Living the Dream

I wake with a jolt, full tilt panic before daylight. Mouth bone dry and my heart hammering, I feel the familiar squeeze in my chest-FUCK! I can’t do this again! I am not ready. I am not ready at all. Oh my GOD, what have I done?

I try again. Just go back to sleep, I tell myself; you’ll be meat by noon. Today’s another twelve hour day. Maybe more. But the squeeze is there and I can’t. Can’t sleep. And if I don’t at least rest, I’ll lose my mind. So I lay there until I can’t anymore and I get up.

I’ve always known what hard work is. I’ve worked much harder, in shorter bursts. I’ve worked long hours at times. I’ve had responsibility, and worn many hats. I’ve worked in a hard hat, a cowboy hat, ball cap, a bandana, and a helmet. I’ve worn the employee hat, the manager hat and the free agent hat. But I have never worn all the hats at once.

I am so tired.

I am on a runaway horse, flying by the seat of my pants.

No, really, I am on two horses at once. One is a runaway, and the other I have resorted to kicking the shit out of to keep it moving, and I am trying not to do the splits, which I never learned to do. I feel torn in two, every day, or torn in four or eight or however many different directions I am flying in at once at any given time and I swear I am riding as fast as I can.

I am barely hanging on.

My day ends and I feel like I’ve been to war. Warmth, food, kindness, all like seeing rainbows after being underground; miracles. I have maybe an hour, two. There is not much time for those little miracles, because there is only time for things that are barely getting done, and just have to be. And then I sleep, and wake with the squeeze in my chest, the hammering heart, the bone dry mouth, the fear I will just not make it no matter how hard I try.

There is no time now to ponder, muse, reflect. There are no days I just follow my words to my heart.

Words flow from me all day and every day. Words that get me where I need to be to survive. I think on my feet and I use my words and people listen to me so I try to choose them well. I am sincere and creative in my approach.

But I can barely write an email now. I am so tired of the talking and all the words, I cannot even write. I cannot join two thoughts together for that. Maybe not even two sentences. All I can write is this.

It would seem to me easier to stop having a struggle and just say I can’t. I can’t write. Maybe simpler to quit, to stop torturing myself with my imagined need to write. I chose my life as it is right now, and for a good reason. One cannot always do all things. There is a season for everything. Perhaps it is not the season for writing, for me, for now. Maybe what I am doing really will take everything I have, and more, and there is just not room for anything else. Sacrifices must be made. If it were easy to do what I am doing, more people would do it. It’s not.

And yet, here I am. I don’t want to quit. I can’t quit. Neither can I quit what I spend all my time doing. Because I do have a dream, and dreams are what I live on.

 

Everything is a matter of perspective. Do I sound unhappy? Well, some days I really am. Some days I want to close the doors. Go ahead, fine me for breaking the rules. I just don’t care, because I am exhausted beyond all reason. It’s too much. Too much for one person. I want to quit it all, give it back; turn the headache over to someone else.

I don’t have the time, resources, finances to do what I am doing in any of the prescribed ways for doing such a thing and I’m just worn out by my own creative ways of making up for that.

And then a magic thing happens. A person comes with a story, and I know they are coming to me by no accident. They bring something that I’ve never seen before, and the something has a story too, and of course I have to know the story. I fall in love with the thing, the story, and the person. I wouldn’t miss this for the world. I have to hang around to see what happens next.

Someone else finds this thing, falls in love with it too, wants to know the story, and then has to have the thing. I am now part of the story, and this is how I make my living, one story at a time.

I don’t always tell the whole story, nor do I usually really know the whole story at all. Sometimes I have no vital information at all, but that creates a mystery which I am happy to segue to another story. After all, possibilities are just my game.

I’m never dishonest, but hey, I was a waitress in another life, and I can read your mind before you know yourself which dessert you really do want after all. This is an art, trust me. How good would I be if I didn’t try at all to anticipate what you might fall in love with, and help you along so you might realize what you must do? Like I said, I’m always honest; I’m just helping people be happy. I’m kind of like a matchmaker.

I’m enjoying, just a bit, the way I’m beginning to be the “go to girl” for some folks’ favorite things. What a hoot. Do I know where to find it? Do I even know what it is? Not necessarily, but I might find it anyway. I often do. Even if I can’t profit, it’s the possibility that draws me, and the mystery; the magic of finding just the thing asked for that makes me feel like I’ve won something.

