my laptop exploded.

My laptop exploded. Kind of. One day, it was fine, and the next, it began shooting flames from somewhere near the CDROM drive. In a slight panic, I tossed it into my kitchen, where it extinguished itself; it sat there for about two weeks, and i was afraid to touch it. While it sat on white tile, blowing sparks and smoke, I rolled my eyes heavenward and deadpanned at God a little; I imagine he may have grinned back.

It's not that I haven't had time to get a new computer; I have. The problem is that I can't write. I don't know why I'm bothering to write and share this, using a rinky-dink keyboard and my iPad, writing to you about how I can't write, as though that's something you need to know or care about, as though it were essential information. Writing about how I am like a sieve under water, and when I lift myself out of the water and place myself in front of a keyboard, every word or sense of direction inside me rushes out, fizzles away. 

abortion is murder. 

homosexuality is sin. 

mental illness is the devil. 

women should submit. 

It's valid to wonder why do you even "need" to write about these things? why not just keep them private? Why do you presume that what you have to say is worth saying? Who is going to read what you know and conider adjusting their thinking - or just their reaction - midstream? as though someone opposed might ever agree that abortion isnt always wrong, or that loving, honest responses to coming out can still be demeaning, or maybe you can't write anymore because you were a little crazy before, and now, you're "Stable," and doesn't that feel so much better? Find you a man; you done been to cookin' school, so it should be easy to land one. 

I've always valued nuance; I've valued staking a claim without degrading opposing claims. That's gone. Dead. I don't know what to do with the fact that conclusions to which I've come have required driving a stake directly through the heart of anything I used to believe. I've never been out for blood before; I am now. I am not up for discussion. It is shocking and scary and fiercely real; I am out for the blood of anything which degrades or devalues what I know to be sacred. I dare you. And I don't know what to do with that - I don't know how to be a confessional writer who grows in my faith by sharing it with others when I know the rote party line better than I know living its inverse. I feel, frankly, like an asshole, assuming that my words might matter when, clearly, they do not. From no to help to talk to me to right now. They fall to the ground. 

I "need" to write about these things because of how God lives through them in spite of me; I just can't imagine a time or place when I'll trust that peoples' first instincts won't be to respond. I can't imagine being able to give people more credit than to steel myself for their inevitable rebuttal. As though I need to hear it again. As though I didn't grow up hearing it. As though you saying it one more time might change my mind this time; as though my sharing might change yours. 

If this struggle has taught me anything, it's the living truth that shutting up is, most of the time, much more valuable than responding. Maybe that's where my voice went. I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine. 

deep places

For me: the deep places are Home.

In all ways but the most practical, I am currently homeless. I shy away from depths, and I tell myself it's easier, because of pain - my history with it, my habits around it. My having been disproportionately focused on it, not as a perpetual victim, but in years of having been controlled by it - shunning it as weakness or wrongness, until I was no longer able; then crafting it into something pleasing or "constructive," as though I could ever redeem it.

Pain is not what it once was, and it never will be again. I am no longer capable of postponement or denial; I can no longer suppress. For all my origins in deep places of Truth, if I am made to pursue and articulate Truth: the God I seek is present in my pain. How many times have I heard other people utter that phrase, having no idea what it really meant? where it led? what it meant to the person saying it?

Lately, though, I only notice depths as I pass them by; I skate across dark, mirrored surfaces, and I can't bring myself to know what they hold. I can't breathe deeply enough to re-enter the deep places where Truth rushes and blooms, electric and liquid in the dark, like a bloodstream-baptism, where your words do not matter is swallowed up in that words are made for Truth, and in the depths, they rush, like a current, one into the other, in hundreds and thousands and millions nearly in vain of the Truth they approach, as though the Truth might find its glory or its limits in syllables. I drown, open-air, for lack of submersion; I grieve the death of voice for dread of where I'll find it again.

I am just so sick of pain, and the mess of my history with pain has culminated in the fact that I am now totally unaccustomed to being in pain. Not unaccustomed to pain, by a long shot; unaccustomed to being in pain. Being, in pain. Existing, in pain. Living, in pain. Becoming, in pain. Abiding pain. Integrating pain. Hearing, in pain. Delving, in pain. All of it, let alone how to let other people into it, or keep them out.

