Ford the Jordan

Drafter's Note: I write this yesterday! Honest. Just didn't get it posted...

It's the last day of the month, and I only just barely have done half of what I set out to do--a post every other day, on average, instead of every day. This, in one kind of light, is failure--but in several other lights, success:
     I wrote far more than I otherwise would have.
     I was encouraged and buoyed by friends and strangers.
     I worked harder at writing than I have in months, maybe years.
But I think the largest success, for me--and the reason that, as of tomorrow (today), I'm taking part in NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) with a goal, again, of writing a post each day--is this: that it has made me remember (not in a sais way but in a connais way--see paragraph four here) that writing isn't all pretty. Sometimes the words don't come like I want them to. Sometimes I trip and fumble and have nothing sensical to put down. And the perfectionist in me answers, "Then stop. Take a break. Wait until the juices pool enough to do this well." But any writer--any real writer--will tell you this isn't how it works. You don't wait for it to show up; you work until it does.

Two quick buttresses to this idea that have come to mind recently:
   1) The first is one of my favorite moments in the Old Testament, which I was thinking of earlier this week. The narrative of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea is more familiar--the intricacies of translation will tell you that their sandals hit dry ground. But for most applications in my life, I prefer a similar but different story: those people's children, their sandals having crossed forty years' worth of dry ground in the wilderness, wait on the edge of the place God has promised them. Joshua leads them toward the Jordan River, too strong to ford on their own. They take the first several steps in, and the water remains--slipping stones, sinking silt, frothing rapids. It is not until several steps more that they realize the water isn't climbing their thighs like it should, and several more again before they see bare, wet skin: the waters receded just the same, but this time they had to move first. Had they waited on the shore, afraid of getting their feet wet, expecting the same provision as their parents, they would have died in exile and shame. No less a miracle, but they had to participate to see it happen.
   2) I'm reading a book right now, larger than my Bible and nearly as fantastical. As I was just reading, the hot-and-cold enthusiasm of a character is given detail in his pursuit of poetry: that he had an exceptional first day at it, writing feverishly, pages scattering to the floor in the fury. "He was very delighted with everything he wrote," the narrator explains, and this, in a glance, is what the writer longs for, what I long for. But the second day, begun as the first, ends midway through, the poet becoming stuck on a pesky rhyme. "He struggled for an hour, could think of nothing, went for a ride to loosen his brains and never looked at his poem again."

This is how I am--a fury-writer until my toe hits a stone, and then I am distracted, over-busy, too important. And then I wonder why I haven't felt like writing in weeks. I sit on the beach watching the waves, never wondering about wandering into them. 

So in this one little part of my life, in this small way, I am walking in. I am writing even when the rhyme doesn't work. I am committing, to myself and to a writing community. Will I fall short? Depend on it. But I will write anyway, because like any muscle, the hurt of overworking it feels better than the ache of lethargy.


I cannot wrap up this little Essay a Day journey without a few acknowledgements:
Thanks to my coworker, Sherlock buddy, and writing co-conspirator Zsofi, who alerted me to it in the first place.
Thanks to the EaD community, especially ringleader Chelsia, for their ideas and craft and accountability. 
And thanks to you, who reads this--friend or stranger. Thank you for letting my words take you somewhere, even when the road is broken and winding and littered with typos. 

You Have Sacrificed Function for Fashion Yet Again Only

Truly, there were good intentions. I posted here last on October 8. I suppose when I thought my kitten was dying I figured paying attention to her trumped writing an essay a day. Well. That day turned into a few weeks and here I am back in the orange chair at bedtime, piecing together strange ideas. Tonight they become a poem. 

**

You Have Sacrificed Function for Fashion Yet Again Only

To fail

To flinch

To write the names of everyone you’ve ever known along the inside of your forearms

To whistle a tune you make up as you go

To curl bare toes inside shoes too small

To hand off the pen when you’ve run out of room

To mention celebrity suicide out loud and regret it instantly

To cough

To suffer through campaign ads

To speak too softly amid the crowd

To slide the loose ring in circles around your finger

To let the ink smear in the creases of your knees

To stand here wondering about religious sects

To sigh

To kneel

To rest a minute among coats in the master bedroom

To return down a long hallway

To saunter

To smile

To slip quietly out the door

Harmonize, Entropy, Light

Drafter's Note: I accepted Essay a Day as a challenge, and that is certainly what it's been. A far cry from the official plan, but if I can squeeze one more essays out after this, that'll be an Essay Every Other Day, which I'm pretty darn proud of.

