Autumn

"Tell me it's all going to be ok," I said in an email. "You can lie if you have to, I just need to hear that it's all going to be ok."
"It's not," She told me, "It's going to be what it is. But you're going to be ok."

It was the last Wednesday in October and I was driving down the back roads at night, the radio playing so loud it drowned out my thoughts. As loud as it was, something about the whole thing felt still. Even though I was tucked safely behind the windshield of my car, it was like I could feel the wind coming through, going right through my sweater and the layers of my skin and blowing between each rib that makes up my ribcage, whipping away all the thoughts and fears and needs I had and leaving only stillness and serenity. And for a split second, it was all ok. Everything I needed was right here, for one minute. I felt full but for the first time in days that feeling of fullness didn't hurt. It felt like safety, security, solace.
I'm not sure if it's possible to find Holy Ground in the driver's seat of an old Jetta but if it is, I think I found it.

I have this friend who says things I think about saying but never do. And I told her this one day, sitting in a school assembly squished between her and another person. She told me that I should say it anyway, and who cares what people think.

I watched a spoken word once about apologizing for taking up space. It was late June and I decided to stop making apologizes for how I chose to live my life. "I'm sorry," I said rather defiantly, "But I'm not sorry."
I'm not sorry for saying I love you and meaning it.
I'm not sorry for loving too much.
I'm not sorry for believing in God and love and magic and the hidden power that comes in a box of hair dye and a tube of red lipstick.
I'm not sorry for not being the person you want me to be and I'm not sorry for needing you and I'm not sorry for not having it in me to be the person who can still look at you the same way and not be bitter and not be the person who has these moments where all I feel is the pain and it hurts so much I can't breathe and a scream gets trapped in my lungs where it turns to ash.

As I lay here, with all of these feelings pressing hard up against my bone, I remind myself of this. I remind myself that one day all of this will have burned down to ash that I will then scatter in the wind of the wide open space I've learned to call home and it won't hurt as much as the burning of it all.
And I remind myself that life will be what it is, but everything I need is right here, even if I don't see it yet, and that no matter what happens I will be ok.

Bleeding Red

Grief is messy
It's scratching at the surface, under my skin
It's a discomfort that makes me want to pull out my hair
It's anger and tenacity which sometimes gets mistaken for strength
It's fear, and vulnerability
It's desperation
It's neediness
I've described it on a number of occasions as bleeding out
I got sick, and then I got diagnosed, and through out this whole ordeal I've been feeling like I'm bleeding out
It's the little things you notice first
it's the pale skin, and the tired eyes
And then comes the irritability, the anger, the moodiness
It's this ache in my chest, right where my heart is. It's gory and messy. It doesn't hurt really. It's just this small twinge whenever I walk or talk or laugh or breathe
Loneliness, desperation, neediness
These are all symptoms of the bleeding out
Maybe it's a good thing. maybe it means one day I'll have all new blood, healthy blood
But for now, it just hurts. It's sticky and red and it's not neat and pretty
I tend to edit myself a lot, to make things sound poetic and neat. I tend to miss capturing the raw and the real and the honest on paper.
In these bleeding out days, I think it's my fragility that scares me more than my mortality
Death doesn't scare me. Neither do needles, or doctors.
What scares me is this sort of desperation that needs to make everything ok, the neediness I feel, the vulnerability I am forced to succumb to.
I kept waiting for someone to notice me, to pay attention to that pale girl losing blood over there in the corner. But it didn't really happen.
No one offered to tend to my grief, or sit with me, to acknowledge that what happened to me was not ok and awful and world changing.
But the world kept spinning. Life went on.
And so I did it myself. Or I tried to.
I wrote too much and watched too much television and threw all my time and energy into eating the right foods and complained too much and avoided friends because I wasn't brave enough to trust them with my grief. After all, it was all I had left of normalcy.
I was looking for a cure, for some magic to not necessarily take away my conditions but to minimize that gaping hole in my chest it seemed only I could see and make it stop hurting, make me stop feeling like I was losing blood every time I took a breath.
I wrapped myself up tight in un-forgiveness and anger and isolated myself, tied the cocoon I'd made myself up tight and stamped it shut, locking myself inside.
With bare hands, I'm digging through all this gory, messy blood that's coming out of me.
It's not pretty, and it's not fun.
It's exhausting and lonely and it scares the crap out of me and I still don't have all the answers on how to stitch myself back together.
For now it's just duct tape and staples.
But as I look through all this gore and misfortune, as I look at myself in the mirror and see the things other people look past (The pale skin and the tired eyes, the stickiness from the metaphorical blood that keeps coming out of me), I see something else too.
I see life.
It's red and it's sticky and messy but it's a sign I'm still alive
So the blood keeps coming. Soon, I imagine, it will stop pouring out of me and I'll start to build new blood, better blood.
Soon, I imagine, it will stop hurting and aching and the grief will stop feeling so consuming and I'll stop feeling so angry and desperate and lonely and vulnerable. At least, I hope so.
But until then, until that hole in my chest stitches itself closed and the new, better blood comes and it all nudges me back up to live, I'll just sit here, with my pale skin and tired eyes and all those other symptoms of the metaphorical bleeding out that's going on inside of me, because this bleeding out is all I have left of the before.

Fix a Heart

I used to think grief robbed me of all my words
I'm realizing that's wrong
grief doesn't rob me of my words, it gives me too many
And I delicatly sort through each word in the English language trying to find the right ones to express how i feel
most of the time i end up saying nothing at all
sometimes i write and my heartbreak comes through and i bleed red all down the page
I'm sorting through these words, trying to pick out the ones that will explain how this happened, or how I'm feeling, or why...

I was broken. And I tried to tie up my heart with string and bandages and stop the bleeding, stitching it back together with jagged stitches. My broken heart was forever stained by what happened...

And then he died. And I don't know how life can change in the blink of an eye.

And she's coming home, on a flight that will arrive tonight

And now we wait. We wait and hold vigil and pray and cry and try to use all the words in the English language to make sense of this. And, in our own way, we're all searching for that one secret that holds all the answers to mending a broken heart.

Red

I want to write about being a teenager. I want to write about that moment when you’re in high school and there’s this guy and he looks like the toughest guy out there and then he looks at you and singles you out of the crowd and talks to you and you feel like you’re walking on air as you walk out of the school building. I want to write about when you get in a fight with your best friend and you end up screaming at each other because everything in that moment is so alive and vibrant and everything is being felt under a microscope. I want to write about falling in love, and getting your heart broken. I want to write about how sometimes things happen one way but when you play it over and over again in your head you change little bits and pieces of the script and then you remember it that way. I want to write about changes and snapshots of things you keep laying around like Polaroid’s and dried up flowers that you keep on a shelf in your shoe. I want to write about that one moment when everything else fades away and you’re there and you’re laughing and you’re learning how to dance again and it feels like its infinite.

 I want to write about all of these things because they are all parts of the story. They are all a part of this tapestry that is woven on the cusp of becoming something great. It’s like magic, like flashes of light and stardust. It’s breathing in and laughing and crying and flirting and being angry and feeling like your drowning and then… gasp… you exhale.

 It’s all about being brave, being heartbroken, being excited and being in love and being alive in this moment. That’s what being a teenager is about. And the bad things, they’re just pieces. Things shift and move and nothing stays the same forever, not even the things we think will ever go away.

 Everything changes, a fortune cookie told me once. Nothing is permanent. Life is short, enjoy the ride. What no one ever told me was how.