The ring belongs, in my opinion, to someone else. It was given to me once as a symbol. That symbol connected to things. Promises. But life got blacker and I fell down a rabbit hole and drank a potion making me small. The ring grew too large to fit my finger. It wasn’t mine. That life wasn’t mine. I didn’t know what my life was then — not at 17 — but I knew what it couldn’t be. So I ran.

The first thing they tell you in Life School is that running doesn’t help. I missed that day.

It occurred to me, three weeks ago when through a series of events the ring’s owner became a real person who, inexplicably, lives not far from me — what are the odds?? of all the places on this planet! — that the running finally caught up with me. Here were things I haven’t wanted to see in 30 years (yet surfaced continually anyway), and now they were in my back yard.

Today we had lunch.

I tried hard not to have expectations. Expectations can ruin things. I know that much. Expectations either good or bad. Or in between. I tried, actually, not to think about it at all. When I caught myself thinking about it anyway I returned my thoughts to the present. What am I feeling now? Weird and awkward. Like I am 15 again.

This is sounding like there is romance here. I’m not seeing that, no. But there are memories. And a sense of continuation of something that was begun. Not down the path begun once, but a different path. I have met with people from my distant past before and there has been a feeling of warmth, of connection, of familiarity-yet-not.

Lunch was pretty good. Better than expected. It started this morning with a phone call that startled me with recognition of a voice that spoke to me from hours spent in a green-walled kitchen, lying on a black faux-leather sofa, yellow touch-tone phone glued to my ear.

I’m still filled with feelings. A lonely scared child in a woman’s body. Snips of pictures, words, one after another like waves crashing on rocks. What might have been but wasn’t. What was instead.

The message is that there is something to take from this. Something to take and a lot to let go of. I felt the rumblings three weeks ago when I lay awake one night in panic, feeling the volcano trembling underneath. I feel them still, closer and less frightening. I can lay open the doors, gates and walls bolted down so long ago. It’s just a dragon, after all. Nothing to be frightened of.

I channeled once that this relationship, my first, lay the groundwork for all that came after. I saw that, felt bound by it. Now I see it doesn’t have to be that way. Patterns are reversible; plaid turns into paisley. Undo what was done. Create something in its place. This opening, then, is a gift.

I can’t really tell you what’s been going on with me lately because, well, I can’t really tell. I hate not being able to tell, because not only could I make it into a good story but there’d be a certain poetic justice in the telling that would be immensely appealing to me. Like chocolate cake. But I can’t tell.

But this world I’ve been living in as a result of the [redacted] situation I seem to be in that is the fault of the [redacted][redacted] is surreal. Life is but a dream. Add to that the thing that is going on with me on a physical level, the one I am snarling about over on Facebook about the state of the United States health care (oxymoron) system, and there you have it.

I am so tired.

Tired is not the word. Who can sleep ten hours and then need a nap later in the day? Raise your hand if this is you. Oh, not you? It must be me then. And my day is punctuated by the Things I Must Do, like work, which occurs amidst the Things My Body Tell Me To Do, like lay on my bed meditating. (Staring at the ceiling through closed eyelids.)

Rest has not come easily to me in the past, and I fight it still.

My brain feels like it is under water. Or perhaps that someone sent it out for cleaning. Is it a bad sign that I can’t tell which?

I am sure this must have something to do with reorganization of priorities, but so far everything is being shuffled to the bottom of the pile and nothing is on top. Is this what non-attachment feels like? Because I just feel like lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, drifting slowly away.

Nope, I’m afloat on the Wonder Barge of Life. Somebody up ahead (it might be me but I can’t be bothered to get up and go look just now to see for sure) is poling us gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily. And along the sides of the stream I see the things we slowly pass, but I’m not grabbing for any brass rings these days. It’s okay just sitting here in the sun, floating down this stream.

My days are pinpointed by whatever is on Google Calendar, and most days are pretty full. Not a lot of time for floating, but I’m managing meditational runs and meditational baths. It’s okay that I don’t actually sit in the Zen Room and meditate. I don’t need to answer emails, but mostly I do. The bills are paid. Phone calls are made. Songs are sung. Life flows on.

The walls could be crumbling around me, and for now that would be okay. Let tomorrow take care of itself, right?

If there’s anything I feel I could be missing, it would have to be passion. Is this what life is like on anti-depressants? The top and bottom of the graph are cut off? I remember telling someone long ago about the huge advantages I saw to having big emotional ups and downs. I strove to live my life that way. No, he said, he preferred a straight line across the graph. I wondered how anyone could live that that. Now I know.

Everything changes.

