overwhelming sensation of letting go. I was tired of being graceful, of laughing through stories of days I was there, of stories I had heard with a twang once before, of a life that used to be mine. Tired of paying homage to someone who was my best friend, and of me, the person who was content yet somewhere in the bottom of her heart, waiting for him to walk through the door. I left a five dollar bill on the counter, said my goodbyes and didn't look back.

I see now though, I was just doing what I could to get by. Overburdened by the enormity of it all, it was so much easier to separate it into smaller pieces to digest. Did I stay too long? Maybe. But was it wrong? Not at all. It's what I needed to do.


It's a big decision right now--to leave a good job in a suffering economy, leave a steadfast life in what some would call tropic paradise. But after all of that, after it all, that little gut instinct returned and I know now that it's what I have to do. I have to keep feeding my soul. There's nothing left for me here. But it will always be home.

Poem

It's funny how I was once such a prolific writer and now I might write something once every six months... Here's a few poems I jotted down recently... Maybe I am losing my touch?


----------

Licked Clean

once there was a city
that could not satiate
a curious appetite
for all things
naked and unexplained
in pop-up books or fairytales
or novellas of mujeras
bent back ways over banisters

a hunger so voracious, an innocence
so unaware, a softness
and roundness—a girl
so gleefully just waiting,
waiting—
for a darkened entryway
to reveal an ever after

that all at once
she was bare and speechless
twisted, unrecognizable
lips to mouth to skin
in reflection, she would find
nothing of herself
none of the awkward ramblings, nor
poetic disasters, these truths
chipped away slowly
then scraped and licked clean
to the bone

Tequila makes her thoughts fall off...

Four a.m. used to be my favorite time of the day to write. A senior thesis novella, an overdue sonnet, or just really, really bad poetry. I didn't drink then, so I couldn't blame it on the Cuervo. The city was quiet, especially if it was snowing in Kenmore Square, and all of the bars had let out and there were few taxis and fewer cars and I'd be thick with thought. The street lamps dim and the Mass Pike calm and only the glow of the Citgo sign flashing red and blue through my bedroom window. I wrote some pretty shitty stuff then... and I still probably do now... but at least tonight I can blame it on the Cuervo.

I'm awake because I can feel the tequila swimming in my stomach. Too many margaritas over dinner with my family... so potent that I can remember ordering food and maybe eating some of it but not quite sure if I tasted it. Even writing about it right now makes me a little queasy.

But it's four a.m., and I couldn't sleep. Usually I get up and take a steaming hot shower and crawl back into a cold bed and that always seems to knock the liquor right out of my system. But I am in Atlanta for the holiday weekend, visiting my brother and his wife and her new baby bump that I like to call peanut. So I am trying not to wake up the house and a radio-active second trimester pregnant woman.

Sitting in this office, typing on a laptop, a fog of memory begins to rise around me. It's the things I have somehow managed to push away -- but coming back to this place, typing in this dusky yellow-lit space, it's hard not to feel crowded by unbalanced emotion. Flashes of utter and total defeat, disparage, disallusionment; passing half-lights of hope. Hollowed, food didn't even have love anymore, and I was self-medicating on over the counter sleeping pills. Still I was brave, I laughed often, I cooked wonderful meals a few nights a week for two busy lawyers who never ate at home. I freelanced from coffee shops, like the patchouli-reeking artsy folks behind the windows in Expresso Royale I'd pass on the way to my first 9-5.

During my stay, I had come down with such a bad virus that I lay on the cold granite tiled bathroom, thick with fever, unable to stop throwing up -- but I didn't care, something about it felt so cathartic that it wasn't until I almost passed out that I called my brother to come rescue me. It was almost as if I was punishing myself intentionally, putting my heart through an emotional bootcamp.

In the short three months I spent here, flopping fish out of water, this place saved me. I've known it all along. It's been the foundation of this new start. I've whispered it to girlfriends in corners at gatherings where I've been leaning against the two-hundred pound elephant in the room, feeding him cocktails. This city was the best thing that ever happened to me. It's apparent now, being back here... I'm finally through the dark tunnel... standing tall, naked with cellulite, in bright blazing sunshine.

