Gratitude
I am grateful for family, the light that casts beauty across shadows, music that lifts emotions, a little house and garden filled with colour and love, friends and inspirations, the beauty of nature, the ocean’s cold spray, the soft barnacle skin of the grey whale and the possibilities that exist in life.
Category Archives: then and now
watching for words
A blank white page doesn’t tell the story. There are volumes piled up, crumpled into each other with peanut butter stains and crayon chalk drawings; swollen with the wet rain of tears and smeared with the joy that comes from kicking a soccer ball and running with a kite.
In a month’s time, I will watch him walk across a stage in a cap and gown. I will likely cry because I tear up just typing those words. He will graduate and then we will spend the last bits of the summer together before he packs up and leaves me with an empty room of sunshine filled with boy cave reminders. It is all changing. It has already all changed. It will continue to change.
I’ve been watching One Tree Hill (OTH) Don’t judge. Or do judge. I don’t really care. I am the girl who wrote an English paper in grade 11 defending so called romantic paperback trash novels (not the romantic era of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Coolridge not to mention my favourite Byron) as valid reading material. I can high brow it and low brow it with the best of them, thank you very much. My boys laugh at me and my OTH addiction but I enjoyed watching the highschool antics move into grown up realities and the music and the quotes and bits of literature. My favourite quote,
“happiness is a mood, not a destination” (Julian, OTH)
Yeah. So simple and I know it deep down but it still blew my mind just a little bit. truth has a way of doing that. word.
I remember when I graduated high school. Well, to be honest, I went through the ceremony and did the graduation thing and partied hard enough to end up on crutches for weeks afterwards, but it was years later that I graduated because I sort of gave up and quit. Yes it is true, a person can quit high school and still end up going to university and acquiring more than one degree, with honours even. Don’t judge. Or do judge. I don’t really care. Anyway, I remember the feeling of standing on the edge of something and not knowing what was going to happen next. I felt that way that first night in a strange city in a new mostly empty apartment, that night that I slept on the kitchen floor because it was the only room that had any furnishings in it and so felt safe. I felt that way when I was pregnant too. There I was newly married and halfway through my first degree and newly pregnant and standing on the edge of something and not knowing what was going to happen next. I felt that way when I got divorced too. There I was newly separated having barely finished graduating from my second degree with no job and a five year old son, standing on the edge of something and not knowing what was going to happen next. I didn’t really feel this again until I found myself, standing in the living room of our newly purchased house, marrying the man who helped me birth our twins and held me tight through nicu and death. And that was six years ago.
And here I am … standing on the edge of something and I have no idea what is going to happen next. There are these moments that we can trace backwards and forwards. These pivotal moments that sometimes stretch out for hours, days, weeks, months and that linger like markers in our memories. I am in one of those moments. And I stare at the blank page and wait and watch for the words to reveal themselves to me.
And. I am happy. It is the mood that I am most familiar with these days.
the waiting
my thoughts are filled, filled with poetry and drunk cherry curses. it is the way. the way we walk around healing and breaking and fumbling in our strong sure step while confidence and fear circle each other warily.
for the longest time i wanted to hide from you. hide from your prying eyes piercing me with perceived expectation. i wanted to hide from ugly and show you pretty files in candy coated colours and then smash that wide open with a long thick gooey scar of garbage strewn down a neglected back alley. and anger and joy circle each other warily, wolves teeth bared as drool hangs and then baptizes me anew.
plain language please.
poetic jargon thank you.
what the fuck do you want from me I ask myself on a regular basis. you looked at me in my polyester blue smock, pricing gun slung over my left hip and said that i looked like mom’s apple pie, rosy cheeks and milky skin as I stained my fingers with the long inhalation of a choked off breath, still hovering in that middle ground of hope’s optimism and the despair of anger’s pessimism while the punch of your fist still stained blood’s bruise on my rib. and i have no answer because life does not show up on the lines of my face but sit curled up beneath my skin waiting to strike. twenty years later and i still hover.
