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.

addict.

One of us, in chef pants and a ribbed wifebeater and day-glo-pink bra; one of us, in unbuttoned chef coat rolled up at the sleeves, and men's boxers, having stashed the chef pants in the car immediately post-class; one of us - the one with no evening classes - in seahorse-printed pajamas. The former two sweaty and stinking of dead food; the latter, with avocado-green face, waddling around hot-teal foam toe separators with lighter in her mouth, a pack of American Spirits and phone in one hand, glasses of wine in the other. All of us, settling together on the tiled front stoop of a house fifteen minutes from the beach, arms resting on drawn-up knees, side-by-side in the thickening evening, intertwined trails of smoke carrying deep sighs, secrets, truths, laughter: camaraderie formed of habit and need and the understood collapsive versions of acceptance we offered each other in these vile indulgences.

____________

I miss smoking.

It might gross you out; it might disappoint you. But I miss it fiercely.

I miss smoking. I miss drinking. I miss sex. I miss the times before I became aware that even food serves an addictive purpose for me - to indulge and numb, or withhold and punish. I don't have a particular poison; I am propelled toward poison by the drive to poison.

I miss addiction as balm, however temporary; whatever the means; however destructive the aftermath following that brilliant balmy disconnect, when I still believed I'd somehow circumvented what was dormant in my bones this whole time. Before I knew that addiction is no balm. Before I understood it as a slow, desperate death with a long game.

I know that, even as I sit here fidgeting for a yellow pack of American Spirits, I can't do it. I know I can't have even one. I know I would purchase a pack tonight for a single fix and destroy the remainder only to repeat the entire ritual tomorrow. I am thankful for, and brought to frustrated, hungry tears by the dead headlight in my car, for which I would incur a ticket I have no business paying were I pulled over, and of course I would be pulled over, because, seriously, let's all have a chuckle: have you seen my luck unfold? Ha. Ha. Freaking HA.

I know that keeping wine in one's house isn't a bad thing, but I know why I bought the bottle of sauvignon blanc that's in my fridge, and I know that I purchased it solely for deglazing the surface of my brain. I know the danger in recognizing that I function better, happier, while drunk - that nothing is as daunting, that I feel happy and myself when I am not myself. I know all the art a chef can create in a kitchen with a well-stocked selection of liquor, but I also know that My Drink is gin and soda with extra lime, and I know how much cheaper it is to keep my own gin on-hand than tell myself I'll only drink if I'm out somewhere, as though I'd ever limit myself to maybe two; as though you could ever treat oxygen as a treat.

I know I am lucky to recognize these things in their infancy; lucky that the basket of regrets I've accumulated is heavy enough to keep me from filling dumpsters; I am lucky to know that,with each time I indulge it, addiction germinates in my joints and creeps along my limbs like poison ivy.

But oh, when you're alone and jonesing for something, is it nearly impossible to disconnect the brutal truths of addiction from the comforting rituals that surround it. The suspended belief in those rituals is what I miss; the little intimacies of sharing a lighter or bumming a smoke or thoughtlessly grabbing you a beer along with mine. Loosening limbs and words, and the stupid, drunken illusion of emotional competence as hands and lips find each other under blurry Christmas lights; raucous laughter, or quiet conversations, for an evening, or just for a time. The built-in camaraderie of shared indulgence - that's what I miss. The guarantees of a window of connection which won't close prematurely because of the needs that prop the window open, and letting yourself believe that the little thrill of reaching for a second cigarette, packing a second bowl, cutting a second line, slipping a hand under a shirt, making a drive-thru run all mean I want to share this experience with you, rather than I need to stay in this suspended place. I wonder, sometimes, if there aren't different kinds of addiction: the kind where I'm only hurting myself, versus the kind where I'll numb myself at anyone's cost, where I can only reveal the most truthful version of myself as the need in me exploits the need in you while you exploit the need in me. Or, are they all the same? I don't know.

It is work, to form a long counter-game; to quiet the hunger by remembering, rather than repressing, the aftermaths; by reminding myself that the camaraderie of addiction is false: that what looks like acceptance isn't always intimate: that addicts are a scared group of people afraid to know anyone for fear of being known, afraid to call out anyone's sickness so as to hide our own.

____________

I'm sitting here on my couch dying to sit on my front stoop and draw crackling drags and breathe in deep, calming breaths full of poison which, I know, will eventually strangle and kill me. I straight-up love the sight of a sweating wineglass of chilled sauv blanc, and I'm dying to feel the fragrant thrill in the back of my throat and the warmth deep in my chest, despite the potentially poisonous interactions between alcohol and medications I'm taking. I am lonely, but I know better. I want all the cheese, but I'm not hungry.

I'm still pretty new to this, but I'm starting to understand what seasoned addicts mean when they say there is no such thing as a former addict. 

Lord help.

teenage indiscretions, and what they're maybe not.

There is nothing profound to read here. I'm just letting you know.

It seems there's been some confusion lately, in lots of places, about the phenomenon known as the Teenage Indiscretion. It's a confusing animal, I know, as the term can encompass a variety of behaviors and events, and these behaviors and events can fall on a wide spectrum of what might be considered Serious and what might be considered Oh That's Just What We Do. And it got me thinking about my own Teenage Indiscretions.

I was a good kid. Sweet to adults, generally. Bad childhood, so, you know, there was a repressed Hellion Streak which fed directly into my Teenage Indiscretions and occasionally steered me into Whoooooa Crap territory. It's funny - before I started pondering them, I never realized I'd personally performed so many Teenage Indiscretions, particularly of the variety which make chubby teenaged Me sound like a freaking gangbanger.