The secret anniversaries of the heart ...

Ordinary numbers on an ordinary day can have ordinary significance or give way to a sonata of the secret anniversaries of the heart.

It's a day to have been a celebration, a day I swore off last week, a day that I demanded would have no importance. Because the person formerly known as my best friend, the one I almost married, has become nothing more than a footnote in this last year of life. It's like the person I knew him as died that day his eyes washed gray, the very moment he became undone -- the very moment he would not allow me to stand beside him and put the pieces back together.

And still it's hard not to remember this day for everything we were, and for everything he was, truly, for all of the time we were together. It's hard not weep for the dreams and things that should have been -- for my hopes and future and love that was cast aside. It's okay to say I cry for me, but for him a little bit, too.

It's hard to deny this last year has been a rollercoaster of emotions, but I've gone through the dark and just come through the breaking light, to find this place is a lot better than I thought it might be ... just me. Just me, single, solo, table for one, a movie ticket, no take out container for me, just me. There's freedom, there's liberation ... but I miss whatever the heck that was back there.

I know that I will meet someone -- and boy, have I met a lot of wishful folks so far. But today, I remember what that magic was, that spark I felt for the first time in all of my life, that security of true love ... and in cruel twists of fate, in rash decision and whirlwind, gone without warning, irretrievable and beyond repair.

I want to believe in that magic. It's hard to believe such a thing can happen twice. And that is why tonight I am in the ocean, in the melting glaciers, on the wind ... I am everything around him in this secret anniversary of the heart.

In Light

A few weeks ago, my grandfather's sister passed.

She had spent her life caring for her mother, she never married and never had children. Her ten brothers and sisters she fought with, and with the few alive, had barely made her peace before her passing. She had smoked almost her entire life and was left barely breathing, a tank of oxygen always by her side. That morning, it was not a brother or sister, niece or nephew, but it was the maid that made the discovery.

She was found, the tubes from her nose, cradled a corner of the bedroom, clinging to pictures of her some of her brothers and sisters who had already passed.

Since then, I have often wondered to myself, if this was meant to comfort her in death or a sign for the living to let us know who came for her in light.

Just let it go. . .

Saturday, while I was driving home from the gym, I realized it was missing. I had my cell phone pressed to my right ear, making plans to watch football with a new, shall we say, man of interest. My foot slammed on the break, car horns behind me honked in annoyance -- and deservingly so, because I was stopped at a bright green light.

****

The morning of the day I graduated college, my grandfather pulled a blue velvet box out of his jacket pocket and pushed it across the breakfast table. We got you a little something, he says. My grandmother, over my shoulder as I open the box, assures me, they're real, as my grandfather glows with pride over how happy he is to live to see this day.

For as long as I could remember, my grandfather was dying. When I was seven, he had quadruple heart bypass surgery and when I was eight, a heart transplant. When I was ten, he had three-fourths of his right lung removed and finally had to stop smoking. He was always dying, so for my entire academic life, every report card laden with B's and not A's I brought home, every seal of approval over sports or musical theater endeavors -- everything lead to this day, one that I always knew we would share.

****

These earrings, they weren't really much of anything -- the diamonds, so tiny you could barely tell if they were even diamonds at all. But from the moment I put them in my ears that morning, I seldom took them off, and even less frequently in the last few years.

Every once in a while, one earring would get caught in a shirt and I would later find it on the floor.Not too long ago, I watched the shiny yellow and white gold ring swirl in a current of suds down the drain of the tub. I fell to the porcelain, crying, clamoring, my dog barking and scratching at the bathroom door.

****

I could have turned the car around and gone back to the gym, after all, it's only five miles away. Instead, I went to the grocery store, went home and made lunch, showered and dressed pretty in pink to visit my new boy (gigantic space) friend. It wasn't until Monday night that I went into the gym and rifled through a shoe box the pimply-faced kid at the front desk called the "lost-and-found." But still, no earring.