i was reminded late last week of the fragility of life, the fragility that comes with being human. we push it out of our mind only facing it in moments of grief when death holds tighter than we possibly can to those frail hands. we can be walking along feeling powerful and in control, leaves dancing in cool winds, the cycle of death around us and yet beauty is what we chose to breath in, to hold on to because that is what makes us beautiful. there is a vulnerability that happens in the generic pale green walls of a doctor’s office, our legs pushed open, breasts bared, pushed open with the unnatural clamp of necessity. it is but a moment and then suddenly you find yourself walking frozen through the lightly sound of jazz flutes as the bright colours of book titles float around you.
a lump in your breast.
what does that mean.
and you remember the last time you felt the world tilt hard as blood poured out between your legs, like a faucet left on too long. sometimes you have to hover in the spaces in between the bright smile of optimism and the dark form of despair. sometimes the very possibility of something is enough to stop you. stop you hard.
and so you find yourself in a waiting room. the same but different. a pretty pink smock and the ease of a molten chocolate cake simmering on the tiny television. you remember the last time you were in a room like this. the same but different. your belly not quite showing, the magazine in your hand filled with the words of nicu and what it felt like to pump your milk while your babies hovered between the world of breath and death. you remember running your hand over the soft spot that held your babies not yet knowing there were two of them and yet feeling somehow that this moment was important enough to note. so you filed away the vinyl chairs soft and squishy and the story of the woman who had lost so much and how his hand held yours while you waited to empty your bladder into the cup that held your blood. and now you feel that same sense of importance as a woman in a pink smock laughs nervously and makes conversation about how easy it all looks on the television. meals prepared with a flick of wrist beneath pearls and lightly coiffed hair as a team of jean glad ponytails wander the supermarkets buying just the right ingrediants.
and you realize that yoga has prepared you for this moment, you pose and breath as your breasts are pulled and pushed and it is only vaguely uncomfortable. far less uncomfortable than the prison walled steel you had imagined. they smile and nod and smile reasurringly some more. and you remember that is the way. you were stunned when they handed you the tiny urns, their death now dust. how does that happen when everyone is always smiling, offering up reassurance until they can’t anymore.
you wipe the goo off of your breast, wadding the pretty pink smock and throwing it in the basket even as you remember throwing the blue one in after wiping your belly. ultrasounds see more than babies. you walk away feeling confident again, a little raw and more aware of the way the wind speaks into the leaves but solid. a solid form. until you see the message blinking on your phone.
good thing you learned a thing or two about patience and waiting. you know what it is to wait. and so you wait. even so you have a hard time choking out the words, it will be okay even if that is what everyone wants to hear including yourself. so you sit in that space of not knowing. and you realize that walking through all those thick trees has somehow clouded the knowing, the deep down knowing and you are only left with the peaceful sigh of uncertainty.
i feel the hot breath of the wolves circling and i know, deep down know that regardless, i will be okay. it may or may not be okay but i will be.
Also posted in health and wellness
5 Comments
sisters
(polaroid colorpack iii / polaroid 664 film / kristen)
there are those moments
that we can’t escape from in life, those moments
where we hover in that place, where we wait and we do what we can
knowing there is really nothing we can do
even as we crack and lose ourselves in the pain of it all.
i spent 4 months watching my sister die, holding a space inside of myself that was sometimes like a cold wind blowing in the open spaces and was sometimes like a brick wall of knuckle scraped comfort that no one could penetrate. sometimes i laughed until my sides hurt and sometimes i cried until the salt swollen skin felt unnatural and burned into the broken spaces. i ate badly and my skin took on a loose pallor that seemed tinged with green. i drank like a fish and i forgot i needed water. i hated my family. i loved my family. no one understood and everyone understood. it was such a space of immediate contradictions filled with more pain and more love than i thought i had the capacity to hold inside of me. i was numb even as the slightest breeze caused me to slink from the needle like pain of my emotions.
what can i say. death sucks.
no matter how many times i watch someone i love die, i never get used to it and i never understand it. i remember people looking to me to guide them through what i needed but what the hell does anyone really need when they are the ones living, when they are the ones in the middle of it, bearing witness to it all. i didn’t know what i needed and there wasn’t really anything anyone could do for me but i remember hating being alone and even when people were irritating me, i liked that better than the dark spaces of empty.
during the long months of watching my sister weaken, watching my family collapse, tubes and blood and sunken flesh, i had a lover who sat beside me as i watched every single episode of buffy the vampire slayer over and over and over again. it didn’t prevent my sister from dying and it didn’t take away the pain but sometimes a distraction is like a warm blanket.
i am grateful that it worked out that i was able to be a bit of a distraction for a short time during my recent travels and hopefully somewhat of a warm blanket. i know there is nothing i can really do but give my love to a friend who is living in those filled and hollow spaces of love and pain.