Among my teenage indiscretions number the following:

• The time when I had a huge crush on Wilfredo Cortez and told everyone we were dating when we weren't, and, somehow, even his grandma found out, and she was thrilled. Because he was gay.
• The time when I combined cherry Koolaid powder, egg yolk, and Vaseline, and dyed sections of my hair bright red.
• My devotion to Hootie and the Blowfish, the depth of which was definitely an indiscretion. Particularly the drummer, who, coincidentally, lived three doors down from my great-uncle in South Carolina. I know this because, during one visit, my mother chased him down the sidewalk and made him sign a poster while I failed miserably at hiding behind a laurel bush and prayed to be swallowed up by hell itself.
• The time when I encountered a perpetually-swirling toilet in the girl's room and I, with excellent intentions, threw a wad of paper towels into it, which resulted in a flooded computer lab, some girl named Erin ratting me out, and the wrath of Mr. Andre, the diminutive assistant principal.
• The time when I interrupted a fight between my parents by screaming at my father I'M REALLY GONNA LOVE LISTENING TO YOU GET UP BEHIND THAT PULPIT AND PREACH AFTER YOU JUST CALLED YOUR WIFE A BITCH IN THE CAR ON THE WAY TO CHURCH and he accidentally almost drove off the BRIDGE WE WERE ON.
• The time when I pretended to have asthma to some girl who got really mad, whipped out her big Ziploc of inhalers, and slapped me across the face with them.
• The time I ran away... for three days.
• The time my boyfriend and I were busted making out in the empty church nursery with the lights out. By his mother.
• The time when my friend and I entered the (unlocked) big travel van of our youth leader's husband, which he used for musical traveling stuff, and my father caught us and ultimatum'd us: either fess up to them or hard labor at the church for two months. I chose labor. He upped it to three months. I held eye contact and said make it four. And he did. (The real mistake? Upping it to four months. Lesson learned; shelve your pride where shoveling rocks is concerned.)
• The time I hit my mother back.
• The times when I helped Charlie, who was a year older than me, with greasy hair and bad acne, develop his racket for selling bootleg Blue Raspberry Blow-Pops after school by distracting the morning delivery guys behind the school with a story about an ambiguous lost pet, complete with tears and a little hysteria. It worked twice. Eventually, the pressure got to me, and, mid-operation, I pretended to see a puppy and took off running. Never was built for crime.
• The time I was stuck in the front seat of the church van with our youth leader's wife, who disliked me (and I can't imagine why) and she snapped at me for saying oh, Lord. And I was already angry with her for something, so I asked well, can I say oh, geez? No. Okay.. well... oh, man? Huffy sigh; I guess if you HAVE to say something vulgar. And I kinda snapped inside and replied; Lord God Geez, lady, what the hell is your PROBLEM with me? She did not reply.  
• The second time my boyfriend and I were busted making out in the empty church nursery with the lights out. By the pastor.
• The times when I would ditch the stupid required pep rallies (they're character-building) to plaster myself against the walls of the unlit, unsupervised orchestra room with fellow likeminded orchestra dorks. I do not feel my character suffered.
• The time when we went to the beach and I stole a ring from the gift shop - gold, with a heart cut-out and a pink stone. Turned me green. Wore it anyway. Til it ate my skin.
• Loose, baggy, pinstripe-y pants. Lime-green things. Clunky boots which did not work. Jeans three sizes too big. Everything I ever ordered from a Delia*s catalog. I'm so sorry, people with eyes.
• The first time I smoked (thanks, Charlie) in seventh grade and didn't realize that I wasn't inhaling, until I inhaled, and that was a mistake, seeing as how 1) it was disgusting, and 2) it's been on-and-off, but I really only just quit for good last Thanksgiving.

I'm sure there are more.

But although I cussed at a youth leader, got to second base in the house of the Lord, and broke into a Jesus music van for absolutely no reason, you'll notice the item not found among my list of Teenage Indiscretions:
Sexually assaulting young children.
Because Teenage Indiscretions are not the same thing as felony sexual assault.
Never figured it'd be necessary to write those sentences.
Hashtag Thanks Duggars And Their Supporters For The Opportunity.

white people: this one's for you. (sort of.)

[note: comments have been disabled. I'm thankful this has resonated with so many people. To the death- and rape-threat crowd: time to move out of mom's basement and buy some shirts with collars.]




Are you sure? 

Every joint in my body vibrated, the parts of me only loosely connected to each other; I, in a paper gown, goosebumps; he, skeptical, leaned back in his chair, badge glinting in the fluorescence, one eye drawn slightly, the edge of his mouth pulling upward to reveal his tongue probing the corner of a tooth. I roved the room with my eyes, my breath in my ears, and the humming in my joints - I feel my bones; I am still here -  kept me from flying apart as we had a conversation. Sort of.

acquaintance. not a friend. not a boyfriend. no, never. last name? don't know. i don't know. acquaintance. i said no.

 Deep breath through his nose; impatient shift. Yeah, but. 
Are you sure? 

He'd uttered the phrase a few times, clinically, half-interestedly, toward specific details. But this one, in the final wrap-up. The smirk in his words. It slammed into me - the fantasty playing in his head, as he looked at me and shrugged with, almost, aggressive amusement.

I hadn't focused before. But now, I knew he didn't believe me.

I was so numbed that I couldn't form the thought. But it's been blooming in my bloodstream since.

______________________

There are few parallels between the experiences of a white rape victim and a black person in America. Rape is not racism. And for white people, no matter our experience, there's a fine line between healthy, respectful advocacy and speaking for people of color. I fear I cross that line, sometimes, or at least toe the line much more often than I should, only because I am mouthy and ill-tempered and nobody should ever hang out with me. I've tasted, courtesy of systemic sexism, what it's like to be actively disbelieved by a larger structure which needs, in order to survive, the idea of your inherent untrustworthiness. But realistically: If you would only act decently, you wouldn't get hurt, and being judged for walking around in the physical that I own - that's pretty much the extent of what I might have in common with black Americans.