Driving home, I remembered my grandfather. The day he gave me the earrings, the day we lay him to rest in the dirt, how haunted I was in his passing and how I made my peace with his absence. I let him go but kept him with me, feeling him all around me, knowing I could speak to him and knowing he would guide me. He had sent me signs and omens before, and lately, with the hollowness of holidays, I was speaking to him again. More specifically, I had been asking him for a sign -- a beacon in this dark passing year, full of heartache, sudden dismissal, and hope lost. Halfway through though tunnel and barely glimpsing passing flashes of light, I searched for a promise, like any six year old child would with an imaginary friend -- I wanted to know everything would be all right.


It began to come clear. I had let go. It's funny that I would arrive at this place but perhaps this was the sign. In a year that was haunted by that phrase murmured behind tears, twelve months of doubting my choices, my intuition, as the very heart of it, myself -- I let go.

Letting go can come in different forms. Sometimes we are like monkeys -- letting go of one branch yet clinging fastly to another. Other instances, its a tiny dying, like the loss of childhood innocence. These moments, we lie to ourselves, carry ourselves through the black. There are times we will stand on barstools and cheer of freedom, but still speak to memories in a half-empty cocktail or beer. We will tell our girlfriends in whispers in corners that it's over, that we have moved on, and still wake at six in the morning, expecting the phone to ring. The truth in it though, is that when you've really let go, when you've really gone there's no grandstand, no declaration, no new par amour at your side. Real letting go has no need for words at all. It's an act of pure silence.

****

It's only when we have truly let something go that it can be found again. Five days later, watching television, my dog begins to dig at the cushion of the couch. Expecting to find her bone, I stick my hand down in the crack, and instead pull out a shiny sparkling earring.

A Storybook Ending

There's been words turning in the back of my mind for weeks -- a story I've been trying to find the exact words to describe, finding just the right shade of gray to paint.

It started with this girl who had everything, whose life was so full it was bursting at the seams -- and she knew this very well, because before this, she had little to nothing. Before this she was the girl with thighs so burlesque she couldn't fit into clothes and her best friend sewed her dresses. A girl with a bruised heart, devoid of self love, a girl with a half always empty. She was a girl who rebuilt her outside to finally match her inside, but still putting her faith in the wrong places. Until finally, finally, he came into her life, from no where and then forever.

Finally, she knew what it felt like to have everything, and she cherished it every day. She loved him fully, even in the places he was broken, especially in the times he may not have liked himself. Before bed time, she closed her eyes to hear nothing -- no voices churning over what-ifs, what-nots, what-will-bes -- because finally, she was whole. And she was grateful.

One day, this girl woke up still thinking she had it all, but by nightfall, it was never to be the same again. Never had she felt so completely broken or thrown so far off the course of her life. She didn't want to give him back, she didn't want to give up, she didn't want to let go. She took pills to fall asleep, to quiet the doubts in her head, the ones that had her gasping for air. She didn't think she would ever breathe again. . .

But she did. And much to her surprise, she didn't fade back into the sad girl, the girl pitying herself or blaming her thighs. She was now stronger, stronger than she had ever been before.



It gets easier every day, every moment I am further away from the hurt. It only seems to sting when I see our friends starting their families -- holding their babies in my arms, seeing the life that should have been our own.

I think to e-mail sometimes, or call. Some moments, I simply miss my best friend. But I don't let myself get caught up on the what-ifs, what-nots, and what-will-bes. I said all I could say, did all I could have done, moved the last piece on the chess board. I don't call because I am no longer a girl who chases love but let's love chase her. Because I deserve it, I deserve more.

A couple weeks ago, I said good night to some of our mutual friends, after sharing a wonderful evening with them. I walked to the car, looked up to the heavens, to the October moon hung low in the night sky, and smiled. Not a grin, or a smirk, but a full wide-toothed smile.

It was in that moment when I really told myself something I'd only whispered all along. This is my story. . . I want what I want, and I won't apologize for it. I give of myself fully, even in my most broken places, and deserve the same in return. I deserve the love that's going to shout it from the roof tops when he's falling and the love that runs down the runway when he knows he's been wrong. It was that moment, when I smiled because I'd finally realized. . . I'm the heroine in the story, and I have been all along.

The things we carry...

It's said that God gives the most challenges to those with the strongest character. It's said that one is never dealt more load than they alone can carry. It's said that we are not defined by merely our success, but more how we respond in the face of adversity.