Also posted in health and wellness, love and friendship, travel and stories
3 Comments
fuck safe
this is an old photo of my sister and i. i was 24 which would make her close to 18.
what strikes me about our faces is how freaking happy we were, how filled with hope and love and expression. i was newly engaged living in a highrise apartment downtown and though she needed 24/7 care, she had a wheelchair and wasn’t in pain, the pain that came later when her spine started twisting her little body. sometimes i wish i could go backwards instead of forwards. sometimes the pain of all my loss is unbearable. so unbearable.
i miss her. my sister. she died almost 10 years ago now. i almost can’t bear easter. it holds so much pain for me, so much death, so much loss. i can’t even bear to talk about it really, even writing these words causes tears to roll down my face and i want to scream only i can’t because i am sitting in a beige cubicle of quiet. i often wonder at the strange coincidence of it all. the way that her death and the death of my twins are so entwined into this month, days grasping days in waves of pain.
and then i look at myself and wish i could whisper in my ear that i had it all wrong. so wrong. on so many counts. but i suppose i wouldn’t know that if i hadn’t walking down all those paths, avoiding myself at every direction, trying to lose myself in the paths less traveled, the paths worn out by the moon even as i try and find the trail of breadcrumbs that i know i left not understanding that they would be picked by the chatter of mockingbirds waiting for me to move on.
in this moment, depression crushes down on me … i feel the grey film washing over my eyes, over my skin numbing me from everything only i don’t want to be numb. i want to feel it all, every last bit even as society tells me to shut the fuck up already, walk quietly and keep your thoughts to yourself. i am tired of playing it safe. i am tired of feeling numb. i am tired of being nice. fuck nice. fuck safe. fuck me. fuck you. fuck.
me yesterday. as far as rebellions go, it is small but it feels like me. and i need to feel like me not the shell of a person i have let myself become.
death is permanent. i am going to die. this doesn’t really scare me because i will be following in the footsteps of some pretty amazing loves of mine and i have held death in my arms and it felt warm and lovely until it was gone. but i am tired of all the ways i have chained myself and i am tired of only living half of a life. i want to grab life by the ball sac and squeeze every last bit of juice out of it. i want to dance under the moon with wild abandon like i used to, a long time ago when life felt full of possibility rather than full of disappointment.
i will not go gently into the grey, i will not let it consume me, eat me up and drain me. i am going to fight this slip into the grey with everything i have because i am right here in the bright focus of spring and i am giving birth to myself as painful as that can be.
i am tired of playing it safe. i am tired of feeling numb. i am tired of being nice. fuck nice. fuck safe. fuck me. fuck you. fuck.
Also posted in notes to self
22 Comments
billowing flags
(polaroid sx-70 / 600 film)
I remember the flag sellers at the edge of my small northern town so very long ago when I was an angry mascara fringe over a thick line of black khol and now they are back at the end of a long street lined with towering elm trees, here on the fringe of my daisy soaked life.
The teenage boys* that litter my life tell me how cool the flags are, look at that one there with the marijuana leaf like a maple leaf and a rock star’s face buried beneath the ground next to a swashbuckling pirate symbol of a velvet elvis crouched beside smoking cigar dogs. And I stare with a faint roll of revulsion in my stomach and am suddenly transported back to my version of the eighties, those torn black jeans and yellow stained fingers of freedom filled angst.