Because I am not a black person. I can never understand the experience of a black man in America. Sometimes, I think I'm even further removed from the experiences of black women in America - the ways in which the feminism that empowers me is narrow enough to erase their experiences almost completely. When I work to educate myself on issues of systemic racism, black feminism, and intersectionality, I find myself absolutely overwhelmed by how much anguish I do not know and cannot understand. It seems like a hopeless thing. A vague, hopeless thing. The lack of hard answers is uncomfortable. It's hard to sit with, for long. It's tempting to close the tab, put down the book, start baking. Leave it on the shelf. Or tell myself it's just not true, because it cannot be true. Because it hasn't been true for me. How can it be true? all of this brokenness being screamed toward white ears - how can it possibly be true? How can I live in this world and not see it, too? How can I believe this is true when I can't connect with any personally-meaningful proof that will make me understand it? 

Full stop: that's the thing. Right there.
Nobody is asking you to understand it.
If you can't understand it, you can't understand it. That is okay.
But you - especially you, people of faith in God - are fully capable of believing it when you're made aware of it by someone who does understand it.

I struggle with the duality of belief: the effect on the believed, on the believer, the cost of conferring belief, the cost of withholding, both on the dis/believed and the un/believer. I'm so grossly angry sometimes, when I remember being disbelieved - from police, to dear friends - and when I, in turn, convince myself that belief is an easy thing to confer, but difficult to withhold except for the worst or most evil among us - when I remember how I was made to feel stripped, like an animal, before the eyes of men and women to whom rape can only mean fuck, and fuck only means one thing. When all I allow in my entire heart is how can you deny someone the fundamental human kindness of validating their pain and believing them when they tell you why it exists? What does it cost you to simply believe? to not turn away? to not rewrite the narrative into something that further blames. oppresses, undercuts, isolates? 

But when I'm being real? No, Lisa. Belief is costly. You should know that by now. That to believe is to esteem; to hold dear; to trust. That, particular to pain: to believe someone's pain is to hold their pain near to you, to absorb its heat in your skin, to breathe it into yourself; to feel the sting in the limitations of your own empathy, intellect, and experience; to awaken from a state of denial to which you can't return. To elevate someone's life-need to express their pain above your need for comfort. To postpone pointing fingers of right/wrong at those expressions, and, instead, choose to recognize what drives the expressions. To humble yourself, rather than indulge in correction you haven't earned the right to confer.

White people: if enough black people are telling us the same thing, it is incumbent on us to believe. How can we not believe them? How can we sit here, in our whiteness, and listen to little bits of these myriad deaths, over and over and over, but only so far? and deem, in our whiteness, that it cannot be true, so we will listen no further? that we must know better? as though there's purity, or omniscience, in our whiteness? That because it has not happened "like that" in OUR lives, it could never be?

White people: we can never understand black peoples' experiences. We can never enjoy the certainty of proof; We can never nod, satisfied, at evidence which cannot be refuted by someone who chooses to disbelieve.

But when the majority of the black people in my life are telling me the same thing - that systemic racism is real, that police brutality targets and destroys black lives, that the judicial system is biased against people of color: I believe them. For what it's worth, from one damaged, somewhat bitter, slowly-rebuilding white lady with a migraine in Florida.

If black people tell me they struggle under a legacy of police brutality, I believe them. 
If black people tell me that their children receive subpar educations based on skin color, I believe them. 
If black people tell me what it means to them to live in poverty, or live in financial comfort, or seek or eschew education, and all the reasons and heartbreaks therein - I believe them. 
If black people tell me they've been denied jobs, advancement, general upward mobility, and opportunity because they are black, I believe them. 
If black people tell me that an entire police force or judicial system or federal government has been focusedly sabotaging them for generations, guess what? I believe them. 

When black people riot in the streets because racism drowns them out: I believe them. 
God believes them. 
So should you. 

claire.

[I really do mean it when I say I wish I could be Claire Underwood.]


If you do it just so,
you will have filled the space.
And that is what you aim for.

The mother of your indignation
will not trickle away
as you tear at her robes
weeping for absolution. No. If you do it
just so,
You will suckle your rage
into a lesson: you will craft it
to be subtle as mist, to infiltrate
like a drug, a secret;
as a frenzy beckons it to wildness,
you will say no
even as you cannot breathe.

It will kill you.
But any number of things will.

It's
predictable (if tiresome), necessary
(if cruel). Death is
not in your nature.
But if you do it right,
if you yank the leash
if you edge the mist just so,
your eyes (they always look broken)
will burn cool, movement
without spirit, strategy
sans indwelling:
Everything
is war. (It will kill you.
But any number of things will.)
You'll draw yourself upward,
pull in the air between your shoulders;
You will fill the space.
Your eyes cannot disregard the broken spots.
Your face will appear to soften
at these armor-chinks
as they wrench themselves wide
(they should've yanked the leash).
You will - motherly - watch them crumble.
You will look down
and remember the floor.

And, alone,
holding breath in the night,
you will tell yourself yes,
It's unhealthy. (not cruel.)
But sometimes,
the fuel you need
is flesh,
spent in the fire
you cannot release
as it burns you.
and you will you hold it up: a burnt offering
to a god you cannot name;
a penance
you could not afford
for that
which you could not spare.

It will kill you.
But any number of things will.

put a bird on it.

As a rule: I don't do Starbucks.

