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Black Widow
To start with, you should know that I don’t believe there are any true accidents in life. Things may appear accidental, but really they are all part of a glorious and masterful interweaving of people, places, things, and experiences. Tonight I found myself musing over the “Archive” folder in my email, specifically from the years 2006 & 2007. Interesting, you might say. Why those years? Why that folder?
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Landing Place
I thought you might like to read my complaints about my AirBnb, since this is my last night in it.
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Alone in the Time of Corona
There are doves everywhere, cooing their lovely dove-sounds. And other birds of unknown-to-me varieties, calling out to one another, letting the world know that yes, they exist, they are here, they are alive. My window this week faces a brick wall. I ask you, is that a metaphor? Someone nearby lets some light jazz drift out their open window. Everyone’s windows are open because it is 90 degrees here and there is no air conditioning. Someone else is singing, maybe it is singing or maybe he is simply talking. His inflections rise and fall. Sometimes he is saying a thing and sometimes he is asking a thing. I think I…
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The Light in the Tunnel
For a long time I was shrouded in darkness. There was no light at all, not even from the spark of life that lay dormant in my heart. For a long time I saw nothing but endless dreary winter, felt nothing but bone-shattering cold. For a long time I wasn’t even myself. With some help, I found a doorway. I walked through it and found a world I thought long lost. Much like when Dorothy enters Oz and transitions from endless black-and-white to a world bursting with color, my long-lost world thrums with the life I was so long denied.
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Endings & Beginnings
Big changes have been happening, both internal and external. 2020 is a big year. Can you feel it? An old friend observed today that my energy has changed. It certainly has, I thought when I read what he wrote. He said: the old you is gone and another power has come in. You are more open now in a different way. And then he went on to say: you will teach others. I suppose I will. I have been for a long time now. It will look different now. Less doing, more being. One can teach quite a lot simply by being.
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Love Me Tender, Love Me Lost
Yesterday at the gym while I harnessed my ankle to a pulley system in order to torture my hamstrings and glutes, my attention wandered, as it often does, to the other people working out near me. I saw a couple who appeared to be working out together, and I watched them take turns using a machine designed for upright rows. At one point, while the woman sat tall and engaged her rhomboids while pulling the handles back, the man tenderly caressed the top of her head. Instantly my thoughts propelled me back to all the myriad times when my beloved tenderly caressed my poor brain tumor’d head. I nearly broke…
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Sometimes I Say The Stupidest Things
You know the thing where something just tumbles out of your mouth because you think you are safe, but the reaction from the person you said it to tells you that not only are you not safe but that the thing you said was probably the worst possible thing you could ever say? That. That is what happened to me literally just now, and it happens often, too often, so often that now I have to examine why. Why does this happen. Tell me. Not going to tell me? Fine, I will tell you. Number One. I Don’t Think Before I Talk. Oh yes. This is so me. I think…
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Hands
I haven’t told you yet about my hands. When I was in middle school and high school, people frequently told me I had “piano hands”. Long slim fingers, oval-shaped nails — I guess those things make piano hands. The same people also assumed I played piano, which I did a little if you count “Für Elise”, “Moonlight Sonata”, and “Just the Way You Are” by Billy Joel. My hands have been so useful. Writing, chopping onions, riding horses, soothing fevered brows, folding towels, driving cars. For all of these things, my hands were there, helping. In my 30’s I became a knitter. Knitting was the thing to do among moms…
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Losing Touch
My beloved and I had an argument-thing today. It was brief. The gist was this: I interrupt him. Often. Multiple times a day. And I am unaware of doing it. This is, of course, Not Good. It is a sign that my brain is not functioning as per normal. We parsed the offending conversation, down to (what seemed like) the nanosecond. This is what happened during The Interruption: He talked. He paused. Then my talking-machinery ground into action, causing me to talk. Meanwhile, he was still talking, but I had no idea he was still talking. Oops. Interruptus Maximus. Evidently this kind of thing happens All The Time. I am…
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Where Did My Brain Go??
Guess what it’s like, knowing that you used to be pretty capable and smart but now you struggle remembering a thing from just 5 minutes ago, and your vocabulary is down at least three notches, and many days it’s hard to even make words? Go on, guess. No wait, I’ll tell you. It’s scary. And it totally sucks. I don’t know whether my abilities will ever return. Maybe they will. I hope they will. I know now that my two brain surgeries from over three years ago aren’t responsible for these deficits. For a long time I thought, well my brain is just healing and needs time. Fuck healing. I have…