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.

From Great Love, Comes Great Loss... Comes Great Love.

Two weeks before I got the call to come back to home, I was on the phone, this time with him. He asked me about my temporary job that I had just gotten, as an assistant to the Dean at the Harvard School of Public health.

It was my first real job out of college and I was barely twenty-two. That summer after I graduated, I fought to get back to Boston. I fought him. I left that August, secured a dingy basement apartment in September and by October had my first job. If I had known better, I would have known that something in him was trying to keep me closer to home. But I was young and stubborn and hellbent on getting back to the life I had built for myself up north.

He was in the hospital and had just finished dialysis. His voice was breathy and broken across the phone line. "Keep your desk clean," he said, giving me advice when the only thing I wanted to hear was him asking me to come home. "It will show them that you have respect for yourself and your job."

For many months after his passing, I remembered less of the man he was, and more of the mourning that followed. The image of the dirt falling out of the shovel and onto his casket. Sitting with my cousins in the gazebo in the backyard, trying to find some sort of normalcy, in a world where our foundation had been swept from underneath us. Family coupled in the tables on the back patio. My grandmother. Bowls of olives. The images changed but the feeling, though, always consistent. I had lost my best friend. I lost my ally. More than anything, at its very truth, I lost the person that saved the seat next to him for me. I lost the feeling of comfort , and the security in knowing he would always be there.

It will be nine years now since he has been gone, and the more time passes, the more I remember the smallest moments. It's not every day and they come and go, it's true. But after a long day's work, when I prepare my things to start the long trek home, I clear my desk and turn off the light, and I hear him. . . every time.


Life is divided into these small moments -- both happy and sad. We keep them with us, hold them close. They are our strength to push us through and also our weakness and baggage.

One night this past week, the intimidating boss and I were packing in a late night and leaving work. She was talking about her new boyfriend, how he'd sort of mentioned the idea of a marriage proposal. This woman that was so normally rigid, became light-hearted, carefree -- a school girl floating on the air of her first kiss. Seeing her like that, just confirmed what I have always known -- I will feel that again someday.

Ever since then, even though I had felt it before, it's on the surface more -- the affirmation that I am a wonderful woman with so much to offer and so much love to give. And maybe I not-so-long-ago suffered one of love's most awful punishments. . . but I am no longer willing to punish myself.

If anything, I may even love smaller moments more now... freely, purely, whole-heartedly... and perhaps, with a school-girl hope, that fate's hand has saved a blessing for me.

I'll have the Ben Affleck...

Things I have learned from working at my current job the last two weeks:

1. The title "art director" is so much more fun than my previous title. Not that I do anything different, its just more fun to say.

2. I have way more work in the first 6 days of work than I have had possibly in my entire time at my previous position. I have worked through every lunch, save today, and have left work no earlier than 8:15 when my hours should be 9:30 to 6:30.

3. My Star-crack (aka '*$' or Starbucks) drink of choice also happens to be Ben Afflecks. I learned this last Thursday morning, where I defintely needed the coffee following my marketing brainstorm all-nighter. I collected my drink from the portly barista and headed over to the fixings bar, I was approached by this 20-something guy in a Jamba juice apron. "Iced coffee with a shot of sugar free vanilla, huh?" He says it the way the bartender looks at me when I order a Bacardi and Diet, also known as the "skinny bitch" -- as in, you do know you're not a skinny bitch, right??? So I ask him what the big deal with my order is, and in the back of my mind, I'm thinking about how this guy I almost married once used to complain how my coffee order was so complicated. "Oh," he shrugs, "I used to work at the Starbucks in Savannah and Ben Affleck used to come in all of the time and order the same thing." I joked that maybe Ben and I were soulmates -- you know, right after he's done with his kick-ass-wife and little baby. Or that maybe its the Boston in me. Ben probably knows, like I have come to know, that no where but in the Boston Dunkin Donuts can you find the best French Vanilla Iced Coffee you may ever drink. The only thing you can get close to such a fine taste is my (I mean, our) concoction from Starbucks. Now, I could get into why you can't just get one at Dunkin Donuts in Miami or Savannah... but that's a whole other blog to itself. Anyway, the guy smiles at me and goes on his way into the white morning sunlight. I shake some cinnamon into my coffee, thinking to myself that the person that would get the greatest kick out of this story is someone who will never hear it.

4. I am not meant to drive on the highway. It takes me 60 minutes to get to a job that is only 30 minutes away. I also drive into Havana -- I mean, Miami -- where apparently everyone has taken a different driving test than I had to take when I got my license. Oh yeah, half of them don't even have a license, and forget car insurance. The State of Florida actually came out with a press release this week stating that using an indicator was merely a COURTESY. . . as if anyone used one anyway. When you put out your indicator, all it does is indicate to the cars behind you that it is time to excelerate.

5. Protein/ meal replacement bars still taste like chocolate flavored chalk. Never, in any circumstances, will I ever eat a Pria Powerbar Chocolate Almond Crunch bar EVER again. Worst.tasting.thing.ever. It was like chocolate, chalk, and Elmers glue paste.

6. If I go to bed now, I will actually be going to bed EARLY for a change.

*cue Dolly Parton....*

Independence Day

I started the new job this week and I could not be more thankful that I had a day off in middle of the madness. The beginning of anything new can be overwhelming to one's senses and this new job is no different. I love new challenges and new stimulation. . . but when I have to be creative and I am overly stimulated, it's a lot like asking me to paint something pretty with red and green paint. It will just come out looking like mud or muck.

The first two days certainly had its challenges. I had moments when I wanted to crawl underneath my desk and I had moments when someone needed to talk me off of a ledge. I am still kind of waiting for them to look at me at the end of this week and say, You know, we thought we liked you, buuuuttt, not so much.

And wouldn't that just be the story of my life.

That's why I'm here blogging at 11:44 at night. I've been racking my brain trying to think of a marketing idea for a hotel chain revamp so when my boss looks at me tomorrow for some answers, I don't look quite like a chump. And that's just it. . . it's why I am blogging. Because I am a chump. My brain feels so completely drained of creative juices. I can't hear the brilliant ideas over the other voices in my head -- the ones reminding me who is who, what is what, and whatever you do, don't ask the senior art director anymore stupid questions tomorrow.

Women don't usually scare me. In fact, I have oddly been told by many women, some my closest friends, that when they first met me, I scared them. But this woman, the senior art director, intimidates the crap out of me. She's fearless, confident and brilliant. A creative, out of the box, in the zone kind of designer. It's so simple for her because she's been there for a few years, knows her co-workers, knows her clients, knows the industry... I may as well be asking her if red and yellow make orange when I ask her the anything. Judging by the look on her face, she lets me know it, too. But she is brilliant and most of the reason that I haven't quit is because I am going to learn so much from working with her in this arena.

Tonight, I am thankful for this pit stop in this week of craziness. I'm thankful for new challenges, new opportunities to show up to life. I'm thankful for the glimpses of independence I have felt in just this short while. My hope is that this path will bring me to a higher place in my life... a life I caught a glimpse of once, as it sailed on by in the night.

I Got The Job!

Somewhere, someone was smiling down on me on Friday afternoon. Finally, I get to get back to work. I am so excited to be in this new company, in a new arena, a different field to test my creative strengths. Most of all, it seems I can't wear sweatpants here and they certainly don't seem to use instant messenger to communicate -- they actually get up and speak to one another! Imagine that... perhaps it will give me more to write about...