I've been, but the visits are rare, because you cannot pay me enough money to pay that much money for some of the most consistently offensive coffee I've ever had. Starbucks is many things, none of which are coffee: Starbucks is slick surfaces under track lighting, multi-tonal, shiny device-things, prettified people, pastries made to sit, pert and plump and sparkly, under glass for prolonged periods. Starbucks is posh knicknacks: cutesy travel mugs with sparrows and owls and whatever the hell else, knockoff brewing systems, little holiday.. thingies? in browns and pinks and seafoam green? I don't know. I don't care.

Except, okay, that's not entirely true. I am emotionally available for iced peppermint mochas. They need me, and I am here for them. We have a relationship. More like a one-night stand, since I've only had one iced peppermint mocha. But one was enough, as in one was definitely not enough.

This morning, I woke up early, because I am housesitting in a different city, and I don't know how long it takes to navigate morning traffic in these parts, and I also needed to buy some fresh basil for work, and I was tired and edgy, and when I pulled into the grocery store parking lot, I smelled it, and there it was, right next door, with that stupid green lady logo and three empty parking spots right in front, the grease spots in each of which read Lisa, I swear, if I chose to see it.

If I chose to see it.

Don't look at it; don't you do it, Lisa, no, NO, you will NOT, Lis - you look away right now. Lisa. LISA LYNN. You don't dooooOKAY THE SMALLEST TINIEST ICED PEPPERMINT MOCHA MOLECULE THEY WILL LET YOU PURCHASE AND ONLY THIS ONE TIME and I'm not ashamed that I practically ran to the Starbucks door before realizing that I hadn't even parked my car. (that part isn't true.)

Walked in. Tried to remember which stupid Starbucks word meant small. Placed my order. Politely declined to purchase a beautiful styrofoam scone. Sidled around to the place where the Starbucks person waits for her Starbucks while the Starbucks people make the Starbucks. I'm the only customer in the store. The employees are decorating the space with Happy Birthday banners. Wear it around your waist, Creighton! Someone mentions eating a scone, and someone replies ugh, Sabra, no, the scones? So gross. The scones sparkle in response. Everything sparkles in Starbucks. It's the track lighting. So luxe.

The barista who made my coffee seemed really tired, and I assume it's because she walked here from an episode of Portlandia, burdened with the tasks of trudging here from Portland every day to schill burnt hipster corporate coffee to the bourgeoisie while supporting all those dreadlocks with a very skinny neck. I really do feel for her - the weight of those dreads is kind of pulling her head backward a little bit, and her eyes are only half-open, because she's got to be really tired after walking here from Portland, and I'm positive it's not that she's surly and disinterestedly looking down her nose at the process of making peppermint mocha happen to a cup.

But in the meantime, I just want my tiny iced peppermint mocha. Also, did you know that tits means awesome in Hipster? As in omg, I infused my patchouli oil with this amazing lavender blend I've been growing in the terra cotta pot on my back stoop, and now my dreads smell. so. effing. tits.

Far be it from me to be that girl, but those dreads smell like dog and burnt coffee, honey, because they're dreads, and because you work at Starbucks. I know this, because I'm standing six inches from those dreads as she does things which result a peppermint mocha happening to a cup. If it sounds like I'm being unkind, I'm really not.  I celebrate her eventual freedom from the grind of anything not tits. Foot travel is a pain. Exhaustion is real. So when she plopped the straw in the drink and monotoned tall iced peppermint mocha for, uh, I don't know - it's not like she could read four whole letters on the side of a cup - and a little cup, at that, and the letters are on the side, not even on the top, where it would be easy! - it's not like it's simple to figure out who the drink belonged to, because, hello, we were two people standing on one whole side of a whole entire store filled with sparkly knicknacks, so the sensible thing to do was to walk to the other side of the store and place th drink by the register, guys; she couldn't assume it was mine, after all. Eye contact is just - what do you want from her, people?? THE SERVICE INDUSTRY IS HARD AND PEOPLE ARE SUCH JERKS.

It is hard, though, and people are jerks. I might return tomorrow morning. I'm tempted to tell them my name is Fred Armisen or Carrie Brownstein, just to see if she gets it; maybe if I tell them to write "bird," she'll get that I'm putting a bird on it. Maybe she'll crack a smile - a wan one, half-scathing, but only half. She did, after all, make a mean iced peppermint mocha.

Maybe I'll buy her one.

But then she'd have to make it. For herself.

Is that even nice to do to somebody?

Everything is so complicated.

death: it stinks. as it should.

A few nights ago, I watched a documentary about the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding kerfuffle. Harding was blustery and rough; Kerrigan declined to be interviewed. Reminded me of a similar report I'd watched a few years ago, wherein Kerrigan seemed almost irritated to be asked about the incident, expressing a desire for everyone to "just get the hell over it already, because I certainly have, and there's no point or merit in discussing it anymore."

Elizabeth Smart responds similarly when discussing her kidnapping: that she's moved past it, that it's no longer worth discussing, that even though her career involves activism and such, her own ordeal is not central to her life.

They have allowed their lives to remain central to their experience, rather than acquiescing to life-changing ordeals becoming central. They have fought to remain who they were.

__________

Sometimes, it's easy to nitpick at all the things Christianity gets wrong. There are lots of things. Lots of particulars, and lots of big-picture items, depending on your perspective, beliefs, life experiences, yada yada yada. Christanity has an oft-earned reputation as a bully, and, as a result, it's sometimes a sitting duck. As with all the realest things, it is uneasy; it exists in the same tension as a circulatory system, wherein life-carrying blood chafes against the walls of the vessens which bear it: the functions of a body for and against itself. It will never be ideal.

Sometimes, I think Christianity considers it unchristian to consider something completely dead.

The interworkings between life and death are central to Christianity, and the heart of Christianity is built on God/Jesus "defeating death, hell, and the graaaave!" which, if you grew up in church, you will have read in your finest sweaty-spitty booming preacher voice, and let the church moan amen. Death bad, life good, power over all. Simple.