Tomorrow I might wake up with my panties in a twist. You never know. The Wonder Barge probably isn’t a permanent fixture, as much as I’m (bemusedly) enjoying this Time In Between. Either way, I’ll enjoy the purple irises on my coffee table.

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.

Plus it had weird carpet.

In the spring I discovered forested trails and alternate universes. I sat, motionless, sometimes for hours, staring out through a skylight and eventually emerging into a giddy, childlike state, a person who thought lakes were oceans and wondered whether she should be driving real cars.

A year ago I had a job, a sort of a job, a full time gig for part time pay, plus a promise of a someday full time pay for the time I was putting in, so I wrote and I wrote and I edited and I wrote my little heart out. In February that world exploded and it limped along through May, and then I was done. No job, no pay.

I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane and found my way through a maze of fears. Later, a motorcycle fell on me.

In June I moved to a smaller place near the water and near the trails and across the street from a banyan tree and in a community. The Magic Bus drives up from time to time and takes people places. I look out my tiny window and see a slice of ocean. The place isn’t hidden, is sometimes a fishbowl with the world looking in, but it fits me better. I have an easel and paints, and I write. The sun shone on this place and now the rain falls gently on my sari-clad zen room and my bicycles smile through their gears.

In July my intentions caught up with the world.

In August I brought my heart-pieces closer and together we walked my world, now theirs. We ate 18 pounds of blueberries. We laughed. We parted with new paths woven between us.

I discovered a box.

Summer tumbled into autumn and soon the bright crunchy leaves became dank and moldering and slick underfoot. Outward turned inward. Not being a joiner — ever — I joined and joyed. I sang. I found a home, at least for now.

Now, inward, I sing. I joy. I raise silent lips in inner song, singing my heart into wholeness. I breathe and become one with my heartbeat, and with yours. I walk and feel aliveness in the dirt under my soles, in each sparkling raindrop on my face, in each leaf and sound and sigh. I touch hearts and they touch mine.

What do I wish for 2010? More. More of what comes next.

I can smell you.

As you approach and before you even walk past me, I have already decided what you smell like based on your appearance. Dryer sheets in the grocery store, sweat on the hiking trails. I know this with the inner sense we all share. We lift eyes and greet one another kindly, or nonchalantly, or not at all. We continue our separate directions, you one way and me another. After you pass I am bathed by a wafting of your being, an air current bearing with it a tide of your essence. My superpowers engage. Try as I might, I cannot help what comes next.

I inhale. Deeply. I can smell you.

Here is where I am proved wrong. Dryer sheets on the hiking trails. Cinnamon and vanilla — or is that coffee? — in the grocery stores. I had it wrong.

Dryer sheets are an evil surpassed only by cigar smoke. They asphyxiate. If you use them in your house and you happen to be running your dryer as I cycle past, my throat burns. I cough. Petroleum, get thee from my lungs!

If we happen to get close enough for a hug, I will know your shampoo, your soap, your secrets. I inhale you deeply. You fill my cells with your essence. We become one for that moment. I can smell you.

This superpower has other uses. I know when things are burning that shouldn’t be. I can tell when cakes, cookies, and toast are done to perfection. I appreciate a new book, its pages crisp and ink fresh. I remember the scent of newborn babies.

Scent memories run fresh. I once had a yellow blanket, one corner browned from being pressed nightly to the underside of my nose in comfort. When Blankie was washed it took days to get it right again. I remember places by their smell. Paris is perfume and the Metro, and tiny quiches and baguettes wrapped in colored paper. The paper wrappings all smell the same. Ireland is damp green, warm with conviviality. Germany smells of steel and rain and sausages. Finland smells of ice, clear and crystal cold, tinged with warm cedar.

I can smell you. Walk by me now, dare me to lose myself for a moment in the swirling cells that surround you.

While this isn’t purely hypothetical, please don’t freak out. Don’t refer me to a suicide hotline. Don’t tell me I need counseling. Because baby, I can guarantee you 100 percent that I am not the only person in the Universe who feels this way — at least sometimes. Momentarily. But I am one of a handful who is willing to talk about it.

It wasn’t long ago that I first began really embracing this feeling when it comes up. Emotions, to me, are waves. They come, they go, they move through and around and beyond me. Ripples in a pond. Yeah, I’m an emotional person. I would be the first to offer that. And that glorious aspect of me made people around me uncomfortable as a child, so I learned to push it away. Was I successful? Not so much.

Feeling of helplessness, anger, and hopelessness have always been oddly connected for me. I know it has much to do with a panoply of things like that initial childhood dynamic and other perceptual choices I made. I sort of love the irony in that my work, my love, is about helping other people through similar spaces. Healer, heal thyself, right?

So I offer this.