And as I pull out my polaroid and hold my breath before the billowing wind forces my click, I remember the first apartment I ever had in a three story walk up with a balcony overlooking a dandelion field of forgotten memories. I was driving like a maniac through town as anger at my parents spilled out of the exhaust dropping oil slick thoughts across the pavement and I saw you walking head down. I didn’t know you but your boyfriend had tried to pick me up in the bar over a rum and coke breath smile on more than one occasion and so on impulse I stopped and asked you if you needed a ride. You smiled gratefully and hopped in to escape the reddened cheeks of a cold wind. Within 5 minutes of talking, blowing smoke rings of wistful longing, you expressed that you and he and broken up and I impulsively asked you to be my roommate. An hour later we secured an apartment and I went home to break up with my parents after stopping to buy a rock n roll flag for my new bedroom window.
You were older and so much cooler with your swinging black bobbed hair and bright lipstick that left markings on the mismatched coffee mugs and ends of stubbed out cigarettes. I had a child’s bed with white drawers underneath my squished up mattress as you slept with dark haired boys on a rolling waved water bed. We happily tacked artwork on the walls and threw after hours parties, black sabbath pounding out of big black speakers as laughter rolled out onto the balcony. We snorted life up our young noses and became disgusted with the anger of poverty, the lies of the machine.
The last time I saw you, your rust colour haired children were filled with laughter and raced through the trailer court with smudgy smiles as their freckles winked out playfully. I was home on a visit from the big city where I was living my university life and in my uncertainty, I played the part of pretension sitting there in my bright red hair and bright red lips, showing off far too much of black clad legs under a lime green short skirt. You were bravely beautiful still and filled with hope and I was still running, always running. I ran from that apartment of ours straight into a burned out trailer court of hopelessness as I dug through shag rugs for my next fix and I ran from the pain of all that into an empty student apartment and classrooms filled with words that felt too high up for me to reach with any confidence. It was easy for me to look down on your trailer court life because I had escaped that life without realizing it was the life I had created so much differently than you had. Your trailer was clean and beautifully filled with the bright colour of children’s artwork and shiny yellow flowers of love but I didn’t realize because I was too fixated on running from the poverty that crawled up and embedded itself in my forever dirty fingernails.
I haven’t thought of you in forever but in a rush, your smile and heart came back to me as the flags billowed up in the wind. I thought of you and of me and how easy it was to be impulsive and free even as we felt so weary and old. I thought about how easy you opened yourself up to a friendship with a stranger who flirted too much over rum and coke’s easy smile and suddenly I find myself missing you and missing that version of me that I worked so hard to escape.
~~~
*I am surrounded by teenage boys who romanticize the eighties as some mythical time when everything was real and cool and they think I was so lucky to have been young then. And I laugh and laugh and laugh some more.
Also posted in love and friendship
6 Comments
i hate the stink of roses
on my eighteenth birthday, he brought me 18 long stemmed red roses and then complained bitterly that we had to eat birthday dinner with my parents. that should have been my first clue had i been one of those more secure in themselves 18 year olds. i was pretty broken. well actually, i was very broken. i kept things inside, deep in the secret places of my heart, holding tight to the pain while i smiled and laughed and tried to be the life of the party.
i was 18 and instead of feeling fresh and dewy on the brink of a life of beauty, i felt hollow and cored out and my heart could tell you stories of the endlessly long lighting of a hospital hallway, the waiting and crying and wondering of months on months of not knowing if she would live or die. no one should have to go through puberty while watching their sister struggle to breathe through tubes as bolts inserted in her skull kept her head from moving, kept her neck stable. i could tell you stories of being pushed down in the sand, the light of the stars swaying over the jackpine trees as rock music drifted from a corner of your my brain, the party just to the right but far enough away that no one would hear your my silent screams as blood was shed even as you i struggled to escape as the tears dried up for years to come.
on my eighteenth birthday, he brought me 18 long stemmed red roses and then proceeded to sleep with my best friend. its a classic tale, a cliche really. and this is how i always tell the story, in a flippant sort of way.
i hate roses. on my eighteenth birthday, he brought me 18 long stemmed red roses. blood red crimson velvet and the scent lingered in my bedroom for weeks. on my eighteenth birthday, he dropped me off after we all went out to the zoo (which is the local bar, every small town in these parts has a zoo). i drank just enough to not be able to drive and not enough to pass out. i was out of cigarettes and feeling off. the entire night he had flirted with her so i begged my father to drive me to the truck stop so i could buy a pack of cigarettes. as we drove into the parking lot, i saw your truck driving down the dirt road into the trees and there she was curled up beside you. i hated the stink of those damn roses but at least i got a camera out of the deal.