I was raised on that formula, toddled aisles under the gaze of people who saw bad situations as either punishments for wrongdoing or as vehicles for God's power to be wrought more abundantly in the lives of the faithful!! Any bad circumstance was treated as fertilizer to grow God. Unexplored, unfelt, unrealized, folded and tucked into the back of something, like a Sunday morning bulletin, week after week after month, shoved into the back of a Bible until the spine began to rip apart under the pressure of so much.

If you're taught that your bad experiences give more room for God to grow in your life, you know what you become? A broken spine. A martyr; a narcissist. Breathlessly starstruck in your pain, unable to see your bad experiences as things which should never happened to you. Forcing your God-formed and God-seen heart into the ground, screaming and gagging, in exchange for the idea of God's power breathing life and beauty into the rotting corpses you've fastened around your neck. Isn't that what God does? Won't God make sense of this, eventually, if I just hold on? Won't he make it beautiful? 

Oh, honey; just stop. Because no. None of it means what we've always thought it means. None of it is simple. None of it makes sense. None of it feels right or beautiful. None of it is your responsibility. None of it is your fault. I don't know why it happened, and I never will, and it will never be okay, and I don't know what to do with that.

But I know what's beautiful, and what isn't.

Driving yourself nuts, trying to make it mean things that it doesn't, is not beauty. It's not fruitful or healthy. It's not kind, patient, loving, gentle, temperate.

You know what's beautiful?

When you look it in the eye, grow in the shoulders, lean into it, and hiss from your diaphram: fuck. this. shit. When you finally let yourself understand: not a fucking iota of this should ever have happened to me. The language may not be beautiful, but there's fierce, holy beauty in owning every vulgarity you utter toward every death you suffered, because you know that there is no holy language for any of it. Not a word; every word. God knows it's true. And it will be no more or less beautiful if you can ever use sweeter words for it all.

It's beautiful when you sit long enough with the pain to understand that you begin to come full-circle toward yourself again; it's beautiful when you begin to understand that you can be you again. That it's okay. That you don't have to change for it. That finding yourself again isn't evidence that you've failed to become more. And that throwing up your hands is really just refusing to engage it all on any terms but yours anymore.

It's beautiful when you stop driving yourself crazy with it, when you accept that you will not be made more beautiful, more worthwhile, more valuable, more exceptional, more anything by unlocking the secrets of how God turns shit into flowers.

Sometimes, it's just dead. And you leave it. Because otherwise, you start to stink.

It's all stream-of-consciousness while people are talking to me, and there is no pretty ending, and I'm sitting here in Georgia without a laptop, so I had to go buy a tiny keyboard at Best Buy for my iPad..... I don't know what my life will mean or do, if anything significant. I don't know if every person "finds" or "communes" with God in specific paths, if the center of my life with God will flow from a place of pain or not, if God's pleasure finds me best in suffering or industry or I don't even know what.

But I know I hate this keyboard.

And I can breathe a little better.

salamanders

when i was tiny,
and every eye-level of my grandmother's house
was loud brass and cream-and-terra-cotta velour and
a glazed-pine smell which tingled my bottom teeth -
when late-afternoon rains
fizzled to living mist, and the long deep dirt-grooves
gushed with miniature rivers for miniature hands and feet,
and the light seemed filtered through dingy linen clouds, thick and golden
and rich against the skin, and the trees were never so green but in that gold -

i broke out, ginger-toes curling
then relaxing against rain-cold grass
as flushed skin cooled and glowed, as hair breathed the rain and air
into itself and became wild and gnarled, as my body
exhaled that house
and the ashes of it
were borne away as light-bugs in the dusk: i

would hunt salamanders

in my small bare feet, i would stand and survey to start forward, chilled toes curling momentum
in pebble-sand until, i knew, they would find
those miniature riverbeds already running scarce, the sharps giving way to
God herself, laughing in wait, in those smooth, warm signatures of melted snow fallen months before,
shimmering my name - she had sprawled wide and lush and intertwined herself with me, her name and mine a new word, rivulets and ringlets and braids and swirls like initials, new every evening, and she held my heart warm
in her hair, and
like an infant to the breast, like
the dark, liquid-blooming senses even before:
i knew to go to her; i knew she was.

the salamanders stood neon in that dark-gold dusk against their wills
against the fingers barely grasping, delicate as a mother should, against a hard yellow plastic picnic basket, for a time,
against fantasies of community, names, marriages,
travails and triumphs,
dampness on cheeks,
mansions of sand,
raised voice(s) and
God - she swelled
in witness, always,
to the breathless dramatics
of tiny creatures
in the dark

thirteen months and a bacon-chicken.

After nearly thirteen months in my house, I unpacked most of my boxes today.

For the past year, I just couldn't.

I've always been a light social drinker; nothing crazy, nothing crutch-y. Almost immediately after the rape, I began drinking heavily, daily. A functional near-alcoholic. Class, work, home: I'm positive that I reeked of vodka. Every now and then, I'd crack: break down weeping in the car on the way to work, or silent, seething rage at classmate hijinks. A friend later told me, of that time, you scared us; you were always drunk, somehow so desperate; we didn't know why; we didn't know what to do. I truly don't even remember doing it, though I don't remember much of anything about the four months between when the rape occurred and the stalking began.

It all just happened so fast. One crushing event after the other, shutting out the rape completely from day one, trying to contain the stalking as though I were dealing with a civilized person and eventually realizing I couldn't; then leaving Florida for Pennsylvania in fear, then leaving Pennsylvania for West Virginia in more fear, then a job which rendered me exhausted and unable to think (which I was extremely lucky to get, though), then moving back to Florida.... All in thirteen months. Thirteen months. Until today, I hadn't realized how short the timeframe was.