I don’t think of death as something to fear. Yeah, people would miss me. Yeah, there’d be things I wouldn’t do, lives I wouldn’t touch, if my body was no longer infused with my essence. Do I feel a sense of responsibility about that? Not really. I’m all about letting go of responsibilities that aren’t mine. You over there — you have your own life to live irrespective of mine. Even though I love you unabashedly the way I do.

Death would be a respite. In the space I’m in right now, which is ALL ABOUT hopelessness, letting go of that sounds fantastic. Brilliant. The best idea ever.

So this is what I do when I feel like this.

Nothing.

Nothing special, anyway. I don’t try to get over it, past it, or beyond it. I make a pot of congee. I take a shower. I hunt for new apps for my iPhone. I Twitter and Facebook, feeling the interwoven tapestries of all to whom I am connected. I listen to my love laughing upstairs. I write about whatever comes to mind. I breathe, not in any special way. Just in and out.

That’s it. Nothing changes, not for now, but everything changes. Annica.

[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.

~~~~

I drove home in silence today. It was two hours of after-airport surreality, the shotgun seat and the back seat now oddly silent after having been so full for the last ten days. I came home to the smell of bacon frying, the love of a man wafting to greet me at the front door, trying to fill the holes in my heart left vacant by the two who now occupied seats 27A and 27B headed back to humid-hell Pennsylvania after ten days of forest trails and waterside sunsets.

Later, my foot slipped on the kitchen floor. Tonight’s repast, a love offering to the gods of change, left bacon waftings on the floor. Argument ensued, first over the presence of bacon grease on the floor (I could feel my feet sliding baconly; he protested his innocence), and then over its disposition. I said no to the mop wielded by a repentant man. No to the mop. No.

It wasn’t until later, when I slowly and deliberately filled my bucket halfway with hot water and a squirt of soap, got the mop and began to erase the underfoot ghoststeps of two of my children from our past ten days, only ten small days out of the past 365, that I realized what had happened.

It is an act of love, caring for the dead. Sacred. Holy.

The wet floor became shiny, clean. I no longer saw faint footprints on the wood.

It was my duty, my love, to make my home wholly mine again, to take away the bits of Nathaniel and Serena still lingering here. Those bits belong with them in Pennsylvania, to help them feel whole. My duty, my act of love. Mine. No to the man. No to the mop.

The floor is dry now except for a spot or two here and there. The table that holds my paints casts a reflection in the gleaming wood. No more ghostprints. It was my job, my love. Now my two are whole, joined by the waftings they left here and the bits of forest and bayside they collected. Whole, and my home echoes a little for its loss.

My box is just my size. Like a casket. I lie inside it, feeling its smooth wooden sides, feeling safe. Inside my box it’s just me.

I was nine when I found the box. Every night I’d lie awake inside it, breathing carefully through the air holes someone had put in it, feeling the rocking motion of the waves. Every night I’d lie inside the box set adrift on the ocean, always landing on an island where there was an evil wizard who did unspeakable things to me.

The box lasted at least through fifth grade. That was the year my stomach hurt for three months straight and I left the contents of the brown paper bag containing the vanilla pudding snack cup, the baloney sandwich, and the baggie with a handful of Laura Scudder’s wavy potato chips (why never the flat ones?) uneaten in my desk every day while the too-small purple rib-knit top that I wore every Friday got bigger over my already thin frame.

Disappear. Float off to sea, never to return.

I found the box again just the other day. The inside looks worn, in a good way. Someone varnished it once and the varnish has yellowed a little like the deck of a well-loved sailboat. The box still fits me, even without air holes. The sides feel comfortingly close, like a hug. I lie inside the box and feel at home.

When I was nine and then ten, I never knew where the box came from every night. One minute I’d be lying on my bed and the next I’d hear the sounds of the sides of the box being nailed shut around me and the air holes drilled in, the drill coming close to me but like a stage magician’s sword never drawing blood. The box would be set afloat on the ocean and that was my cue to bring in the element of budding ten-year old sexuality that always happened when I was in it.

Fifth grade was the year that Amanda Viera got breasts and the boys all left the room while we girls were shown a special movie. All I knew was that my stomach hurt every day and that breasts were years away, but nightly I’d be nailed into a box that took me to the evil wizard’s island.

The shadow of the box remained with me for years and I always dredged up words like “dysfunction” and “abuse” when I thought about it or almost felt its comforting worn sides, but now I see my box for what it is.

Protection. A safe haven. A room of my own.

I slept in my box last night, whispering a silent plea to the sleeping, loving man next to me that he not touch me, not put his solid arm through my box and shatter its safety. I felt the hard wooden surface underneath my body, softer than any bed could be, and breathed. I feel its sides still — warm, yielding, mine.

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.