Did I know it when I first woke up or before I fell asleep? One or another of those times the sinking feeling leveled all on its own and it just didn't hurt so badly anymore. It's not about the you that's been lost, it's about the office you held, the you in theory. What it could have become. It really is silly to think there's only one person we could love. Something clicked in me, maybe it's all the nice in the air. We've been surrounded by it and covered by it and wrapped up in it to sleep. As much as I would hibernate these times away, it's been the necessary route, pain has so much to give. There are always lessons to learn if we're willing to be still and quiet and grow roots and wait and wait until the season's ripe.

How easily I could forget that the letters don't corral themselves, don't line up nicely and march themselves out. It's possible I've been hoarding them and it's even more possible they've been trying to come out for quite some time now. I think what I'm trying to say is I've been scared to let them go, a true mother goose hemming and hawing, reluctant to say goodbye.

I could stand at the edge of a waterfall for years, contemplating the jump: the moment my feet leave the ground, curling my body, gaining momentum, descending through the air, seeing what's coming, the moment I close my eyes, the second when my eyes are closed before I break the surface, when the last of my toes dips below the waterline and those weightless moments before I rejoin the world of the walking and talking.

If I could live under water you know I would.

Surprises in the mailbox that remind me to dream and rearrange the paragraphs in my head.
My hands and fingers are twitching, surging, and a familiar tingle is lurking just beyond what's needed to make them jump. To make them dance, my own ten little dancers in the dark. I can sit above and be their life-line, their life-giver, and similarly just let them go. All these other things start to seem sort of irrelevant in that grand-scheme-of-things way. But they are menacing and trying and they are slow. I had to spend the necessary amount of time digging so deep just to fish out the knots keeping all this tethered tightly to all my parts. Even so only the very tips of my fingertips could reach. Untying is still a great ways away. If these things were just a little varied from themselves perhaps I could operate. Extricate.

There's only one way to wind my spring. All I can do is whatever it takes to find the dreams and start the dances.

I'm prepared and I'm almost ready to lose you.

Scary adult things, darkness; a weight hanging over me and around me and attached to me and dragging me down, an anchor and a straightjacket and a prison cell.

Somehow you wake up every day and go to sleep every night and this is not the first and the last and the biggest thing on your mind. Somehow I need to get to my own version of that.

Honestly what kills, what is killing, is the remembering they will do. At least one of them will do. Remembering for me is not so much an insurmountable obstacle, more or less it can only form a speed bump. I already remember so much, what's another two or three dozen things forced in, like the garbage pail you think is full, or feeling full before dessert. No matter how much there is, there's somehow always room for some more.

I've been writing on paper, thinking of typewriter keys instead of this digital universe, this web of edits and deletes and secrecy. Instead of leaving hints and dropping clues, going straight in for the kill. No more subtleties, just the whole real truth.

Sometimes they rose up inside her, these moments of fierce happiness, kindling out of their own substance like a spark igniting a mound of grass. It was a joy to be alive, a strange and savage joy, and she stood there in the warmth and destruction of it knowing it could not last.
That it was too big for her to contain.
That it would ebb as quickly as it had risen.

Her life was a waste and a failure, and she had never loved another human being, and she wanted nothing more than to escape the planes of her skin and appear in some other place. The world was unreliable. The world could turn on a dime. It was a joy to be alive when it was a joy to be alive, and it was a terror to be alive when it wasn't. What else had she ever learned?

Still fragile after all these years, no matter how much I want to be that hard rock,
firm and unmoving, fixed and sure,
I'm a gemstone, waiting to be cradled and held, worn and cherished.

do-overs, take-backs

I can still be happy for more than half of my life.
I can let all of this go for two hours or four hours or eight hours and do a trial run,
like I need to convince myself that it exists,
and when it goes so well, it's not awkward, even all things considering,
you stepping in, forcing your way in to remind us you won't be ignored.
Still demanding, controlling, trying to make this in to what you want.

This story isn't yours anymore, you're hardly worthy of being mentioned by name.
I'll keep you somewhere in the crowd, an extra, because it's true you'll never be gone,
you'll never be forgotten, we'll never be over, even though this is.

As down as it can get me on the one hand,
I know I have to make it through and there has to come a point when you get bored
or run out of steam, or are fully distracted by your own other things;
when all of this obscure strung out pain and madness,
this battle for nothing can end.

If that's not the reason then I can't say I know what is.

I wonder how any of this could ever make actual sense, ever again.

Making the most of the times I have now.
My ears are all the way open.

These words are being crowded out by the other ones, the fun ones.
The ones I've wanted but couldn't find because of these.

Things have their places, and now they will stay in them.

Lists, boxes, paper cuts.

Those pits and me, me and them pits, the pits and I.

This is the moment of no return.
Not entirely so, not so permanently.
But it's the first of many of those moments, like checkpoints in my video game life.

Trying to ignore the feelings and the overwhelming heaviness in my gut. The inevitability of it all; the waiting, the unknown.

You will be your old self no matter where you hide, and I hope I can get my old self out of hiding, she's been away for so long.