I’m living the dream. I am a business owner. I wear the Boss hat now and I don’t punch a time clock or ask other people what they want me to do. I can’t be fired and I can make up rules and write my own contracts and have a cigarette whenever I please, if I can ever find the time. I eat, sleep, breathe this business and I worry all the time how I will pay the next mind-numbing power bill or even buy the next boat-load of light bulbs and tubes I will shortly need yet again. I borrow from this, cover from that, float what I have to. I have no idea how this will ever work, but I am the mistress of my own destiny. I have bought myself a job. If I might fail from working my ass off and receiving no pay-off, let it at least be for myself. I have possibilities!

Every day I meet someone who thought they had a “future”, who went to work every working day for a decade or two, until one day they went to work and were told their job had been eliminated. And most everyone else I know has lost their ability to work for themselves as well. They have lost homes, assets, credit, bonding, licenses, equipment, and sometimes self respect; they chase work and leave town to find it. They take what they can find and put up with conditions they would not have before. Most of them just cannot find work, or only the most sporadic kind. Everyone is insecure. Things have become simple, basic, and the survivors get creative.

I am a survivor. No, I don’t know what I’m doing. Yes, I would like to go back to an easier time, when I could work as I needed to and have a “life”. Yes, I am in over my head. No, I don’t enjoy this every day. Yeah, you will get really sick if you work all the time, don’t eat or sleep enough and get really stressed out. Whatever, that was the way it went down, that’s what it took. If I knew what I was doing, I’d have not done it.

But News Flash: there is no Play It Safe way left. There is no “I want to have a life” anymore. This IS my life. There are no avenues that do not include big risks. There is nothing to be gained by not trying, and if you’re going to try then try with all your might, and don’t be a quitter. Against some of my own limits, I’m making new ones, and I haven’t quit.

I do realize that most do not understand if I say sometimes it’s just too hard, that I’m overwhelmed, that I don’t know if I have what it takes. They are visibly distressed to hear me say I don’t have the means to do this and would like to walk away every other day. They think “business owner” and assume solvency, competence, and consistent income. They don’t understand even if I tell them, that I’m not in a position of any glory and I’m not “getting all the money.” They don’t know that “success” for me today might be staying open another month. I realize that all I do is scare some people when I tell them how close to the bone this is, and that some other people may only judge me stupid for taking such a risk with so little means or know-how.

I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut. They don’t need to know, and only those closest to me know the truth.

So there it is. This is all I have; running on empty with no resources and little experience and a bit of nerve. Not as much as people think. And every day is a ride I wonder if I will live through. There’s no time to regroup, and most of the suggestions people have given me for improving my business are things I struggle to not snort at. They have no clue that it’s simply not possible, that anyone would dare to do this without the means to replace, repair, hire, buy, and borrow from a bank. They have good ideas, and I file them away for future reference.

Am I crazy? A fool? Some days I think so. On sleepless nights I definitely think so. And then I go back and do it again the next day.

I want to write. I can’t find my magic place, the place I used to write from. There’s nothing in me right now but this runaway horse, and the one I keep kicking along. Maybe I will have to write about the ride, even if I write it badly.  And if  I am willing to do that, I can always write about the Dream. I’m living it.

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Sliver

There are blank spots. Certainly I don’t remember everything. The memories I do have are sometimes murky, shadowed. And some are sharp as broken glass. The sharpest ones I live with, like I lived with the sliver of Coke bottle near my wrist for so many years; not visible, not painful, but just “there” where it shouldn’t be. Considering trying to get out.

One day, so many years a part of me, the sliver decided to leave my body, or at least begin to. Now that might have been a little painful. There was some swelling, and eventually, a bit of a point emerged. I think it freaked me out more than anything. Glass put there by an event so very long past, and now so unreal, I could not get comfortable with the hard evidence of what might otherwise seem easy to deny, or at least ignore, and pretend to forget.

The time came when the sliver protuded enough that it had to come out. I was able to extract it with tweezers, still imagining it might be something besides what it was. Glass. Glass that could only be there by the force that put it there.

The sliver was long, sharp, and clean as a whistle. I had perfect vision then and took a good long look at it. I marveled at the way it had suvived in my flesh in one piece for so many years, and at it’s size. Just huge. It was really impressive. I turned it over several times, pondered it’s origin, and then saved it somewhere now long lost to me. I know eventually I disposed of it. I knew it would be too ironic to find it poked into myself again by forgetting where I’d hidden it. Just because I needed to look at it for a while, didn’t mean I had a wish to hang onto it. So away it went.

A quart sized Coca Cola bottle; they used to make them that way; all glass, and heavy. The bottoms were thick.