And next month will mark thirteen months in my house.

I returned to Florida with all intentions of jumping right back into school. Picking up exactly where I'd left off. I returned to the scene of such an abrupt exit to expectations that I didn't realize I had: that my life was here waiting for me, that the spaces which held the person I'd been had frozen, and that I could just slip right back into the hole I'd left in the frame, like a digital photo with a person-shaped cutout. That nothing would have changed. That I was fine. I am not going to fail at this. I am going to finish this. And I tried. But I couldn't make myself be in that building.

So I didn't.

I got my job stuff settled, I moved into my house, and I began unpacking boxes which still smelled like my living room in Tennessee; out of cardboard and newspaper, baubles which had brought me pleasure and comfort clanked against my bones, and I set them up on shelves and looked at them as they expectantly occupied bits of space. Piece after piece, vases and books and sheets and dishes and an entire life-ful of items.

Do you do this, too? - When I enter someone else's space, I'm always interested in how they've chosen to make the space reflect themselves. All the little details they've purposely chosen to display for themselves, knowing that other people will see them, too. Family photos, old childhood toys, books, media, particular pieces of furniture, maybe a wall color reminiscent of a grandmother's kitchen. I looked at the walls of my new house and didn't know what to do with them, purchased furniture I didn't want to touch to fill a space I didn't want to know me. I may as well have hung from the ceiling to sleep, as displaced as I felt. I functioned through work every day to escape those walls, then returned to them every night as the dread built in me, as the evidence of how destroyed I felt continued to build, as I tried to incorporate items from the past into this space where they absolutely did not fit, as I tried as hard as I could to just make it okay now. You're fine. FORWARD already. Get going. In my father's Pastor Voice, no less, urging us into the car on Sunday mornings: c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, let's get this show on the road. 

I threw it all back into the boxes and stacked them in the garage, and after the last boxes were packed away, I pulled the garage door shut behind me and looked at what I'd done. I didn't know what needed to happen, but I knew I needed to see my house as it was: full, but mostly packed away, disheveled, a denied space with no windows in the middle. It was the first time I could breathe deeply, and the sound echoed against the walls. It was the first time I was alone with everything that had happened, the first time I was in a space with everything without urgency or fear driving me to focus three steps ahead. I could look at my walls and know that this sadness was real, and that my brokenness was more than in my head, that I could shut the door behind me, in this space, and let it come. The more I fought it, the more it took me away; the more it took me away, the less I cared to fight it.

I fell apart.

I was on my deathbed. A wonderful therapist who retired four months into our work; a second try, with another therapist which didn't work out. The immobility and inability were terrifying. I remember sitting in my bathroom, not really thinking anything other than I need to clean this bathroom but knowing I couldn't make it a priority, and feeling so tired, so confused about why something as trivial as clean your damn bathroom was fundamentally impossible, and I started talking, to God, in my bathroom, while I was peeing: I'm just done, man. I've been done. I don't know what else to do. I know that I'm sitting here in limbo. I know that I have to decide whether I'm going to live or die. I can't inflict my choice to leave on my nieces, but God, I can't imagine living anymore. I can't live with all this. I can't. Help me. It was a turning point; I was realistic about how much I wanted to die, and then I determined that I would not die until I could do more for myself than just stay alive.

For the past thirteen months, those words: I can't. Help me. It wasn't self-pity; it was reality. It was neither negligence to engage in positive self-affirmation nor determination to remain a victim; it was my umbilical cord, my total, honest, naked, destroyed soul learning how those words felt in my mouth for the first time in my life. And you know what? I'm a little defiant about this: I'd love to not care if it sounds like self-pity or lack of effort to anyone outside it, but I do. That's both the rock AND the hard place: it will look like laziness or wrongdoing to lots of people, but sometimes, self-care just can't happen, whether it's showering or eating or sleeping or therapy or cleaning your bathroom. But I am better now at being supportively helpless with someone than I've ever been. God's presence in tragedy - a truth that still makes me deeply angry, and I don't know if it ever won't - teaches us all over again not just what it means, but how it feels and what it costs us to weep and mourn with the broken and dead. God never said FALL YE NOT APART, nor did he ever say MAKE IT SNAPPY IF YOU DO. So shut that noise down, noisemakers.  

New therapeutic environment. New work. New terms to learn; new habits to develop, new coping methods. God is here. So am I. Whatever that means. (I'm chuckling as I write that.)

I also drizzled some bacon with honey and rubbed it with garlic, then shoved it under the skin of a chicken and roasted that sucker with some broccoli and whole garlic cloves today. And if THAT doesn't make you happy, then.... well, that's okay.

*puts some in the freezer for you*

i will charge you $25 for a pie. $30, if you're a pain. not sorry.

Listen. I love junk food. My tastes lean toward the salty and horrific. I don't care what unpronounceable crap lurks in my crappy drive-thru mozzarella sticks, because they are fried freaking cheese with a crunchy shell and I love the crap out of them and no, I have no plans to make my own just because "chef."

But we all know that junk foods aren't for everyday consumption. There are definite issues of privilege tied up in discussions of people's diets, so I'm not here to soapbox about it.

I'm here to tell you why I, as a chef, and a business person, will charge you at least $25 for a lemon meringue pie. $30, in fact, if you earn it. In a heartbeat, without apology, and with sincere understanding and good wishes for people whose budgets don't allow for $25 or $30 pies.

______

"Are you serious?" She'd just finished eating a slice, and, upon first bite, leaned back in her chair with eyes closed and proclaimed it ambrosial and otherworldly and transformative, and that should've been my first clue that she was nuts, but it wasn't, because sometimes, I am dumb. So she inquired about ordering a whole pie. "Are you serious? How can you charge that much? That's crazy!" Her nose wrinkled up and, I swear, her eyes shrunk backward into her head, somehow. As if I'd told her something like... well...