I miss lingering in deep places. I find, though, that even as I haunt outposts, the Truth progresses in spite of me, and Home and I are aware of each other, and it exists in current, always moving, always alive, always outstretched toward me, waiting for me, but not.

schizo...wut?

August, 2012. I lay on an air mattress in my friend's West Virginia apartment, having left Florida because of the stalking, and having left Pennsylvania because - I honestly can't even remember why. It was late; I couldn't sleep. I turned off the light, shifted on the mattress, closed my eyes, breathed deeply, listened to the traffic outside the window, heard one of my friend's cats scratching softly in the litterbox

LISA

like a gunshot in the dark, and it was all in a fraction of a second -  jerked out of the bed, fumbled for the lamp, almost knocked it over; whirled around to face the empty room; glanced down the hallway toward the bedroom, where my friend slept; my heart galloping. The sound of my name rang in the room, bouncing off the walls with physical presence.

I had heard it; it had been there.

It was my stalker's voice.

It was the fourth time I'd heard it.

I hadn't seen the stalker in six weeks.

____________

I've written about it before, but I can't recall if I've shared it: When I was in my 20s, I wanted to be diagnosed with a mental illness. The desire wasn't as crappy as it could sound; part of me knew that something was "off" with me, that any treatment I sought for the weird, intense come-and-go depression I suffered wasn't helpful; part of me hoped that a diagnosis might bring about some kind of structure, a way to "live better."

I was wrong. I thought a definable mental illness diagnosis would make life easier. I thought it was all clear-cut. I, in my 20s, with no major health problems, had never considered the delicate, artistic side of medicine, only the black-and-white science of it, neither of which I had ever experienced. I just wanted to find what was wrong, fix it, and make it go away; and I wanted the fix to be life-wide. Broad strokes; not happy little trees.

____________

I didn't stop to linger on those aforementioned auditory events. I'm Hearing Voices never crossed my mind as a possibility, because only crazy people Heard Voices, and I wasn't crazy.The first time the word schizophrenia was uttered by a doctor, five months ago, I burst into horrified tears. I cried for three days. I ruminated on every mass shooting, every widespread criminal act about which reporters solemnly intoned words like mentally ill and unmedicated and delusions. But I am not crazy. I am not one of them. This is not me. So they had to be wrong; my experience had to be more like dealing with extreme stress and maybe I was just starting to fall asleep, and I'm sure I was just dreaming, because if you're Hearing Voices, isn't it something...undeniable? How could I be that actually crazy? How could you ever Hear Voices and be able to pretend you hadn't?

(How could you suffer any number of things and pretend you hadn't. Lisa. Drink up.)

Before I sought medical help, it took three years to recognize that something might be truly wrong. Because the symptoms grew slowly, in the dark, away from anyone in my life, and the worst of it, for me, is that every symptom I've experienced is rooted in a sometime-truth, or a previous experience, all of which double-down and compound on themselves; very little of it has ever felt truly foreign, and none of it resonates as crazy or irrational.

I'd suffered deep depressive episodes before, so that I could convince myself that the near-catatonia of coming home, crawling into bed, and staring at the wall until morning was simply a more intense version of what I'd already experienced, while not prioritizing the facts that I couldn't shower for over a month, or ate only oranges and buttered bread, or staggered through days as though in a coma, or drank to frightening excess when I couldn't calm the frenzy in my brain.
I'd been stalked, part of which involved several forms of surveillance, so that it made sense for me to assume that there were cameras everywhere, specifically watching me, gathering evidence of some wrongdoing I must have committed, or might commit.
I'd been assaulted, and I never saw it coming; it made sense to assume every single person I knew was capable, that my life was in danger at any moment; it made sense to avoid people as much as I possibly could, to avoid any change in the routine of home/work/therapy so as to minimize the chances of any new "exposure" to strangers.The personal nature of the assault made me squeamish, phobic about germs and contamination; why wouldn't it?
I'd lost so many close people in a matter of weeks, so it made sense to assume that people hated me, that even people of whose love I was assured were merely tolerating me, were rolling their eyes and wishing I would just go away forever, and I could point to the distance between us to prove it.
So I just went on with it, and figured, as always, I'm just not dealing well enough with these things, and I should be doing better/trying harder/being stronger/talking to God more/going to church more/doing something more. normal people do not fall apart like this, as if that were evidence of wrongdoing on my part and not potential illness.

