Home is the place where I peed in the backyard. Home is the place where I gathered dandelions. Home is the place where I threw a blanket over a heater and trapped in the warmth. Home is the place where I was loved very deeply and specifically, as it seems to me now, only a child can be loved.
There are times when my words get jumbled up and I don’t truly say what I mean. Sometimes emotions or anger affect my ability to properly communicate. So here are my words and everything I want to share with you now. My perspective is different now than it was 10 years ago and I will write to you more throughout the years. My letter to you when I’m 50 might have a totally different spin to it as the lens I reflect through will be different. For now, at 40, here goes…
All stops if I’m in pain. Even fear shutters when my head hurts. My well-being, the past and future—none exist when pain is around. But I am right here right now, and nowhere else. My namaste space is more in the moment than yours.
I once believed that my emotions would develop their own olfactory system and become immune to the feelings of longing and loss. Missing was my birthright—growing up as a child longing for a mother who died of cancer in her thirties.
In fact, I owned tragedy—losing my husband in a pointless war eighteen months after our marriage. As I approached my thirties, I felt immune to pain or suffering. I could approach experiences with a numbness guarding me, and I felt invulnerable to the power of any future hurts or devastations.
You love her and she loves you and this will not go away even when she is not there. Her eyes are so blue, like this cleansing force of beauty, a color of simple beginnings and quiet endings and still water in between. Every time she realizes it’s you she says hi and you say “I love you” and she says it back. It’s all love.
In my dream we are schoolgirls together, laughing in the courtyard, smoking cigarettes in the woods, skinny-dipping in the river. We roll our skirts up and our stockings down. We trim each other’s hair to pageboys, smack bright red lips to each other checking for an even kiss mark. We lie in the dirt and dry grass under a hot southern sky and sleep, straw hats on our faces, legs overlapping.
Don’t say a word. Ever. rippled through me. I kept quiet, buried it, tucked it away in the back of my head with other uncomfortable tucked-away things. A dozen years later, after my second daughter was born, something on television triggered my memory and the storage box burst open. I was traumatized all over again.
How do we live our lives unafraid of what scares us? What do we do about the fact that our fates are entwined? That we depend on each other? That strangers hold our lives in their hands and on their big tongues and in their feet? That all we really have as containers for these lives are these bodies? Anything can happen, and sometimes it’s hard to know how to hold that concept in mind without getting bogged down.
I can't be/do/believe one thing because I am lesbian and another because I am Jewish and another because I am American and another because I am female while still hoping to have all those identities bind me to any political/social group. Neither can I simply toss all the adjectives like bathwater and claim, with the optimism of early 20th century leftists, to be simply human. Nobody is simply human because being human is not simple.
My late husband. But I had never been one for euphemisms. I knew Fernando was dead. I had been in the room as he was dying. I talked to him, I sang to him, my voice didn’t break down. But I didn’t realize dying was the end. I hadn’t thought beyond getting us both through that moment.
There’s a limit to how different a person can naturally be from what is the traditional norm before it’s labeled as a ploy for attention, and the bar for that limit is quite often set impossibly low.