I never saw it coming, and don’t remember raising my hand to my head to protect it, and yet I did just that. The part of my hand injured showed such. It didn’t happen some other way. But I never saw it and I never felt a thing. And then again, maybe the memory is just gone or never was there at all. Shock can make things that way.

Another sliver has considered now moving, perhaps is even ready for the tweezers. For all I know it has just passed clean out of me, I don’t really know. But for so long it was “just there”. If I ever spoke of it I did in monotone, matter of fact. I would at least register the look on another’s face and note either horror or disbelief and occasional simple confusion. I learned to say nothing. I suppose not everyone shrugs off the news that someone they know has survived a terror, and most don’t want to know. For most people, it’s only interesting in the movies.

I don’t remember everything. The memories I do have are sometimes murky, shadowed. And some are sharp as broken glass. The sharpest ones I live with, like I lived with the sliver. Not painful, just “there”. The murky ones, they’re the ones that bring the shadows. I didn’t think they had slivers, until now. I can’t see them when they come out, “long, sharp, and clean as a whistle.” But I feel them moving, emerging. Why does it sometimes take so long? When I no longer need to remember, why is it time now? Truly, I am okay. I don’t care if I ever remember more, and don’t really want to. If a sliver is fine where it is, why try to dig it out? I put myself through all that long ago, and finally understood that it’s okay if I can’t remember, it’s ok to live with a sliver. If the sliver’s a problem, it will let you know…and may just emerge on it’s own when it’s ready.

After all this time, I guess another piece of glass must leave me.

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Fancy

“We’re not fancy people.” she said. Opened the door wide to me while following my gaze to the yard.

The “yard” was dirt, mud proper. Chickens pecked and scratched, played their chicken dramas out with one another. Somewhere I could hear a goat in the mix, and that seemed fitting.

“Looks like home.” I replied with a smile.

“Come on in and sit down a while. I’ve got the coffee on.” And she looked me in the eye, plain faced and spoken. I knew already that I liked her.

 

We must have talked for an hour before I got down to looking at the things I came there for. Red glass she wanted to part with. I saw no need, but pulled each piece from its box anyhow, barely checking. I knew it was all as she’d said—perfect. I’d already paid her and wouldn’t have changed my mind. After all, she’d provided high quality pictures and had described each piece in detail.

She’d left the price to me. That was a new concept and one I did not wish to abuse. She’d contacted me and I wanted to play this right. I’d paid her a fair price, even told her she could get more if she chose to sell them herself, piece by piece.

 

It had been a long drive. I gratefully took the cup of steaming brew and cradled my hands around it, almost burning them. My bones were cold. It was one of those damp to the soul, chilly Northwest days, gray and close. Her home was a little haven on the muddy lane.

There were birds in cages that sang a storm when she spoke to them, pictures of family everywhere, and two very happy small dogs that fell in love with me at first sight. My guess was they did so with everyone, but I chose to take it personally. For the moment, I was the best and most exciting thing they had ever seen.

 

The coffee was not the deep and dark strain I live on, but a poorer woman’s coffee, a store brand that came in a can. I took another sip and thought she’d maybe put some magic in it, because it hit the spot so well—just what I needed. The chill left me and we communed over the simple drink, ten years between us and we worlds apart, yet strangely akin.

As I touched the red glass my eye wandered throughout the kitchen where we sat at a plain wood table. There in a glass front cabinet I saw her treasures, mostly worth far less than the pieces I inspected. And I knew she didn’t care, that these were the stories of her life and of her children’s. Mementos and gifts, each somehow connected to a special time or person. The red glass would have been beautiful displayed in the cabinet—the only place available for “fancy” things. But it was useless to her there. She already had everyday dishes to eat from, and she kept that display only for her most loved things. Red glass was better suited for cash to buy gas, gas that would go to the septic truck they worked with. They were struggling like everybody, and times were tough. Work comes first.

Still, I don’t think it bothered her at all to sell the glass. It was just “things”.

 

I learned a lot about Mary while I was there. She had a husband who seemed a good man, whose first thoughts were to carry my boxes and load them for me. She had a young daughter who minded her Mama, at least in front of company. And another, grown daughter who couldn’t meet me that day due to a flare of her illness. I learned that the illness had taken the daughters father, two uncles and a grandfather, and that it caused organ failure and stroke. Daughter was thirty years old and had suffered two strokes already. She was in bed today.

I listened to this information, seeing there was no self pity, no drama in the telling, but a matter of fact accounting of why the otherwise unthinkable was occurring—an offspring of hers not greeting company.

I learned that my new friend had been married for years to another man, an alcoholic who hit her often, until she summoned the courage and conviction to leave.