That's pretty much exactly how she reacted to the words twenty-five plus tax.

I'm so thankful that most customers seem to accept the prices I charge. I'm thankful that they trust me to price items as I need to. And I actually love working with people whose budgets might not typically have room for luxury items, like fancy baked goods or catered events. I love making it happen, because I love creating or contributing to an atmosphere where people can participate in the deeply social, deeply personal, and deeply primal rituals of physical nourishment. Blah blah blah basically I like making pretty food and making people fat and happy and sometimes drunk if I can 'cause drunk people tip better.

But that "crazy" talk up there? I despise that kind of exchange with a customer. I really do. It's never worth replying to, even though I do, sometimes: "No, the price is not 'crazy.' It is expensive. But it's not crazy, given the experience you'll have, and given our costs in creating the experience." By the end of that statement, they've usually either interrupted to continue berating me, or they're walking away, or calling their hipster daughter-in-law, who recommended me, to complain. It makes make me sad, to know the wonderful experience I could've created for them if we'd been able to dialogue a little.

But really, though? It pisses me right straight off. It's ugly. It's boorish. It's just plain rude. Call me crazy, but: don't call me crazy. It's not gonna make me drop the price. It's not gonna make me inclined to work with your budget. It leaves me nowhere to go with you. Basically, you've just sailed directly into I'd-like-to-not-deal-with-you-anymore territory, and I may or may not jack the price up a little just to make you go away, rude person. 'Cause, to me, it's just like walking into someone's home and berating them for how much they paid for their furniture, with absolutely no knowledge of either the price or whether their finances can accommodate the price. It's rude and crazy for a home cook - even a very good home cook - to walk into a professional food business and call their prices craaaaazy without any relevant frame of reference.

And I'm happy to tell you more.

1. There's pie, and there's Walmart pie. I know it's en vogue to hate Walmart; I've never met a person who's happy to work there, but while I know plenty of small business owners who lose business to Walmart, I also know plenty of people who, in the short-term, can afford to feed their families because of Walmart. So there's that. Privilege is a serious, relevant issue when criticizing Walmart, and I'm not crapping on people who shop there.

But I'm totally crapping on the ways in which Walmart affects consumer expectations, particularly where they intersect with my small-business practices. Walmart can crank out 3983598395 pies per day, using automated equipment and the lowest-quality ingredients they can, and make them available to you literally twenty-four hours a day. That's not a judgment-based statement; it is a fact. The only real reason this is relevant to me as a businessperson is that millions of people use a $6 Walmart pie as the standard by which they measure the prices, quality, and availability of food items across the board. And that is relevant because...

2. ... Unfortunately, with the proliferation of highly-processed foods in any mainstream marketplace, items made with whole foods are considered more problematic; they have shorter shelf lives, often require refrigeration, freezing, or otherwise "special" handling (which used to be standard handling), and are more expensive. Do you know that there are people who are afraid to purchase baked goods because they contain real butter? Well, is it gonna go bad? Well, yes, darlin!' Eventually, it will! Because it's real food! Which goes bad, if you don't eat it! Because it was made for eating! It wasn't made for storage! I'm not saying a Walmart pie isn't sometimes yummy; I'm saying that Walmart pie is made primarily for long-term storage, and food made primarily for eating, from ingredients made primarily with sustainability and responsible production in mind, will always cost you more money. I wish it weren't so. But I can't control a single thing about it. And my inability to control those costs is relevant because...

3. ...I use higher-quality ingredients in my cooking, because I am currently in a position to use them. That hasn't always been true, and it may not always be true, but it's a position I've committed to for as long as I can sustain it. I'm not all about the buzzwords, because many of them are meaningless, but those buzzwords, like "grassfed" and "organic" (the only buzzword with consistent relevancy) and "free-range" and "cage-free" items were, at one point, not part of food culture, because they were simply how animals were raised and how products were produced. Those products didn't require a totally different designation and pricepoint. They were cheap, easily attainable, and standard. That's not the case any longer. They are more expensive to purchase, and they are often more problematic to source. Which is relevant because...

4. .... Every raw material in the world is more expensive than it was fifty years ago, the cost of living has increased, and wages, etc., have been increased accordingly. High-quality, responsibly-produced ingredients require more time to source than their conventionally-produced counterparts. BUT: the amount of labor involved in making a scratch lemon meringue pie hasn't decreased in relation to how much those labor hours actually cost, or how much electricity costs, or how much insurance costs, or how much my time costs - my time, which is, unfortunately for ME, often the most easily-sacrificed cost available to me in pursuit of creating items I love for someone's pleasure. I don't always pay myself for my time; I definitely don't always pay myself enough for my time. But I always soak, scrub, zest, and juice real organic lemons for your pie. And that's before I make the crust, before I make the filling, and before I time the meringue to be ready while your filling is still hot, so it adheres properly before broiling. Walmart doesn't do that, so if you want it, you have to pay someone to do it. Usually while they're also doing eight million other things. Which is relevant because...

5. ...I already kinda said it, but I'm giving it its own number, because I want you to know it so hard... The costs of pies made by a home cook for pleasure do not carry the same weight as the costs carried by a pie made for business purposes. Unlike a pie made in a home, the price of a pie in a business covers much more than raw material and labor (which is likely not a concern anyway). So pricing lectures from a home cook - even a very good home cook - it's like being angry that we communicate in Chinese in a professional kitchen, even though you speak Greek in a home kitchen. It's. Just. Not. The. Same. Not better, not worse - just different. If you walk into China expecting Greece, you will be disappointed. 