the truth is she wouldn’t talk to me until two weeks later when he was done with her and then i had to hear every single detail as i was somehow expected to console her. he came back to me with a gift wrapped olympus film camera and three different lenses knowing how much my heart longed for a 35 mm camera. i went back to him and let him abuse me for another 8 months. i just did the math. was it really only 8 months? back then it felt like 8 years, like a lifetime as my light became dimmer and dimmer. i found my power to leave through the shadows i saw at the end of the glass, a reflection of me that i held out my hand to even as my anger shattered the tears of sadness.
i hated the stink of roses until i pushed into the dirt and planted my own with my love by my side, the roses that would root and dig even deeper into the earth, the roses that would come back year after year and fill the air with the sweetness of teardrop petals that flutter down and water the earth.
Comments Off
time
everything is changing, shifting and even as i write these words, i feel my ideas becoming something else and i am running but i can’t catch up and if i lag behind, i lose the thread of thought…
and so i look up, seeking the grounded wisdom of time, the solid stone lighted up beneath the shadow of fire’s flame.
***********
tomorrow is my son’s birthday. 16. sixteen. 16 !!!!!
how did i get here? to this place of long limbs and dimpled charm, sweaty socks and lengthy thought out dreams and the glow of a note out of his saxophone as he teaches me to see the world a little differently with every passing conversation.
it all goes so very fast, a blink and chubby arms and legs tickle the grass with tiny toes for the first time to the sudden sprouting of facial hair and bear hugs as i look up at him and i wonder yet again, how did i get here.
when he was a baby, i used to sit out on the balcony of our tiny walkup apartment chosen for its proximity to the university and i used to sing ‘time in a bottle’ with tears pricking the corners of my eyes, as though i somehow knew that it would swirl by in a colourful smear of memories filled with the forever change that is life,
tomorrow we will celebrate on our newly built patio, the patio built by the three of us, our hands shaping yet another memory and we will bite into a variation of the same cake i have been making for his birthday since he turned one and his hands pushed into the centre making the most beautiful mess. this song will swirl in my head and tears will prick the corners of my eyes yet again and i will hold fast to the moment even as i stare up at the moon knowing that as fast as time travels, it is all over before it really starts.
Also posted in love and friendship, music
Comments Off
bluebells cockleshells
blue bells, cockle shells, evie ivy over … i like the boys and the boys like me … yes, no, maybe so … sandals clacking the pavement, orange crush popsicle lips and a bright yellow skipping rope, pigtails dancing under the bright blue sky of summer.
i was not cool or hip enough to have a bright yellow banana seat but i had pretty sparkly streamers on my handlebars as we streamed through the neighbourhood games. i loved to lay in the grass and read soft paperback teenage novels about those american girls who spent their summers flirting with boys and going off to summer camp where secrets were whispered into the night as sand coated toes snuck out to canoe the lake at midnight.
i went to summer camp only once, girl guide camp but i made a mess of it all with my strange dreamy asthmatic ways. we went hiking through the forest and my lungs hurt, wheeze of my breathe, allergies in full force not to mention the fact that i often got distracted by little bits of beauty that others passed by quickly. like bluebells. they fascinated me because they seemed to be always buried deep in the coolness of thick overgrown green, their delicate blue bell shaped petals leaning wistfully into the soft mosquito filled breeze.
the last day of camp, we were all given a little animal token badge to pin to our blue summer hats. i still have mine. its in a box under the stairs still pinned to that same hat. i won the snail badge. i was a snail. i wish i could tell you i was so evolved in my thinking that i embraced that little snail but i wasn’t and instead i spent many nights crying in the quiet safety of my room. the shame i felt over that snail badge caused me more red faced thoughts than i care to admit. i wasn’t lazy but no one really understood how hard i had to work just to walk for 10 minutes when my lungs were unable to take in a full breathe of air, it was hard work just to breathe. i was a pretty sickly child, suffering from many bouts of pneumonia and bronchitis from the time i was 3 weeks old. the shame of the snail was my first realization that adults could be as cruel as children and i did like any good snail would do when presented with the danger of the world, i curled up inside my shell and hid out.