I saw that she was happy, but humble, and found myself admiring of her gentle spirit, her absolute lack of bitterness.

 

Her mother arrived with mail in hand, a daily tradition they kept regardless of all else. “Mother brings the mail everyday, and then we have dinner.”

Mother was on oxygen, but moved and observed like a bird, her quick movements belying her age and condition. She engaged me in a story of yet more glass, glass she’d collected one piece at a time, lifetimes ago, by filling up her gas tank. One free piece per fill up. She still had it all. I knew she was eager to show it to me, and she lived on the same lot as Mary, but I resisted the impulse to ask to see it.

It was time to go and I knew I shouldn’t draw it out any longer. Dark was coming, and these people needed dinner. So did I and so did the animals back home.

 

Mary stood and she told me, “I’m a hugging person. I hope you don’t mind.” and she put her soft arms around me. She was silent, feeling, holding the part of me that saw her and knew who she was. She did not let go, but stood this way for a time. I knew she smiled, though I couldn’t see her face. When I finally could, she said, “I hope to see you again.” Looked me in the eye, plain faced and spoken.

 

I went on then, drove through the wet and the falling night, drove to my own humble home. When I finally got there, I saw the smoke rising from the flue, the golden light of the window. I heard the dogs barking, then saw the biggest one wagging furiously on the porch like I’d been gone a week. For another moment, I am the best and most exciting thing ever seen.

 

I am wearing my favorite coat, the one that makes me look like a rock star and never fails to bring comments, even strangers touches. I hang the coat  in the closet and pull off my favorite vintage boots. One arm into my old Carhartt, I see my thundering, bumbling four legged children heading my way, mud and slobber flying, and I pull on the beat up boots I live in before they can get to me. They are not respecters of go to town clothes.

I clap my hands and call my big girl Bubba, because it’s funny, and the boy I tell a little rhyme to with his name in every line. He always seems to get a real kick out of this. They fawn and lean and wap their tails on my legs ‘til it hurts too much and I have to send them away. They leave their spit on my pants, but it’s time to change anyway.

 

There is a smile in this house, and food that is hot on my favorite plate. Here are my own treasures, my most loved things, and the ones who know me. Here are my stories, my secrets, my promises, and here are the things I won’t part with. Here are my flannel pajamas, the cookie jar I won’t sell for seven hundred dollars, the chipped china bowl on the shelf with a story no one knows but me. Here is the man who believes in me, even while not understanding me, and here is the land he’s fought to keep for us, covered in dips and puddles and mud. Here are the oversized dogs who love us, protect us and drool on us, and their oversized beds, cluttering up the floor. And here is the deal—the red glass is not for me either, but a means to an end. My treasures.

 

I see the mud on my boots, and I know if I ever build a house, there will be no carpets. Just nice wood floors, the kind you can clean. Grinning, I see muddy paws and rawhide bones, happy dogs.

We’re not fancy people.

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What People Will See

okay, kalei, try this and think about it a bit:

every day, take a moment to breathe very deeply. and then reach deep down into yourself- that part of you, you love about you, and just be there for a few moments. every day. deep, loving breathes welling up from the deepest, loveliest, sweetest, strongest, part of you. picture your heart center as the center of your favorite succulent or other flower/plant/tree reaching down into the soil and out into the sky.

every day, breathe your beauty out into the world.

it is an endless supply.

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What Do You Want People to See?

Maggie,

 

Interesting question to my own question, and I’ll to answer it.

What is it that I would like people to see?
I guess just me. Not dry, stressed out skin, or makeup, all though I have no problem with make up. I just don’t like it much when it’s what you see when you look at a person.

And I have not adjusted to “aging” where my looks are concerned. It’s shocking to watch them change, even slowly, and wonder, “Who will I become?” Maybe it’s even harder when one somehow bypasses so many of the signs of aging, for so long. It’s been this way for me.

What do I want them to see?.… You have me thinking hard now, Maggie, about what THAT question means.

Maybe that’s the answer, for me to think about; what I want people to see…and why it matters to me.

What I have always had a hard time with where my face is concerned is this: always, my every emotion has played out there in high relief. I don’t do deadpan.

It makes me feel very “un-private”, all though I am not, by nature. It makes me want to withdraw from humanity when I am not feeling well, because it makes me feel too vulnerable. It makes me not look as well as I’d like, when I am sad or disturbed. I can, to some degree, consciously control this, but with great effort only, and then only when I am feeling strong.
Hmm….I wasn’t expecting the question, or my own answer.
There is no moisturizer or make up for that “skin” condition. LOL.

What do you think of that?
Is it a bad thing? I would not rather have a robot face; I just wish it were not quite such a conduit for my feelings…

My skin.