These are the things we repeat to ourselves in the moments when it seems we have lost it all. Because we need to believe there is some higher plan for the pain we must endure -- lessons that seem, at the very heart of it, down right unfair.

Two weeks ago, I came home to find a single grayed newspaper clipping on the kitchen counter, and my mother gone. "Karen Garrow, 56, of Homestead..." it read, "dead at 56." Karen was my mother's best girlfriend for years. When hurricane Andrew took our house in 1992, it was at Karen's house where we stayed the night before the morning that changed my life forever. They had lost touch in all of the movings, all of the numbers marked "Carole Cell - New, Carole Cell New NEW." My mother had been begging me for what had seemed like the last six months to take her for a drive down to Homestead, to look for Karen, on her ranch. "You can't just show up on someone's doorstep," I said. "Just try to Google her and see what you can find." But that Wednesday afternoon, when my mother sat down to read the paper, the last thing she expected to read was her best friend's obituary.

It's the unexpected, swift jabs to the gut, that get us most when we are far off daydreaming. It's showing up to work one day, and reading a discarded printed email on the copier that deems your skills "useless." It's a blissful two year relationship ending in just two hours. It's a silly disagreement that turns into pride fattening tongues for years. It's an eviction notice, out of the blue, just when you're getting back on your feet again.

Whatever it is though, we keep going... because he never gives us more than we can handle. We push through the darkness, the weight on our backs, the heaviness on our hearts, with an endurance in our stride.

Dear Tivo...

We are creatures, by nature, that get swallowed by time. Time, in itself, is written about just as much as love. We are all, perhaps, control freaks in that way, and at some point, usually when we are adults, we surrender. We know we can't manipulate time. We know we can't change the past. We learn and emphasize the future.

Sometimes we are foolish and try to run away from our past -- even though it may haunt us, unformed syllables, sentences and thoughts we cannot form or we won't allow ourselves to finish. We grow up, we become wiser at letting go. . . letting go of the control, letting go of the time, letting go of the past.

Time swallows us whole. Wrapped up in technology, hamsters spinning endlessly on a plastic wheel, we resign and distract ourselves with daily rituals. To-do lists, events, text messages, emails, cell phones, hellish commutes. We trick ourselves. We trick time.

And then the phone rings in the darkest part of the night; you eat a spoonful of cookie dough ice cream; you smell a plant in bloom on your afternoon bike ride; it's grapefruit body wash in a bathtub filled with bubbles. . . and then you trick time again, because suddenly, you experience a moment where no time has passed.

As soon as it's there, though, it's gone, and you're left with the sour taste in your mouth, dizzy with deja vu, wondering if any of it was really there at all.

It's a Wonderful Life

Things I have learned this week:

1. Kmart is still ghetto. My weekend project was redoing my bedroom closet to accommodate my ever-growing collection of clothing and shoes, along with the assorted pieces of this-and-that from my previous life as an almost-wife.

I decide to go to K-mart because it's on my way back from Miami Dolphins training camp. This K-mart and I have history, and it's not a good one. Last year, my less than 3 month old Honda Civic 2006 got rear-ended in this parking lot by some geriatric gentleman that decided to reverse the wrong way. But it makes sense to get this errand done, since I am in the neighborhood, after all. And after my 400+ mile commute during the work week, I try to consolidate my weekend errands and travels.

I grab the lone cart left by the front door and quickly make my way over to the housewares. In no time, I have found what I need, calculated the cost, and added it to my cart. I wouldn't say the store was overly busy. I'd be more inclined to say that the lack of carts was due to employee laziness -- who wants to go fishing for carts in 110 degree heat? My closet organizers in my cart, I wheel around the aisle to where the grills are because I have been dying to get a little indoor george foreman like grill so I can start eating a little healthier. I spot what I want, add it to my cart and I almost feel proud of myself for the amount of time I have saved inside this store. Before I take my mental bow, I leave my cart and mosey over a couple aisles away to check out something else and when I return to where I left my cart. . . it's gone. Yes, gone. G-O-N-E-gone.

