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.