Finding Buildings

I am bummed, because I have had a goal to write 10 blogs a month. Should be so easy to do. Sit down and write something. I often have so many thoughts swirling in my head, I could write 10 blogs in one day. And sometimes I have nothing to say. And yet, there is sometimes just this inability to write anything. I remember last year when I first separated from my husband, I found it almost painful for my senses. I did not want to wear perfume. Food had no taste. I did not listen to music. It was like I could not extend myself past my inner frame--it was if I would just fall apart. And I suppose that is what holds me back from writing sometimes, frankly, I just can't.

I don't know what happened to April. It started off kind of good, but then seemed to relapse, like a drinker, and fall further behind. Like I was right back in the center of it all.

Yesterday I could not find a building I was going to for a meeting for work. I mean it was ridiculous. It was like the more I tried the worse it got--totally mirroring my emotions lately. There I sat, practically driving in circles (hmm..that sounds familiar, living in a circle..) I would bang my steering wheel and yell " I F%^&ing hate this! I hate all of this." And there I was, like a very funny character, really, in a sitcom. Because to say I am tragic just makes it all so worthless, I just have to make myself appear funny. Really it was. Later, I drove back and found the damn building.

But that has been my month. Not able to find the building I am looking for, and crying out in total frustration. Stuck in my own prison. There must be some answer for me, but I don't really believe in "answers" anymore, I just don't think life is that simple, and at the same time I do.Maybe there really are no questions for me to figure out/so I don't need an answer.

I don't know. I have been awash in grief this month, crying so much last weekend. Feeling like some odd ghost walking around a shopping mall, feeling like a dish rag, hoping no one would talk to me, for fear I would fall to pieces at their feet. Wanting so much to connect back to my past, and knowing at the same time I can't, and wondering how to really make that bridge in my mind.Death of another dog, the complete ending of an era.

I don't even think anymore, "this month will be different." Hell tomorrow is May Day, it symbolizes new starts, birth, the May Pole. My wedding centered around that theme. I had a May Pole with ribbons on the front of my wedding invitation, and one of my favorite poems from Rilke inside, with my favorite line, "and what violinist hold us in his hands, o sweetest of songs." Maybe there never was a violinist. I don't believe there is one now.

Too Big to Turn Around

I am pretty much at a loss of what to say this month. I am just living in my circle. It gets a little bigger but it is still a circle. I said today, "my life is a series of mistakes." It really is. You know how people say, when one door closes a window opens, or everything happens for a reason, or one day you will look back on this...and on and on..And it sounds like wow, one day, when I am all grown up, I will really be on my way, and this will be all a distant memory. Maybe that is truly how it works for some people. Maybe some people don't live their lives in a series of mistakes. I can say, for me, all my mistakes have not led me to the promised land. Actually, I feel like I am in prison. And I really feel like that lately. All I did was trade one prison for another. I chose the less of two evils. Now I am in a pretty nice prison, don't get me wrong, but yet I really have no life I would design.

I realized again lately that my dream is dead. It is not possible to recreate it. I do NOT want a blended family. I don't want to start all over again at 45. I am not sure how to proceed with my future, when I am living a life I would not pick. I wish I could just sell everything, and travel for like a year, and just forget who I am and what I am up to. Not to sound trite, but why can't I be like Eat, Pray, Love. Hell, she was only married 1x, she did not have children, she was only in her 3os..she had it good. I don't see why she needed a year to get her head together. She really is someone who could have just moved on. As far as I can tell her life was not a series of mistakes. I feel old, too old to really start again. The prospect of it, the real prospect, is that I am going to get so many complications in my life that I do NOT want, and yet what is the alternative. And that is the million dollar question. For me, right now, it is to change things up dramatically. I don't want to "fix" the life I have here, I want a whole different one. Where no one really knows me. It would not be perfect and it might still be somewhat of a prison, but a bigger prison, with a much larger yard to exercise in.

I never thought 30 years ago, when I really did believe my life was going to be good, I did not think one day I would view my life as prison. All by my choices, my series of mistakes. I wish I had been watching my life, instead to quote a song, I was watching my life go by. And now I just feel like it is too big a ship in the harbor to turn around.

Triggers

I remember picking up my daughter at elementary school 15 years ago, and hearing the news story of the Oklahoma bombing. It was a beautiful day in Santa Cruz, California, I remember that well. I had just made my trek down from Bonny Doon (a home I would come to hate..) which was a 1 hour round trip to pick up my daughter. I did not mind the drive though. But that news, it was like something you look at and think "what do I do with this?" It was like this amazing, gaping, open wound that just came right through the radio.

Fifteen years ago was a good time for me. I was married for almost 1 year, to the love of my life.I thought. My life worked. I thought. Oh I know I have said this a 100 times,maybe more..but that is what I remember ..I was happy in my life back then. I was only 30 and had so much ahead of me.

But it really doesn't matter. Recently I wrote that in an email, it just does not matter what I say to the other party these days..that is kind of a tough thing to be with..I guess because I want so much for everything to have meaning, to matter, but if there is one thing I have learned this past year, sometimes that is not true. There can end up being just a big black whole of nothingness.

