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Panic
The world has sped up. I feel it spinning around me, raindrops stinging my face like tiny needles of glass, each one piercing my heart. The walls around me crumble into dust. I search for somewhere to hold on to keep from falling, but my fingers grasp empty air. I try to remember to breathe, but my chest weighs too much. Nothing is the same. Everything hurts. In my mind I see the upside-down car pushed to the side of the freeway today. I see the tremendous splash it made, a fountain of millions of stinging needles. I wonder what it was like. I wonder what to do now.
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Tightrope
Two years ago I learned to play a Wii Sports game. It consisted of atempting to traverse thin twine stretched between the roof of one impossibly high building and another while purple creatures with bear-trap mouths snapped at my ankles. Even though I played while standing in the relative safety of my own first-floor livingroom, the game poked some of my more unreasonable fears right in the eye, fears like becoming caught in a bear trap and having to chew off my own leg or being unable to prevent my legs from inexplicably jumping me right off the top of a very tall building. Consequently, I wasn’t very good at…
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With
He said the Fourth of July was a turning point for him. We lay there, completely incapacitated by something intense and immediate and awful that we had eaten earlier at the neighborhood picnic we had looked forward to for weeks. There were going to be fireworks later. We could just take our chairs down the hill one block and take in the view of Lake Union, the tens of thousands of people coverng the hill of Gasworks Park, and the hundreds of boats hull-to-hull on the lake, all festively lit by colorful fireworks in the summer sky. That was the plan. Instead we lay nearly unable to move. He was…
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Extraordinary
“Living with you,” he said, “has been extraordinary. Extraordinary.” His heart filled his eyes for a moment, then became playful. “That’s a highlight for you, me saying that.” Why yes. Yes it was a highlight, and in our morning coffee ritual the next day, feet on lap, I told him so. Extraordinary. 1. Beyond what is ordinary or usual. 2. Highly exceptional; remarkable. We have both lived with others. My experiences then were those of survival, maintaining, staying safe from being hurt, trying to assert control where I felt none. I wanted love but didn’t know how to ask for it. Or where to look. Or I stopped believing it was possible.…
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Integrity
I have been unfair. Specifically, unfair in my last post. Unfair to what is really in front of me. I wrote from the place I am in — which to me in this moment seems vast and unconquerable — but not from the place I have been. I have at my bedside a book containing now more than 200 elements of awesome, reasons for loving and living, and I forgot to look at it. Or think of it. No, in my inner emptiness I neglected to feel into the fullness of the Summer of Love, of my soulmate-beloved, and instead I saw the half-empty glass walls I had erected around…
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Lonely
It dawned on me just now, as I contemplated logging in to Facebook to see what’s new in my stream with all the people near and far, real and virtual who have come to populate much of my online life, that I was doing so in order to keep from feeling. Specifically, to keep from feeling lonely. The thought — I am lonely — blindsided me. I am lonely? Really? In this house with my soulmate, the man who now calls me his beloved, his twin flame? How can I be lonely? I am, and I am afraid. My bed calls to me, yards of white fluffiness, pillowy billowy down-filled…