I still can't fully wrap my mind around what I'm told: a version of schizophrenia, coupled with other things. A mixed breed; a 57-variety; the ketchup of mental illnesses. Sometimes, I can objectively recognize things like paranoia and delusional thinking for what they are, or I pull myself back from a freakout and review evidence for why those beliefs are unfounded; sometimes I can adjust and feel better, and sometimes I just have to ride it out, but the nagging belief that they are real never goes away. Visual hallucinations saved my life: okay. this is not any kind of normal. something is wrong. Though they are the most unsettling part of this, the hallucinations, surprisingly, act as a buoy, a reminder, for when I begin to feel self-critical to the point of paralysis: you are apparently, actually ill (stop calling it "crazy"). this is not a weakness or a wrongness; this is an illness, for which you receive treatment. do not succumb to self-criticism. it is not real.

It's an oversimplification, but part of it is somewhat like learning, at the age of 30, that the color of the classic stop sign has always been called "green," although you've always known it as "red." And now that you're aware of this discrepancy, it's incumbent on you to spend time and energy conforming to the "fact" that the color of a stop sign is called "green," even though you know, to your core, that the color is called "red," but that doesn't matter, because that color is called "green" by the rest of the world. When you talk about it with other people, or when you're thinking about it by yourself, you have to consciously adjust, every time, to calling it "green," but you know, in your heart, that that color is called "red." Some days, you make the adjustment, and it isn't a huge deal; other days, when you're depleted or volatile, you know that bastard is called RED and why are you trying to make me look like an idiot and why are you being so cruel and I have an ENTIRE LIFETIME'S INVENTORY OF EVIDENCE TO BACK UP THE FACT THAT IT IS "RED" but nobody cares, because it is irrelevant, and your "evidence" may or may not even be real.

It's paralyzing. I do a pretty good job of paralyzing myself, sometimes, even when I'm not dealing with crippling anxiety or deeper things. Even when I'm just overthinking, or doggedly plumbing empty depths for gold. Even when it's diagnose-able.. even when a doctor-person can point to things and say I think this is what this is, and this is why. Even when I started taking the meds and things lifted a little. The shock is just more than I can comprehend sometimes. Never saw this coming, ever.

And I don't really have a pretty ending, or even a real reason for why I'm writing this. Maybe you feel crazy, too. Hi. Let's have cookies together. Would it be weird to crack a joke about how I won't shoot you? or to laugh about how Satan doesn't sit on my shoulder and whisper to me about cooking kittens or building satellites out of mercury, or whatever?

Sorry.

Heh.

shapes, middle fingers, bricks, pizza.

I used to think this about myself:

I am an eternal optimist. 

I liked the idea. I'd practically chirp it at people. Eternal optimist.

An eternal optimist, because God is big, and God is my God, and because promises of justice, and rapture, and right-setting, because God said so.

An eternal optimist, because I used to believe matters of healing, hope, "calling" were dependent on how hard I was willing to work for them; that God values a hard worker, a determined person, someone willing to do the quote-unquote heavy lifting. And I am, if nothing else, a hard worker, so, clearly, I was set to Do Great Things; to Be Something Great. Clearly.

An eternal optimist, because I am a control freak prone to tunnel vision, and I believe in the power of people setting their minds to things and getting things done, which sometimes looks like "control-freak-tunnel-vision" and, other times, looks like "self-flagellation-tunnel-vision."

I wasn't an optimist. I was severely busted and in deep denial of what I'd suffered, but by gawd, I was smiling. Because I was Young, and the world was vast, and I had plenty of time, and I thought I was fine. I had so much room in which to spread out, in which to believe that the world would only get better as I got older. It's the theme song of The Rough Start: things will get better. It's the hope of those who haven't suffered a Rough Start, too; it's the universal hope, the spark in the bloodstream. The way forward. Things will get better. And we dream of it, an savor for it; drowsily in our beds, driving to our jobs, fervently taking notes in class, singing songs to God against a pretty ceiling. It will get better; the future is taking shape; we're on our way there!

