Letting Go

Peace pitter-patters like rain through granite,
refined by pain
and darkness.
Light disappears through a black hole
but it is not lost.
It comes through, somewhere.
You are raked raw.
You are purified.



by E.R. Womelsduff

Dusk

I remember, impassively, as if they are slide shows from a stranger's life.  The Angels game.  His grandmother's house.  The view of the ocean under starlight.  The fog rolling in from the Bay.  But his face is fading.  I can still trace his scars, the knotted bone, but I cannot recall his face.

The light is nearly gone.  The trees are nightmare silhouettes against a bruised sky.

Wandering

My grandma's yard is cracked and broken.  Her trees are dead, poisoned with vines.  Yellow grass withers around the pool, and over the alley fence the neighbors' orange tree swells with ripe fruit and leaves a pure, Technicolor green.  Christopher lies at the deep end, sleeping.  His zig-zag trail is erratic, almost human in its randomness.  But the birds still sing and the breeze at sunset is perfect on my arms.

I wish different things for her.  I wish different things for my mother.  I am not old enough yet to wish different things for myself.  With all the sour memories hoarded within me, I still hope for a novel-worthy life.  An intentional life.  My mother and her mother and her mother before her followed (until recently) the paths of least resistance.  They did primarily what was expected.  My aunt and uncle are inside talking about whether to go to lunch with us tomorrow, and I see things now that I did not see before.  The strain of life.  The death of joy, of hope, by a thousand paper cuts.  We are born restless, and we die when we no longer desire anything.

The sky here is an inverted sea.  The world is a bubble of air in a dark ocean, lit with stars.  Life is poetry.

This is the tether to my beginning.  The lifeline that once or twice a year reminds me who I am, or was.  It is unchanged, but it has decayed more every time I return.  It rots, slowly.  It crumbles under the desert heat into dust and sand.  It buried my grandfather.

My eyes can't focus.  A headache beats between the skin and the skull of my forehead.  I've felt dizzy all day.  This is not unusual.  Sometimes I wonder if the cancer is more than emotional--if, somewhere hidden in my marrow--a physical cause lurks.  If, like my thyroid deficiency, it is not all in my head.  Just chemicals out of balance.  I wonder.  I hope.  If the problem is corporeal I can fix it or blame it.  It not, then it's just me--just an intrinsic part of my personality--and I will never have mastery over myself.

I am still young enough to choose.  I am not locked to any one future; I have not yet worn a tread for myself.  There was a plan, but it appears less appealing to me now than it did to my 18-year-old self.  College (two degrees), then a brilliant screenwriting career.  But what I've seen so far of Hollywood reminds me too much of politics and politicians--of lies and compromise and cynicism.  I do not know if I have the stomach to outshine it.  More and more I wish to live somewhere quiet.  Perhaps here.  I could keep my grandmother company, and clean, and help her keep up the house, and read books in companionable silence and play games after breakfast and drink coffee, and see second-run movies at the cheap theater and in my own time I would write and I would write for me alone, and it would be better.

I have spent the past four years working toward a certain life, one I no longer desire, and I feel pressured to continue.  But I have not chosen yet.  I have not decided what my life will look like.  We are born restless.  And it is my deep desire to one day look back and see that I had made every decision, not surrendered to them.

Bodies wear down so quickly.  My grandmother's hands hurt.  She can no longer shuffle a deck of cards.  Perhaps it is more important to spend a few years with her--to hear her stories and record them, to find out who my grandfather was--than it is to kiss ass in Hollywood and sell my soul and sink again and again into despair.

For six years I have been wandering.  I have been standing on the edge of a shore that is daily erased by the sea.  And whenever I chance to wade deeper in, I am overwhelmed by the first wave that hits me.  I am a child.  I am spiritually asthmatic.  I am lost.

But here, at least, I am anchored to some small thing.  There are answers to be found, hidden in boxes, in pictures taken before I was conceived.  It is the beginning of everything I remember.  It is my first and last remaining home.  It is peaceful.  And I desperately desire peace.

I have not decided yet.  But the time fast approaches when I must.

Bitterness

The death of our potential future feels to me like a miscarriage: something beautiful, full of life; precious and innocent; something we should have been more careful with.  And we did something wrong (or maybe we didn't, maybe there was nothing we could do) and we lost each other, and the absence is a physical presence.  It is the ghost in the  room, and all my memories are tainted by this loss.  Words he spoke to me in all sincerity turn bitter in my mouth and mind and every past moment of happiness with him mocks me, magnifying the current truth that we failed.  I failed.  I failed at this, and I don't want to try again.

Who profits in love?  Only those who can sustain it.  I am, apparently, not one of the blessed.  There is something lacking in me.  Not fit for motherhood, not good enough to be a wife, to build a life with.  Not good enough to love long-term.  Not good enough to give it one more shot.  Not good enough to stand beside.  Not good enough to cherish.  My faults are too great to bear; my mental torments too inconvenient.

This seems to be the theme thus far: I am perfect for abandoning.

I thought coming here would be easier.  I thought I'd be able to breathe a thousand miles  away.  The sadness pursues me--it followed me to Seattle, it haunted me in Oxford, it smothered me on the train to Tucson. It has become an inseparable part of my identity.

I still haven't figured out how to simply let it go.  How do you let two years of your life go?  You don't.  You fight the inconsistencies.  You war with memories.  You ask why over and over and over again until you feel like you're going to be sick.  The anger will eventually slide back into melancholy, then sadness, then despair.  You stay busy, and it helps.  But in the moments you're alone, the finality of it  threatens to overwhelm.

Flatline

It's like I'm being pulled apart
my mind detaches half from half
valve from valve is torn my heart
flatline now, the whole thing crashes
now I go from ash to ashes
now and here I shall depart.

I am Alice

I was desperate, like any girl,

to grow up.

And staring back behind the looking glass,

I wish I had not been so sure.

kyle next door

You had roller blades, shiny hard wheels

fresh from the factory with that new pool-plastic smell.

You had a Nintendo 64,

a computer with Rollercoaster Tycoon,

a TV in your bedroom.

We played soldier and nurse and I’d sew you back up,

tapping your arm wound with my needle fingers.

You were a latch-key kid

and you showed me the rock that was not a rock

and the way to get into your house.

You had six-inch sharks in a tank in your living room.

You had parents that were never home.

I guess you were my first kiss, when I was six.

Hiding in my dilapidated fort, you’d demand my lips

if I wanted to play with your toys.

And then that last memory of you,

inviting me up.

And then, nothing.