maybe i am a bit of a snail because though i would not consider myself lazy, i am really good at retreating into myself. at hiding beneath the exterior. it was after camp that i started taking my kodak instamatic with me everywhere. At girl guide camp, while other people ran through the forest and excelled at rope tying 101, i stopped and noticed the ladybug perched precariously on the end of green bitten leaf and i fell in love with bluebells languidly going with the flow. i started retreating behind my camera and found beauty in the world again.
blue bells, cockle shells, evie ivy over … i like the boys and the boys like me … yes, no, maybe so … sandals clacking the pavement, orange crush popsicle lips and a bright yellow skipping rope, pigtails dancing under the bright blue sky of summer.
Also posted in postcards and stories
Comments Off
a game of chess
(polaroid sx-70 / 600 film)
my life feels a little bit like a chess game these days and i won’t lie to you or to myself. i am struggling with it. emotions are slippery creatures moving forward and backwards, toppling over and then sprinting upwards. and i watch it all from behind my eyes, a placid smile outwards, brow furrowed inwards.
one minute i have all the answers and i can see it all play out and then i realize that i have no idea what i am doing and i am lost. again. until i remember, the lightbulb goes off. again. until it blinks off. again.
i have all the answers until i have no answers and the world is warm and open and recieving and cold and filled with roadblocks and furtive motives. sometimes, the beauty and pain of the world brings me to tears and sometimes i feel as though i have no emotions because its all too much and i shut down.
i have this memory of staring down the hallway, tentative child steps, toes curled over the shaggy carpet as my fingers trail across the faux wood paneling. i see her blonde hair and recognize her as my aunt but her face is dripping red and smooshed and distorted and i am stopped cold, unable to comprehend. she is crying and talking fast and i know that my uncle has done this. again. but i don’t really understand any of it beyond the blood. so much blood. it will be years before she leaves and is a distant memory, a faded black and white photograph of them coming down the church steps, her veil dancing behind her smile. i don’t know what became of her, where she went, who she became. her story ends with a child’s view of tears and blood mixed with snot.
and i am still that child. staring down a hallway, fingers trailing along the faux wood. and i don’t understand how the world works and i wonder if i ever will. i will continue searching for the sun in the clouds and let the fire in my belly feed me as i struggle to express myself. floundering for words as my thoughts slip through my fingers, tiny grains of memories floating in a future i can’t quite see.
Also posted in postcard stories
Comments Off
our stories
(celeste hanging out in my backyard)
do you not just love love love the embellishments on her jeans and top? seeing her outfit took me way back to another time when i was much younger and felt less weighed down by the responsibilities of my own making.
i remember a pair of snoopy jeans that i had picked up for a couple of dollars at value village and then spent evenings painting them with various bright coloured daisy flowers. they were my happy jeans, the jeans that were too short and too baggy often paired with my tie dyed bikini top that last summer i spent lifeguarding. i remember how i used to henna my long hair bright red and i wandered around barefoot without a care for convention. i had no idea what lie ahead of me as i dreamed about finishing university and heading off to japan to teach english or spending a year in europe chasing words down mossy stone lighted walkways.
i also remember that simmering below those bright coloured daisies was a whole mess of anger that i didn’t understand, that other people mistook for fiery passion but was in reality a whole lot of sadness and confusion. At 23 I looked like the sassy girl next door, bubbling over with happiness hiding the secrets of a past abusive relationship, a sexual assault and a rape that still haunts me on days when the cobwebs build up too many layers.
we are complicated creatures who are more simple than we realize. our stories creep up and surprise us in slumbering dreams or lash out unexpectedly creating a different layer piled up onto an old story that has nothing to do with who we are right now and everything to do with who we have become. i am going to find an old pair of jeans at the thrift store and thread on the embellishments i found at ikea. i am going to rip up the side legs and insert a pretty flowered pattern to widen them. and then i am going to attempt the pretty yo yos that celeste so wonderfully instructed me how to make. i will them wear them out to music festivals as i let the music remind me that the stars are up there winking mysteriously and i have landed softly in the green grass of right now.
Comments Off
instagram addiction