For me: this hope took shape in the belief that my life would act as a barometer for my worth, and the work of my life would indicate whether I deserved the hope toward which I reached. It was my work to do, all of it. Out of the meaningless void, I was to stand back from the big picture and examine it with a critical eye; I was to envision exactly where to place each brick along each row of myself. The hope in this was the same shape as the work, and God will choose to help you if you really need it but God won't force you because God is a gentleman (please don't use rape analogies to talk about God. God.). In this arrangement, God stands back and observes, except for when he shakes his head disapprovingly while you clean up your messes. And eventually, in theory, you end up solid. Impenetrable. Invulnerable. You and God, standing in proximity; each uninvested in the work of the other. You nod, cordially.

But what about when you realize it was all bullshit?
But what about when you realize that it - whatever It is - will never be?

What happens when you realize the shape of your "faith" was kind of like a big middle finger to yourself? and you learned that that was the shape of God?

What happens when you get older, and things don't get better? when shit happens, or doesn't happen, and you realize that true, deep reconciliation of anything is rare, and resolution of anything is a freaking unicorn?

What happens when you acquire experiences, wounds, truths that are complete in their own big picture, but which are, in their fullness, unwelcome wherever you go? truths that clamor to be known, that live and breathe to be known in the spirit, by the spirit in us, but where can you bring them?

What happens God is bigger than anything! slams face-first into injustice that is imbued with pure evil? when the justice for which you've bled will escape your own personal experience? when you come to understand just how finite and breakable you are, and that God made you that way? when you realize that your tradition lied to you and that, actually, some wounds will never heal? when you realize that Youth allowed you enough space to hope that you'd see, on earth, maybe a single spark of the redemption in which you've believed, but now, you realize you won't? when you're faced with the demoralizing reality that some things will never be set right?

Hope changes shape. It rolls around in my head: hope changes shape. So I guess hope changes shape, or something.

When we're young, we look toward the hope of our older years as paved with personal meaning, brick by brick; when we're older, we realize what our coming years might mean, in uncivilized wilderness. I'm not saying that my own personal ship has sailed, so don't read it that way. I'm not an older person, but I'm older than I've ever been. And I don't know if things ever really Get Better. I grieve the death of hopes in the face of Hope taking shape. Hope, which propels us to look forward, still does so.. but toward what?

Whatever. I have pneumonia and a bad attitude right now and I have no witty ending so basically don't listen to me ever. (crawls under bed.) (wishes there were pizza-shaped hope under here.)

in which I am practically Donald Trump.

Come along, chirrun. Wander with me along the paths of lighthearted insomniacal despair. 

Let's say you've spent approximately the past five months coming to terms with your bright-and-shiny, newly-named Mental Health Thing, which you've kept private because no, you are not a crazy person, but yeah, you kind of are, but that has little to do with illness, amirite? (rimshot). Things seem to be evening out, which is nice. Real, bone-deep optimism and hope, and not just hope, but hope with the potential for longevity. Big deal. Yooge. 

Yooooooge.

But some serious things have happened in the meantime, and maybe you've blown off therapy for a few weeks, because you tell yourself I just can't talk yet but you know it really means I just don't want to sit in that room and fall apart, sobbing and wailing until I give myself a migraine. 

And maybe none of that has anything to do with anything, really, and you might just be starting to write about it because it's maybe time to start writing a little about it. Whatever. You find yourself upright in bed with a head full of everything, stream-of-consciousness-ing all over this screen, and your stomach is pretty furious with you because you are also an idiot who did this thing:

I'm ashamed to tell you what that is FINE it's a base of Lucky Charms held together by marshmallow with vanilla ice cream in the middle topped with white chocolate-Lucky Charms bark and I hate everything. I saw it in this video like two weeks ago... 

... and reacted like this: what. gross. will make. don't you dare and it just wouldn't go away; it, like, wooed me with the idea of crunchy marshmallow held together by gooey marshmallow - a horrifying technicolor sugar-Inception that burrowed into my brain and bellowed and bullied and bull-horned until I couldn't help but devote way too much effing attention to it. 