It was a strange dance all those years. Like a "normal" wife, I would get annoyed or upset and show it, in my actions and my face. But it did not matter, imagine that. I mean as far as getting any kind of movement or agreement or anything. What I got was some sort of dismal, quiet anger, a score chart was kept that I was not even aware of. It was always used against me, it became reasons for behaviors. So I often crumbled and acquiesced--that was the only option that made it sort of work. I just did not get it then, it was like some bizarre reality I never could figure out.

These two thoughts don't really connect. An awful, hearbreaking event in Oklahoma and the slow death of my marriage. Just as the mind works though, they weave back into each other.
For the first time, in I don't know..my whole adult life, I actually feel in control of my life. I love the phrase "take your power back" and often say that now, to myself or to others. I love having a real backbone. I love not having to second guess me--if I think something is odd, not moral, twisted, wrong, illegal, evil, whatever, I can just say it is, and not have to do some sort of weird equation in my head to come up with a different answer. Nope. Now I go with what I know.

Stage Show

It is funny, sometimes there is just this blank screen staring at me. With the faintest hum of the laptop to lull me into hypnosis. I could just stare at the screen.

Sometimes I have things to say, I might even think of myself like Scarecrow, who said he could think great thoughts (after getting his brain..) there have been a few great thoughts here and there. But mostly I go in and out of a lot of thoughts and feelings this past year or so.

Some are good, and I welcome them. But they are often fleeting, as if I cannot sustain them. Others are sad, they torment me, but luckily they leave, at some point. I never know when they will strike. Like yesterday I wondered how I would go to the bus stop in the afternoon, when 10 minutes before, I was crying in my bathroom. And I could not, because it was a timinig thing. So I had to kind of just stuff the tears. Tears over the same person, for unfilled dreams and just a nothingness I am left with, that I stare out to, that I cannot explain or escape.

I have been amazed this past year how hard it is to wrap my arms around it all, and I can only say over and over it is complicated. And in between my good thoughts and my sad thoughts, are just an endless stream of staying in the moment, because I am too afraid to look at the future, because I really don't see anything, except the hope one day to sort of run away. Sad isn't it. That is what it has come to.

The present is just what it is, I don't get excited about it. The past, that is what has fueled all of this, this murky mud puddle that I don't seem to ever get out of.

Oh I don't want to paint this falling apart 40 something, first off, because it is just too depressing, but more than that, it is not the show that is running every day. It is almost like all 3 thoughts play rotating parts on the stage, all day long.

Most people find me quite funny, organized, "together" as one friend said today, and I almost fell off my chair. Good lord, am I viewed as together??I told her I once consulted a psychic named Reality Freedom and she found that amusing, as she said she loves my stories. I guess I am more funny than I might even know. Perhaps my whole adult life should just become one large sitcom. We really cannot take ourselves too seriously. And there I go, switching out my sad thoughts, for just being in the moment.

I wish I wrote everyday. I should. Sometimes I just cannot even summon up the will to put a thought down. Sometimes I don't write, just as anger to myself, to get out of this F*#$ing circle I move around in. It should be easy, shouldn't it? I agree.

The Small of My Back

As I drove back from Oregon late Saturday afternoon, I found myself in a bit of a question. I still do while I write this. Actually every time I stop writing, I put my hands to a "prayer pose" as if to contain myself, as if to hold onto myself. Strange sounding I know.

So much went on in my head Friday night but oh so much later, and still now. Funny how that happens. Like a garden growing, each day more and more things sprout up, things you forgot you planted. Or like all my perennials coming back each day now..every time I look out the window I swear more plants are there. I forgot, in the barren cold days of winter, what was there.

It has been a long time. I have been so in love with one person for so very long. And I loved being that and knowing that (however much was just an illusion, as I have said before.) There was so much ensconced in the love and the action of being in love. It was like a garden that was all planted, and yet, kept growing with new plants. There was a certain knowing that even if I did not water it enough, it would not fade away. (again so much of this existed in a separate world that I grew to live in my mind, in order to make it all work, it was complicated..)

And then, with seemingly little notice, the garden died. And it was ugly. I did not want to look out the window anymore.

On Friday night, I entered a new time and space, well kind of. When you are married, if it has meaning, it is pure monogamy. I only dated my husband, and I loved doing just that. But I am not married anymore. So there I was on somewhat of a date. A situation I never expected to be in, nor even wanted to, way back when, on a day in May when I spoke vows that put me way up into the clouds. It is hard to move one self from one dimension to another, because to me they seem only mere moments, one to the next, even though they are many many years apart.

Maybe I created the text messages that came my way. Maybe I sent out vibes to the universe and in rolled the person I cannot forget. Crazy. But. True. Timing. Is. Odd.

There was a hand on the small of my back, more often that I expected. It really never even entered into my head that I have no idea how to go out, when there is a part of me that still feels married. The hand on the small of my back is what I remember most. It was sweet and oddly difficult at the same time. Because it is not the hand the small of my back remembers. And I felt unfaithful.

On the surface I felt no sadness on this evening, I felt fine. But now that I have had some time to think about it all, and there is a complicated swirl going on in my head. I feel I am between two worlds.