Who does this? Who takes someone's stuff out and takes off with their cart? I mean, REALLY???


2. Working hard will get you no where but just really tired. I am a naturally driven person and I will put 125% into most any task undertaken. Call it perfectionism, call it obsessive-compulsive. Call it what you may, but I've been reminded once again that, sometimes, it's just plain stupid. While there are parts of this new job that I do love, there are some huge components missing that would make it an ideal fit. With any job, there are ups and downs, goods and bads, but for me, I handle my work environment like I handle my relationships. I have boundaries, I have deal breakers. If you don't have any of these, you get walked all over. You give too much, you get taken for granted. And you get tired. Very, very tired.

Working until 7 or 8 o'clock is no problem. Every once in a while. But when it's three nights a week and I commute an hour and fifteen minutes in the morning and 45 minutes at night -- its a problem. By the time I get home and unwind, it's 10:30pm. I have no time for myself, no time for my dog... I should actually consider myself lucky I don't have a love life because this job would end it for sure.

And still, all of these things would be fine... if I really loved the company. If they cared or treated me like they did. But there's too many jobs for too few Indians and the big chief is too busy to pay attention to the details. So what happens is things like what happened on Friday evening -- a meeting we had at 6:30pm, mind you, when we should have already been on our way home. In this meeting, I received information that should have been given to me the first day or the first week I worked there -- not five weeks into my position. Totally absurd. Disorganized. All this tells me after one month is that it won't get any better -- it will only get worse. And maybe I will do some cool pieces here and there and build a portfolio but, you know what, I figured out this weekend that no one cares. It's all about production, cranking out the work. I've always been attracted to agencies and always wanted to work for one. I am enjoying the new experience and the people that I work with there. But does it make it all worth the crappy commute, the organized chaos, and not to mention, a five-pound stress-related weight gain? That's left to be determined. . .

3. It's a wonderful life. As I drove home late last Monday night, I had the beginnings of a thought that followed me through a long week. I was on the phone with a friend, the wife of a good friend of my almost-husband. We were catching up on life when she asked me if I had heard from him and she had heard he's in Alaska safe and sound. That's great, I'd said. But honestly, I just don't care anymore. She doesn't blame me, she understands; she knows what most military wives have come to know -- that the silence is the most normal yet the most difficult part. She understands, she says, but from her own experience, she knows that once you love like that, it's hard to completely let it go.

The truth was that I have started to mentally move on -- he isn't the first thought when my eyes open, and if anything, a fleeting thought when my eyes close. I am in a place where seven months ago, I never thought I would come to know. But her words haunted me throughout my long commute, meaningless tasks.

"The heart is frail and easily broken. . . yet wonderfully resilient." This new place I have come to find comfort in, exists not because I truly let it go, but because my heart just got tired of hurting. . . it wanted to breathe again, laugh again. . . and even, love again.


After the ring was on my finger, I remember thinking about what my life would be like as a military wife, versus the life I may have lived had someone different come into my life. Or the life I would have made for myself, without anyone at all. A certain sadness washed over me thinking those days and chances were gone. . . knowing that there would be very little choices left in my life that I could make that the military wouldn't make for me.


As I drove in the morning commute, thick with truck exhaust and the steam rising off the asphalt from summer's heat, the thought finally came full circle. It's like that movie, "It's a Wonderful Life." Are we living the lives we were supposed to live or waiting for an angel to intervene? Is it normal or is it a parallel universe? Here I am, living out my Mary Tyler Moore fantasy while he is somewhere in the deadly Bering Sea commanding his ship and crew.

What would I be doing, alone in the house for five days while he was out saving lives? Learn to knit? Take up fishing? Shoot bears? Work on my literary masterpiece? I am sure I would have thought of something but it's almost hard not to see his point.

There have been many times in the last seven months where I have cursed this twist of fate and yelled at the Gods. But lately, every once in a while, I find myself saying one more 'thank you.' And that's enough to keep me going, to have new adventures, and to throw myself out into the big bad world again.

Still, I admit, every once in a while, I think of him. That fleeting thought. . . just the way he looked, lying in bed at night, reading a book. The lamp behind his head, his index finger rested against his cheek, like a little boy.