Moashmalluhs held tuhgethuh wid moashmalluhs? SOMEBODY BUILD A WOALL

Now, I'm a chef and all, which means that, when I am at my worst, I eat a bunch of gross crap because I feel tired of food almost always, until I remember that I am not tired of it, which makes no sense, but there you go. So, upon watching that clip of corn-syrupy pornography, I thought some things like these (and they were all correct): 

• That looks like it would hurt my mouth
• Wouldn't the marshmallow part freeze too hard to pierce with a spoon or fork
• That is not a cake at all
• The white chocolate bark part looks disgusting
• The whole thing looks disgusting
• This looks like I want to cry
• If I make this, I am disgusting

But I just had to. Because of how horrible it looked. Does that make sense at all? Shut up; yes it does. 

There is no correct way to engage with this sugary brain-worm infiltration other than ham-fisted suppression (ham sounds really good right now; please just pour salt in me), but if you're going to cheerfully throw caution to the wind and brain/pancreas/liver/stomach to the toilet (literally, on that last one), allow me to draw you a verbal map to the exact WRONG way to engage:

• Generally swear off added sugar for a few months
• Do a pretty good job at it
• Watch that video
• Make the thing
• Eat any part of it

There is also a less-tragic, but still totally wrong way to go about it: 

• With each necessary ingredient you toss in your cart, tell yourself you'll buy a vegetable
• Forget to
• Make only a half-batch of the "cake"
• Eat exactly five bites of it
• Throw the rest in the trash 
• Assume it's melting through some tiny hole in the bag and rendering itself a nuisance, as such tragedies are wont to do. 
• Spend a little while on the toilet, experiencing sharp pains and expelling sugary rainbows from your nethers.... 

...surely you saw this coming.

Choose your own adventure. They're all wrong. Had I abstained, even, I would always wonder, and I would rather know and experience than wonder! [And that, chirrun, is the kind of logic that will always get you in trouble.]

Run along, now. Eat your vegetables, or you won't get any dessert.

present/absent.

Some things never change, even when they're completely different.

Monday was the first time in seventeen years I'd been in a car with my parents, and it was exactly what it had always been: my father's car-sickness-inducing brake-jerk-speed-up-brake-swerve and relentless determination to fill the car with what he meant to sound like Carefully Thought-Out And Meaningful Queries; my mother, impervious behind sunglasses, soft leather purse in her lap, lips narrowed and pursed, responding when spoken to, often missing the mark of my father's pointless questions so profoundly that I suspect, for the first time, that she's got to be doing it on purpose just to needle him, to coolly kick the shit out of his pretensions toward control. It works - it always has - and I'm amused. I wonder whether my mother is more subversive than I ever realized.

I, true to five- and ten- and seventeen-year-old me, huddled in the backseat as far as possible from the barrage of attention my father hurled into the rearview mirror, where did you get that shirt do you get nervous when other people drive you places have you seen that one show when's the last time you ate baklava do you know what that tree is called have you ever been out west what's your favorite milkshake what kind of shoes are you wearing. Paragraphs about my father are never neat or easy; they never will be, and I write them as infrequently as I can. I try to mentally reframe his interrogation as the panicked natterings of the parent of a dead child, try to remove them from the context of children crammed into a backseat on the way to church, crammed into a delusion of lightness, of unity of spirit inside a car, responsible for continuing the game upon exit. It was never enough to play the game for other people; we had to play it for each other, to each other. The game is soul-sucking and I suck at it while it sucks at me, and he is scrambling at old habits to ease his own tension, and I try to let it be something different this time.

