Juxtapositioning

Snowed in

Last week the flurries started. They really began on New Year’s Eve, the day I drove away from a warm heart and to a cold empty house that I wanted to fill with all my wishes for the coming year. Wishes full, I lay down at ten minutes to midnight, not realizing that the standard way to bring in a new year around here is with all the leftover July fireworks. Someone even torched a minivan just a block away that night. I’ve considered torching minivans myself, and might have had I ever actually owned one, but likely not as a way to bring in wishes for the coming year.

The flurries began that day and it started snowing harder in the days afterward. Sad, lonely, desperate people who wanted fixing or at least hope that they could be fixed. They reached black lonely tendrils to me, tendrils that I should know better than to accept, and soon I was Atlas holding up the world on my narrow shoulders, unable to speak or breathe.

Or sleep.

My childhood was populated by monsters and witches who lived under my bed and in my closet, coming out at night to masquerade as shapes that became chairs and other mundane items when the lights were switched on. It didn’t help that somebody thought it was a good idea to take me to see a bad B-movie sci-fi flick called The Lost Continent that featured seaweed that would reach in through ship portholes and grab people, making a weird rattling sound.

I heard that seaweed this past week, those black tendrils reaching for me choking out light and air until all I felt was the song of the unburdened.

Having dispensed with the seaweed with the handy axe the witches had left under my bed, I noticed that I was snowed in. Six feet of snow covered the front door. Cars looked like hummocks. The air was crisp and still. Nothing moved.

I took a shovel the size of my thumb and shoveled the city free. When people awoke in the morning, there was no trace of white.

And I slept.

The snow started again today, flurries falling on my face and eyelashes. Soon I’ll be sleeping under a warm blanket in welcome darkness. I reach my green seaweed tendrils toward the light, waving tentacles that could twine around a hot air balloon and lift me up, up from the snow, carrying me over pristine high white glistening mountains.

Free to fill my year with the wishes I began with a snap and a bang.

Dead boy emerges

The boy looks at the woman lying ragged in the hospital bed, her breaths coming like rocky chunks of asphalt, filling the room with the out and in, out and in.

You are not of me, he said. I never came from you.

The woman, restless, moves her legs from side to side in her sleeplike state. Can’t keep a sheet on her, the nurses had told the boy. A chasm yawns in the space where her legs met. Sagging flesh swims there, shapes and color. The boy looks away. I never came from you.

A nurse bustles in with some supplies. A breathing treatment, she says. To keep her lungs healthy. The boy looks on. For what, he wonders. Blood clots in the brain, they had said. A coma. Why treat the lungs? Free. I want to be free.

The staff speaks to her like she is a child. They try to wake her, get her to wiggle toes, to nod yes. Eyes open briefly, looking at the faces in the room. They close again, no change. No recognition.

At last you can’t touch me. The boy stands at the side of the room. He won’t go near the bed. He doesn’t take her hand. He has come to be released of the chains that bind him to her, of the relentless presence in his mind all those years, probing, commanding, all-knowing, all-seeing. He whispers cautious syllables, like sending tiny snowflakes into the room one by one, knowing they will melt immediately in his breath.

Free.

The boy melds with another boy, a boy who has come from a deeper place, an older place. This boy is grey, with dead grey eyes and a dead grey face. No expression. No hope inside, just a dry walnut where his heart had once been. Dead boy looks around the room and sees the future. Sameness. Grey. No life.

I have been waiting for you.

Dead boy surveys the broken landscape of his world. He feels nothing. Is nothing. The woman stirs again, breathing louder, ragged. Her eyes open and close again. Her mouth lies open, a trap. Dead boy climbs inside and dissolves on her dry tongue.

The woman swallows, chokingly. She coughs.

The boy turns away, his heart safe in its velvet box. The woman’s face is someone else’s. He has seen what he needed.

Outside, the cold bright moon is ringed with ice. Birds fly overhead. The boy drives away into the night.

Transition

A hospital bed stood in the center of the room, once a living room. Now it was a dying room, its walls covered with loved ones’ artifacts and memories. The man in the bed was tiny, shrunken, his body barely visible beneath the sheet that covered him. Only his feet and one hand created small hills in the otherwise nearly-flat landscape. His face was turned to one side and his eyes never left mine. Hold me, they said, I know everything. Hold me.

The skin of the man’s face was surprisingly smooth, as if all the cells of his body had ceased their normal work and instead concentrated on making his skin look like a teenager’s again. His eyes looked out from inside deep dark recesses that were two small caves in his face. His eyes spoke. I know everything. I remember when I was a tiny jumble of cells, a zygote. I remember the feel of the wind on my skin, of the sight of birds flying overhead. Once I wanted to fly with them. Now I have become part of this sheet, this bed, this room. I feel myself getting bigger and smaller at the same time. Hold me.

I held him. Softly I sang, surrounding him with song, and the notes became bigger and joined with his spirit, his life essence, that stood just behind him. Together we kept expanding, my clear high notes and his eternal life presence, becoming as large as All That Is, spinning into the heavens. The memories in the room applauded. This is what they had come for.