I don’t mind when I am around people who are fine with however I happen to be, feel, appear at any given moment. It is difficult when working, say, with the public, or around people who are uncomfortable with what they perceive as “weakness”. It’s also bad when encountering people who are um…. predatory in nature. Hard to protect myself. They tend to home in on anyone who wears their emotions on their sleeve.
Interesting question, Maggie—you’ve made me think. Such a simple question, yet so much to answer.

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The Best Amends

Sometimes the best way to make amends to someone is to leave them alone.

 

This isn’t a passive-aggressive thing. It doesn’t mean just stop approaching me directly. It means do not approach me through others. Do not use/drop my name. Do not approach me through media, internet, skywriting or notes left under rocks. It means stop the forced association of referring to me, identifying yourself with me, giving me a role in your life that doesn’t exist and really never did.

If your relationship with me is long dead, why define me by it?

I was insignificant enough to you for you to end our relationship, disposable enough for you to destroy even friendship between us, unworthy of any honor from you even in marriage. Yet once dead, you hold it and me up as something worthy of citing again and again.

Fodder.

 

I have news; I am not flattered by this. It doesn’t warm my heart and create imaginations of special-ness in me. Not about myself, nor about you. I merely makes me see you as having less character than I already thought.

Leave it dead.

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Tough

Tough Love.

I know what it means. I know how it feels. I know sometimes you have to care enough to give it.

But it’s tough, tough love. And it hurts too.

What kind of friend am I? Am I the kind of friend who stands by, longing for you to find your way, wanting to give only encouragement? Or am I the friend that will jerk you up out of the hole when I can see that you’re drowning, and say “No. No more. Get up! Now.”

I don’t know. I’m both.

I don’t want to hurt you. And I want to turn away.

Sometimes I think I can’t bear to watch another friend, or even stranger, slide down into the pit. We have our own personal pits, each of us. When you’ve been in the pit as many times as I, you learn. However deep you slide, the end gets deeper still. The strength to scratch back out is strength that takes everything. If you lose your strength, there’s no hope for anyone else to help pull you out.

It’s not that you have to do it all alone. It’s that without you in the fight, it matters not what another’s efforts might be. You have to get up.

Sometimes, you get up and fight, or you lay down. For good.

So I’ll say it now, because I care; Get the fuck up.

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Unwanted

Don’t touch me

Seriously

Who do you think you are?

Don’t touch me

Just don’t

If you are unsure, ask me

I’ll tell you, that yes…

I do mind

 

Don’t touch me

I’m not touching you

What have I been saying?

You have missed

What my eyes

Do convey

 

Step back

A few more steps

Or go away

I’ll remember

To be polite

And I won’t hurt you

 

Get back

And stay there

Make a space

My warning

Gives you escape

But I could burn you

 

Don’t touch me

Just don’t

Again

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My Heart

What makes sense?

Nothing makes sense, in a way.

Like many, I sift, process, sort. Matching what I knew and believed with all my heart, against the stark facts of reality shown me.

Against my Heart.

My heart against my Heart?

No, not against the heart I knew and which had lead me all my life. Not the one that loved, that fell; the one that leapt that grieved that drove all night fought all odds took every chance and would never turn it’s back….

But a deeper Heart. The Heart that is still. The one that keeps me alive. The one that is me, through and through, that nothing can break, destroy. The one that the truths of all that is real, all that is unchanging, speak to. The one that is complete, when I am not, for it is but part of the all where it always fits. Where everything makes sense, even while I cannot comprehend.

This is the Heart that knows, when I am unknowing. This Heart is the guide that sets me in the direction I cannot understand, but gives me the glimmer of rightness that decides for me, that picks my path. Against my logic, my feelings, my heart, this Heart quietly holds me true to course when I have failed, lost my way, fallen into unseen pits and held no map in my hand.

This Heart whispers, in language I don’t remember but will hear nonetheless if I am still…”Follow me. This way…”

It murmers, “You have not been lost at all.”

It pulses, so steadily yet so subtley, saying, “This way” and, “You already know.”

It says “I will never leave you.”

This is my Heart. The one that healed my broken heart. The only one that made sense when life made no more sense. It was there all along.

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Glory

I do not define you

I do not describe you

I am but a signpost

On your dark road

To glory

 

Nothing of me

Is yours

Nothing you see

Who I was

Who I am

Nothing

Nothing

You contrived

You conceived

But I am my own

And nothing

You planned

 

I do not believe you

I do not reflect you

I am but a shanty

At the side of the road

To imaginary

Glory

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