Besides, this time, I'm alone in the backseat: to my right is my youngest niece's carseat, and my brother died four days ago. I've said those words only once - my brother died - to my boss, the day after, as she gasped in horror, grabbed my shoulders and said oh my god, lisa, what are you doing here, you're in shock, LISA. I didn't think I was in shock, at least not while I could let work overwhelm me, while I could occasionally stand still and take stock, and think no, I'm good, I'm okay. Until I'd close the car door behind me and find myself unable to move; until I realized I wasn't eating; until I got lost twice driving home from Tampa - a stretch of interstate I've traveled hundreds of times - and once driving in my own neighborhood. Until I tried to work, and found myself with three half-begun projects and no idea what I was doing, what day it was, what time it was. No matter what has happened to me - leaving my parents' house, confronting them and my brother.. later, the rape, the stalking, leaving Florida, coming back, mental illness onset, seeking help - no matter what, I've always been able to hold it together; always been able to function, to work, to focus; I've always been present. I'm considering that my brain may have actually reached critical mass; I officially don't think I can handle any more. I'm considering whether God lets shit happen to a point where it stops being shit happened and just becomes here I am. 

______ 

When I got to his house that Saturday - two days after - I still thought I'm good; I'm okay, not in shock. I walked inside his house and began quaking; went straight to the kitchen and started moving things around, as is my training: to make sense of the space. Put away the panini grill; the stand mixer; the food processor (his wife won't use those for awhile); wipe the counter, wash the dishes, put that away, where does this go, rifle through a basket of how many baggies containing a single graham cracker with a baby-sized bite? who saves these things? how old are these graham crackers? stack those boxes of ziploc bags with the plastic wrap, these cans can stack with those cans, why does he have a whole bag of turmeric? it doesn't even fit with anything; where the hell am I supposed to put this stupid turmeric that's probably God knows how old anyway and will never be used here???? until I realized, desperately, that I was just moving things around for no reason, that I've wiped the same counter three times, that this pitcher will still not fit on that shelf. My mother is in the kitchen with me while I wipe surfaces and discard graham crackers, talking about things that I can't listen to; I nod and uh-huh and scrub harder. I take out the trash, then come inside to find that she's brought one of his shirts out of the laundry room into the kitchen; she's hunched over, her face buried in the shirt, and I remember the first two thoughts I had when I hung up the phone in the middle of the night I found out:

now, I have to stay. 
now, I am alone with them. 

Later, as people start to arrive, I overhear her crying with them, louder and louder. Why isn't she. How can she. Laughing. Why isn't she. And I hear sometimes people use humor. People grieve differently. People are different. The oldest niece turns up the TV too loud, and I let her.

______

There was so much about his presence that I couldn't tolerate. I'm walking around his house, and his shoes are sitting there by the door, ugly beat-up brown loafers (he wasn't wearing shoes when he left), and his cell phone is ringing somewhere in the house (the original Star Trek communicator sound), and he is hanging on that wall with my sister-in-law (how can she stand to let his hand rest on her shoulder) and I am sweeping the floor on which he collapsed (my niece, bringing her mother water because she was sweating during chest compressions) - there was so much tied up in his presence, and as hard as I had to work to repress his presence when it was present with me (his absence doesn't feel that strange), there is more tied up in his absence than anyone will ever understand. I dread being in a room with his casket; I dread having to stand in grief with them; I dread that I can't let myself join in their grief, that I simply do not have the capacity for grace that this situation requires of me, and I dread how apparent that will be at his funeral. I dread being the only one left with them, the only one left with his and my necessary shared record of memory; I dread what it means to them, that I am the only one left. I dread the wilderness of grieving someone whose presence I could not tolerate; I dread how it will become A Topic, and always an off-the-mark one, now that he is gone; I dread coming to contemplate how we loved each other, how that love was possible only by distance, how his grief and regret will intertwine with my own.

I'm writing this at 4 am, the night before/early morning of his funeral; I figure we're probably all awake right now. That'll have to do.

______

My middle niece wanders into the kitchen. The eight-year-old is his intellectual buddy; the three-year-old is the adoring daddy's girl. This one - the four-year-old - is not easy to read, under normal circumstances - a fundamentally gentle soul, insightful, who loves to please, who tends to hold onto her perceived failures, whose difficulties controlling her anger are already apparent. It occurs to me, as she makes furtive eye contact with me and lingers a little to see if I'll draw her in, that she is the petite blonde version of her father.

I start to fiddle with her ponytail, then realize it's a matted mess. Whatcha need, pooper? She clutches her hands at her middle, gathers the sentence in her head before saying um, I need you to come help me watch TV. I follow her to the couch, where my brother's TV/computer setup was blaring Frosty The Snowman (he never cared that all those wires were exposed). Frosty starts to melt; children start to cry; she and I both reach for the remote; our hands bump. We glance at each other, startled, and crack up a little. She pulls a graham cracker from her pocket and breaks me off a piece.

let it come.