Gently I placed a hand over his that lay beneath the sheet. His body-shell trembled. His shrunken chest rose up and down, guiltily, tiredly. I felt the nearly-constant tremor in his hand soften. The notes rose and fell in rhythm with his chest. Sleep, his eyes said. Sleep.

Soon, promised the notes. The memories in the room swelled with appreciation. Soon. The body-shell sighed. The mouth spoke but the words that fell out were from another time. The notes receded. Cells quivered. Soon.

Dear Anne LaMott

DISCLOSURE: I suspect I, uh, stole the idea for writing a letter to Anne LaMott from Andy Raskin. Oh, you don’t know Andy Raskin? I didn’t either until about a week ago when his book The Ramen King and I went home with me from the library. I suppose I would have known him if I still listened to NPR — where, apparently, Andy Raskin talks about things — but I haven’t listened to NPR since at least 2005, and in fact the listening to NPR, especially Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion (though I saw the movie — was that cheating?) was ceded to the Other Side in my divorce settlement, much like those old Body Shop stock accounts that probably are still worth only pennies on the dollar.

[A further note on Andy Raskin: Andy, if I may address you directly and at this point I don't see why I shouldn't considering everything you have meant to me this past week, I have to report that I sort of hated you through about the first half of your book. You were kind of a jerk! But then you got all vulnerable and I started thinking Maybe he's on to something here, and I especially liked the technique of letting that horrible inner voice do the talking for awhile so you could really hear it and from where it comes, and then I started thinking that despite your unfortunate inside back cover photograph — the one that makes you look alarmingly identical to the Party of The Other Side in the aforementioned divorce — I'd almost sort of want to meet you. (Not in a creepy way or a stalking way, I promise, but more like in a I think I get you and you seem like a cool guy kind of way.) At least, if it weren't for the fact that semi-famous people are almost always a disappointment in person, I mean, cough, so I've heard. (Not you, of course.) You understand. No offense. Your book rocked, really.]

Dear Anne LaMott,

A few years ago someone commented on the blog I was keeping at the time. You sound just like Anne LaMott! Through the osmosis of such things I knew that Anne LaMott was an author who wrote books. Score! I Googled you. Oh, bummer. I saw references to “God” and “Jesus.” Since I am a person who frequently and liberally sprinkles words like “reincarnation” and “chakra” and “aura” in her conversations, I figured we couldn’t have much to say to one another despite what my well-intentioned commenter thought.

That’s where I was wrong. I adore being wrong.

Last week one of your books jumped off the library shelf into my hands. Well, we say that, books jumping off shelves, but in reality it’s unlikely, I mean seriously, show me the legs that cause all this jumping. How about, the book took my notice? Became magically brighter while everything else fell away? Sure, okay. I was in the Biography section, where, apparently, the lovely librarians in my library have seen fit to stash your books, or some of them. I don’t know, I’m not an expert in library science (but I love that it’s a Science, I mean, Books and Science are two things one doesn’t expect to be combined, you know?), and I don’t even know if there are other books of yours in other locations. I just know I saw A N N E  L A M O T T along the top shelf and something made me stop. Anne Lamott. Well, fine. I guess it’s time to see what ol’ Anne Lamott is like for reals. So I chose a book after scanning the three or four titles that were there. Plan B. Sounds good, I could use a Plan B myself. So I took it home.

I started reading. Interesting. I liked you immediately. I liked how you looked at things. I liked your passion. I liked your cadence, your use of words. The way people use words — which to me are like living, breathing, feeling beings — is important to me. I judge people based on their use (and abuse) of words. Yours were spare. Bare. Frank. Honest. I liked that.

I flipped to the back inner fly leaf. The words tumbled out and the sudden sound of my voice surprised me, “Oh, she’s beautiful!”  Dreadlocks. Hippie-ish jewelry. A warm, slightly self-conscious smile. Someone is taking my photograph and I find that a little ridiculous, your eyes seemed to be saying. A woman growing comfortable with her skin. I liked her very much.

I decided, too, while I read, that we think very much alike. That we’d probably like one another. That we do share a similar writing style. I liked the forthright, tender, compassionate, human woman who emerged from your pages.

Thanks, Anne LaMott, for the gift of you I received through Plan B.

Oh. I can understand your question. What does she want? Well. I wrote to another writer once. I was twelve. His name was Ray Orrock and he was a columnist for a Bay Area newspaper. I adored his writing. His column about driving around the block an extra time just so he could watch the odometer turn from 99999 to 00000 made him seem like just the sort of person I was. At twelve I wasn’t driving, but if I had been that’s just the sort of thing I’d do. So I wrote to him. Poured out my heart. About being misunderstood. About wanting my life to mean something. And you know what? He wrote me back. Took about three months, which in twelve-year-old years is nearly a lifetime of little deaths, but he wrote back. He was kind. He was understanding. He gave advice. Keep your chin up. You’ll be fine. I was embarrassed that I had taken up the time of a 50-year old man and I hid his letter away in a drawer.

So what do I want, Anne LaMott? Writers write to reach people. That’s what they do. It’s why they — we — write. To be heard. To connect. So consider yourself heard and connected. Sure, I don’t know you, but I got a sense from those pages. And writing — reaching, connecting — seemed like a good idea.

Hi, Anne LaMott.