Today found me without much in the What to Write About Ball Pit, so I lifted a page from a college professor: randomly select three words (thanks, random word generator--less romantic and relational than Fuller's jar of words, but it got the job done) and write until you've used them up.

It's that word that catches me, that confirms this is what we're doing tonight, letting the fingers fall and the characters stamp until everything is used up, an erroneous but alluring image of me panting, hands cramping, semi-collapsing across the table. My need to make writing a sport.

I remember the first time I found this word--how many of its brothers do I remember so clearly? But I remember this one: Mr. Stil's biology class, and one of my early tastes of Holy shit I don't understand this in the least. I was that kid, for all of elementary and middle school--with the exception of math, which I had learned to carve out a hole of energy for, all other learning just found a place in my head and rested peaceably. But now, freshman year, with this oddly funny, oddly attractive man at the blackboard, I have been hoodwinked, and this test has snagged me with hooks of unpreparedness and fear. Stil hands the tests back days later, and I am appalled at the number at the top. I skim through, eager to prove another handful of points should rightfully be mine. And there, maybe halfway down the page, is my chance. I had circled something else--a familiar, friendly word--but his red pen has flagged c) entropy. "I've never even seen that word before," I say, all intellectual fifteen-year-old bravado. And I can see Stil's face, more puzzled than annoyed, as he clarifies that it was in the book, so he certainly hopes I have. 

I think this is why I have fond memories of Stil--he was funny and charming, and he understood and accepted that biology wasn't going to be the subject that drove me wild--but still expected me to bring every ounce of intelligence I had to it. Other teachers, surely, had done this, but he did it well. I rose to the challenge with him, and I don't remember what my final score in the class was but I could still sketch you a reasonably passable cell, can vaguely picture the four building blocks floating in a double-helix--the fractures of light that spill across textbook pages and chalkboards ten million minutes ago. 

He knew I was a humanities girl, and didn't try to change that--but didn't let me slump in the back row, either. I was allowed to learn like I needed to, to dwell on the things that caught my attention, but I had to learn entropy, too. He expected me to apply this brain to things that made it wince, to what didn't come naturally. He made me work, and called me out when I didn't, when I started to slide. He taught me to educate myself, to harmonize what I knew with what I didn't, to marvel at the way a word nerd's brain will latch on to the tongue twister of deoxyribonucleic acid, never fooled by impostor answer options again.

Silence

There should be a support group for people like me. People of divorce. I struggle everyday to identify with this notion that I am now divorced, tainted. I know that is not necessarily true, that lots of people get divorced, fail, and try again, however, I feel like I failed and will never recover.

I hesitated, I flinched, I ruined it.

Some days it is not that bad, I go on with my life and with my boyfriend, yes I have a boyfriend. And he can be lovely, though he is nothing like I imagined and some days I notice that more.
Days it gets harder, when I am confronted with his new found happiness, his girlfriend, who is so much more pretty than I ever was. Who, you can tell, is likable and fun and everything he deserves. I try not to hate them, to be devastated by the postings of love, when she claims she has found her soul mate in him. I found him first.

I have no right to be upset, this is my own fault and after dealing with you for 7 years, he deserves to be happy. Don't ruin it, don't message him, don't text him, don't care.

He has moved on, technically so have you, though I am sure that I dwell much more than he does. Why not, I have regrets, real regrets, tangible regrets that I want to run away from on a daily basis. To buy a one way plane ticket to somewhere foreign and just be for awhile, quietly.
I wish I could tell what I really wanted, to see him to hold him to leave him to say goodbye. To burn the dress, pawn the ring and be done. He was the first that I let in, how do you erase 7 years? I can't I will always love him because he was the best part of me for a very long time.

I knew I would divorce, which is never a good starting point. I feared marriage because of my parents, because of my family and I resolved that I would fail.

Either way you are a statistic, it cannot be avoided. I am a statistic of divorce.

Begin again.

The return of the prodigal. I am behind on my 30 days. Pain and discomfort came in and slayed me. On my face shackled by my weakness I rethink the past few years. I used to charge at challenges. Rise up to confront. Push to overcome. Crow with pride and victory. Beat your chest, scream that song. Never give up. Don’t break.