I was sitting in the backseat of my roommate's SUV; we, between classes, had indulged our Tuesday ritual of tapas and half-price sangria, and they, the two roommates - they wheedled come onnnnn, let's just go to the beach, you've never missed class, you can miss five classes, come on, you know you want to! but no, I always said, no, listen, I left my whole life for school; I'd done the math and really, it's like throwing away X number of car payments just to sit in wet sand and chug vodka until the nighttime ocean feels welcoming, and they'd roll their eyes and crack jokes about backseat poetry readings, god, ugh and shake their heads and we'd wobble tipsily,grudgingly, to our baking & pastry class.

But this time - come onnnn, Lisa. Lisa. Come ON - I sighed, shook my head, all the requisite putting-up-of-fight - I can't, guys, I said, because I had to.  And I looked out the car window, and the clouds were glowing pink, purple, peach, the colors that turn the light golden and seem to ache in the sky as they deepen.

The roommate behind the wheel - we met eyes in the rearview mirror. She grinned, and swerved last-minute for the exit marked beach. And I closed my eyes to the sky and let it come coursing through me, felt it tingle and ache through my limbs, and I didn't think critically again for the next three years; I was tired. I was done.

____________

I wasn't in my 20s when I skipped my baking & pastry class to get drunk on a nighttime beach. I was 31. Spontaneous, maybe impulsive to the people who'd known me the previous ten years, here, I found myself The Stickler; The Responsible One; The Dorky Intellectual One, But Mostly Affectionately So. It was as ill-fitting as any identity I'd tried on without realizing that's what I was doing. It was uncomfortable, but I couldn't pinpoint why, in the same way I couldn't ever pinpoint why I'd always felt as though my presence in the lives around me was fraudulent.

So I sat on the beach and drank to killing the parts of me which had brought me here.

It didn't work.

It just brought her to the surface.

And it blows my mind, to remember 20-Something Me - makes me shake my head and whisper man oh man to myself. Blows my mind, because twenty-something-year-old me - that is one. tough. bitch. To have worked so hard and never let herself know how exhausted she was - I can't help but admire it just a little. I can't help but chuckle that, for me, such hard work is performed best in youth, when there's energy to accomplish it.

Mostly, though, I grieve for her.

I grieve for the darkness through which she saw every single thing in her life.

I grieve how little she understood, how hard she worked at graduating from one survival mode to another, and another, and another - adapting and observing, the exhaustion of changing colors to fit the wallpaper, without understanding that none of it was the same as identity.

I grieve that her toughness was borne of necessity; I grieve for how thoroughly terrified she was of herself, and every way she worked to Deal With Things Better Than She Was Currently Dealing, always. I grieve for how hard she worked, absent any sense of personal identity, to be Good; how hard she tried to out-scream a mantra of death, death for you, you will die with be good, be good, so you can be better. 

I grieve that, after hiding herself away for so long, and trying to do what she thought was Good, she gave up, because none of it brought change or relief. I grieve because part of her had to know it was futile; part of her had to know that this moment would come, that she would eventually fix her eyes on an aching sky and say, crystalline and succinct: this bullshit is not me, and I am finished with it. I grieve because it needed to be said, but she didn't understand that I am not Good and I am tired of fighting everything I know to be true didn't have to mean fuck goodness, because it is nowhere in me. 

I grieve that I can't forgive her for anything that followed.

But even so.

I grieve through a greater understanding of grace - for those who cannot see, who don't even know their need for ears to hear, whose worlds are so tormented and small, contrived and unstable, built on so much wet sand, forgive them - for those without identity, who work so hard; for those who spend their years afraid of what they could be, both in potential for good and evil; for the struggle to be without being known, or knowing; for eyes afflicted by dark, distorted mirrors of everything good and true -

- for they know not what they do, who they are, where they are, where to go, where You are. 

As hard as I fought everything in me, I never knew how grace waited for me in grief; I never knew grace until I just let it come to where I'd always been.