I know there's more to this I need to sort through and release from my depths and it's slowly, slowly, floating upward from where it is I've burried it, forgotten in the dark like a sunken treasure. There's no coaxing it up, it takes its time and it makes me wait. Working on patience and silence since maybe this could change things, change everything or nothing. I can't know until I know.

I'm pretty sure I've read or heard or it's common knowledge that when the going gets tough and you keep going and you're doing the "right thing" (which you know based on the watchful eyes of others because you couldn't bare to trust yourself anymore at this point) things don't usually get easier, they get worse. And that's because life is said to be the ultimate test and people have been saying that for centuries and there must be a reason for that.

Swimming heart open in to open books, fresh pages, virgin words. Putting pens to paper, letting them move, following them where they wish to go. Feeling the sun and pushing down the swirling of everything from my head to my heart to my stomach. You can't rule over those organs any longer. Sticky, dirty fingers and crisp cut edges of paper and images making new images making feelings, forcing the rays out.

Internally smashing the pits and lessening the collection. Too much life could be left to be full already.

I can't be a babysitter, I can be wondering and watching and wondering and watching, always. Keeping my lantern lit, waiting for the right moment, waiting waiting waiting. But it just costs too much.

A boy called me a diamond. Told me I was beautiful. Told me I was worth anything, everything.

Why am I waiting for you to see I'm alive?

holding on, letting go

It's easy to let go when there's nothing left to hold on to but those invisible threads are still intertwining everything, always. When you turn your back to walk away and they keep you anchored to where you are, to what things are.

I can't stop this little heart from breaking,
even when I thought there was nothing left.

Part II

Flying at night is so completely different. There is no welcoming white blankets or vast blue calm staring back. Instead it's life. Millions of twinkling lives of every color and this is what it must be like to be living a life. Turning lights on and turning lights of. But it takes so much more and yet here they all are doing it.

As we pass other planes in the sky and the cockpits buzz their hellos like bikers on roads, I wonder about all the animals tucked neatly in rows: are they coming or going? are they leaving or staying? are they trying? are they liars?

thirty-two thousand feet

It gives a whole new sensation to the term 'head in the clouds.' Knowing that everything below is dreary and problematic and so utterly complicated yet here we are: Flight # 1903, flying above the barrier that at least right now is keeping the sun from touching down. It's a new kind of great divide. A real distance between us that someone, some time was paid to measure. That family and friends can track as it grows. It's so easy to forget, especially in these treacherous times, that a sky could be so blue. The clouds are a thick solid entity all their own, today an arctic sea and the ripples and wrinkles and dents further the images of glaciers in my mind. I'm ready to dive in, I'm not afraid of the depths or of what may lay ahead, below or behind. There is no icy chill, only an inviting softness that could lull me straight to sleep. All I see out these tiny oval windows is a bed of freshly picked cotton balls, stretched and folded, beneath the same perfect sky we'd nap together under late in to the days of our summers when nothing was so permanent. The birds and humming mowers and clicks of sprinklers were enough of a lullaby to convince us that all was well. We could rest easy and the world would continue as she always had and when we'd wake nothing would need fixing.

I could stay in this inbetween and watch this cloudy sea and feel this calm and I could sleep here. I could smile when the flight attendants give me more plane shaped cracker bags than I could ever eat and when the proud and wrinkled man next to me slips me his, just in case, for later. And when he says a warm congratulations I can say thank you and be thankful and wonder at their kindness which comes so easily. I am comforted to think as many have said, this too shall pass. I'm not branded with an instigation to hate. I can share a genuine smile when he offers me his economy sized bag of m&ms, which he's chosen to pair with a small plastic cup of chardonay. I can understand how we hold so tightly to our pains and our afflictors, how easily we can let our hearts be weighed and dragging along. But what I've finally understood is how we let go.

Even still it's amazing how we can let go but others may still hold fast and refuse to lighten their grip and that's what creates the pits.

And I can't help but feeling like I'm running away, like I should have been stronger and I should've been able to stay.

someone's going home alone again tonight

I know it's not false hope because I know it's trying for the sake of saying I've tried. Not because I really think I am influencing any outcomes. In my mind it's already happened, it's all already been figured, it's just a matter of filling the required time to qualify for a moving up ceremony. We should be familiar with this by now. There is no rushing.

Que sera sera.

Waiting for the words to come out.
Waiting for the time to pass.

Waiting for the sun to penetrate this cocoon I've spun, this coffin I've sealed.
Waiting for you to make the first move, to jump in head first with your eyes closed and your heart open.

Sometimes we have to fish and sometimes we have to dive and dig and wrestle.
Sometimes time moves slowly and we can't stand it but time knows just how long we need.
Sometimes we have to break our own bones and bruise our own skin to realize,
we've been waiting on ourselves.

So much time has passed, so many things have passed us by. Chances, smiles, memories good and bad.
Well it's time to make that move, enough processing, enough wondering and never knowing.
I've stepped out of my underground lair once or twice and now I don't think I can ever go back.