6. And the bottom line is: lemon meringue pies are luxury items. Drive-thru mozzarella sticks are luxury items. Even a Walmart pie is a luxury. I would love to make you a luxury item, like a gorgeous brioche, or a tiered themed birthday cake, or a romantic candlelit dinner for twelve, if that's your thing (I don't judge). Just know that I have absolutely zero qualms about charging you enough money to cover my costs. If you're trying to work a lemon meringue pie into your budget, I'm not here to tell you that you're crazy for spending less than $25 on a pie; there are markets out there to fit every budget, from Walmart prices, to my prices, and way beyond my prices. The only judgment I'll offer is this: Frankly, if you're eating pie that often, it's worth your while to pay more for a pie made with whole foods...

I also make a damn good lemon meringue pie. It's worth your $25. And if you're a jerk to me, I consider that worth a $5 surcharge.

So there.

Cookies, though... I'll give those away.

"...someone else's eternal home."

Every time I'm out and about, I see my father.

It's not actually him, though: it's the man standing ahead of me in the grocery checkout line, fidgeting and impatient and radiating discontent; or it's the man ambling to his vehicle, the way my father ambles, drawing out each stride, each entitled yard, stretching limbs as though released from a cage; or it's the man making earnest, almost desperate conversation with whoever, leaping forward with interruptions, throwing his head back to laugh, eyes unchanged, because this is the world and this is how people do in the world, and the world is watching. Ever the external pastor-figure: chin up, eyes straight ahead, looking forward, moving forward, ever away, ever someday: toward someone else's eternal home.

_____________

I can hardly face the ways in which we're alike; I suspect he feels similarly. We are alike. I have never been my mother's; I was his, until he left me toward the ecclesiastical ecstasy of someday. We were never familiar, though; we nodded coolly at each other over art and music, discussed the penciled shape of a face or the messy imprecision of watercolor or the vast vocabulary of pottery, completely confusing to a six-year-old (he is an amazing artist, and it was his trade before he pursued ministry). We regarded each other's edges as he strove to connect me intellectually to his understanding of artistic interpretation, where he found solace, and I strove to meet him where he was, wherever he was; to draw him to where I was, which, surely, I could do, if I could do it better.

His hands changed with his vocation - from ruddy, paint-stained, bruised and scraped, dirty fingernails, to smoother, no longer torn, webbed with hardened scars, and in perpetual futile motion; endless drumming against steering wheels and tables and doorframes, knuckles flexing white against his palms, fast-moving, hard-grabbing.

I'd always told myself that he was the safer of my parents. My mother's rages and violence were totally unpredictable, extreme, emotional and manipulative, and satisfied in our destruction. If I had to weigh the cost, I always figured my mother's relationship to me had cost me more.

But anymore, I don't think that's true. I'm starting to realize, as an adult, how very deeply my father hates women. Starting to understand the very real damage that banks inside the daughter of a man who hates women. Starting to understand how that hatred shapes her.

For my entire life, I knew my femaleness was a problem for him, something which drew and repelled him, against which he had to take deep breaths. I was always afraid of it, always felt shameful, dirty, in his presence. Always. Always felt sorry, as though I were a blight on already-broken things which he might otherwise make function, as though he could be happier or more present if I weren't present to remind him of the demons which banished him toward someday instead of now.

Always listened at church - red nail polish! makeup! wanton! wearing pants? failure! purity rings: wear your sex life on your sleeve (my snarky interpretation)! modesty! temptresses! nice to see you in a skirt for a change! why can't I touch you? god wants me to pray for you! better get used to! have every right to! It's not the result of any great insight, or anything to do with me; it's nothing I'm bragging about, because it was one of the central most painful truths of my childhood and young adulthood: I was the only one in my family who did not know how to pretend it wasn't all bullshit. And he knew it. Because we are alike.

It sounds arrogant, condescending, to me, to say things like but he's a good person, he is, insisting to the wind, as though I am a person who could sit and list another person's sins and bask in the heightened glow of my own righteousness by the end of it. I won't do that. He's a seething, broken, angry, controlling person in whose presence I have always - every single day of my life - felt threatened and endangered, pacing childhood bedrooms knowing to myself he could snap and kill us all - as real as fearing my stalker, as wondering if I would die at the hands of the man who raped me.

But I know that the question of whether he is a good person is a stupid one. What is a good person, anyway? I know that there's always been good in him. I know that a broken person is terrified of the indescribable grace which abounds in the presence of children. There's enough good in him that he was, early on, enchanted with his baby daughter, his own hopes for redemption so interwoven with her presence, sustained by his expectations that her nonwoman female presence ought to nurture his good intentions. Until she failed him, somehow. I don't know how. Sometimes, I think I know how. I don't want to know.

Now, I am just tired. I've stopped calling him. When I do, I end up sitting rigidly across tables from him, hardened and wise-talking and swallowing sawdust food which lodges in my chest, absolutely exhausted, thinking you are a person I truly don't know what to do with. I don't know what you want from me. I am still afraid of you. I will always be afraid of you. We still regard each other's edges. He still holds himself distant, as do I. I know, intellectually, that he can't hurt me, not really. I fear for when he's gone, when I still see him at the bank, or the grocery store - wiry, graying, dirty-blond hair, a tall, slim frame in drab colors, an ambling stride, blunt, work-darkened fingers drumming against a steering wheel. I don't know how I'll be with the time of my chosen separation, when the separation becomes final.

And, as an adult, I sometimes wonder what it must have been like, maybe from an outsider's perspective: all of us under the same roof, my brother and I old enough, and all of us thinking and feeling as individuals in a unit; sometimes I wonder, at all the different relationships we had to each other, all the ways we saw ourselves in each other, and how we could hardly face the ways in which we were all alike.