Life evolved. Joints broke down. Confidence cracked. Failures took their toll.  I step up, but not all in now. I THINK I can do this but doubt lingers.

Time goes on. Age has a hold. Knees are shot. Pain is to be avoided. If I push too hard, I won’t have enough to finish. Mediocrity is a laudable goal.

2014-New joints. Body rising. Time to cleanse my mind. It’s ok to make me tired. It’s ok to push hard. Sweat is my friend. It’s fucking necessary to push hard! Don’t be afraid of the struggle. Rise up. Step into healing and new strength. Believe. Breath.

Begin again.

Never Single

We are leaving a wedding, driving down deserted Maine interstates, watching the way the trees pummel across the outer reaches of the high beams. We talk the way you talk in a dark car on a long drive at the end of an emotional day, where no topic is out of reach and no sidebar is too long tangential.

We talk about this woman, our friend, who is even now alone with her husband in their house, a different kind of dark. We talk about our own histories, loves, losses, the things we thought we learned already. We talk so much I forget about the bag of Swedish fish in my purse, tucked away for a mid-ride surprise.

I say something about being single, and she makes a noise, something akin to a harrumph. “My husband says you’re never really single,” she says, “unmarried, maybe, but never single,” and even as we keep talking my mind stretches and curls around that idea like a cat. I don’t remember where our conversation went to from there—forty-eight hours gone, but the emotions of the day had swamped my brain with saline leaving little room for anything else.

Anything else but this: that no one is ever single.

I have my blood family—relations from Vermont to St. Louis to Oregon—who remind me of where I come from and where we are going, who pass names and genes and character on to a new generation of towheads and tomboys who will play Princess and Pioneers, who will have loves and losses and lessons of their own. After months away, I come home into a strange sort of peace—not sliding into a glove, exactly, but stepping into my mother’s kitchen, which is a thousand times better. Come Christmas, there will be too much food to eat and a surfeit of wrapping paper in every corner, but I will be my own self in a way I am nowhere else.

I have my local family here—the nieces and nephews who have lost the quotation marks I used to put around them, the marriage I casually study and hope one day to mirror, the faith and trust and welcome of tested and proved belief. On their couch, at their kitchen table, I find the warmth and breadth of people who have seen every angle of your crazy and love you without reservation, not in spite of it but because of it. People who accept every stumble and mistake, but also lift you to the next challenge, the next lesson.

I have my gaggle (no better word) of girlfriends—some married and others not—who laugh and cry and watch silly movies with me. Some prod me toward what might make me uncomfortable, some secure me, some let me speak into their lives as they speak into mine. Some teach me dance moves, or perch by my stove to watch how onions and water and spices transform into velvety soup. Some just sit with me, in coffee shops or dark cars, and share life in a thousand words.

I have relatives, churchgoers, neighbors, Facebook friends. I have coworkers, cowriters, cojourners—and those that cheer me on from the sidelines. Adam is right—even in the instant, sitting next to Sara barreling down 295, I know he is. I’m many things, but single isn't one of them. 

Robbed!! Accompanied by an emphatic fist shaking

"We were robbed!!!" No this was not spoken by the woman who came home to a kicked in door and missing her television. No, this was not spoken by the kid who came out to find his car window smashed and stereo gone.

This phrase spoken around the US can always been heard on any given Thursday, Sunday, and Monday. The sound of your precious team losing a game they should not have lost to a less than worthy team. This loss is devastating, could not be more black and white. Truly as it is usually the fault of the man wearing black and white that lead to the demise of your precious record and possible playoff seating. Not to mention the all important fantasy league, how will you ever beat your office rival now with T.J Lang out injured. 

But let's think about bigger issues that face the NFL and their players on a daily basis.

How terrible it must be for Marshawn Lynch, unable to talk to the press, only making $5 million, when he is clearly worth so much more. The agony of it all, no wonder he eats so many skittles. But while we are focusing on the Seahawks, who have been robbed so many times, how can we forget of the constant struggle of having a quarterback who just might not be black enough. Or a quarterback, who just cannot get a high five, despite an excellent throw.

These are the real issues people. 

Why do we liken sports plays to crimes? Robbed, really? Millionaires against millionaires playing with a ball, the only one robbed is the viewer, after all it is only a game.