Life is precious. Every heartbreaking moment.
Like Hermes cast down from Olympus, the three boys sped surefooted through an overgrown field. Swaying dandelions and meadow thistle charted their traverse across the expanse like a compass. The true north of their hearts was a wild unknown teetering at the field’s edge where depths of darkness waited with a hungry embrace.
Featured Image: Unsplash – “Boys will be boys.” by Jordan Whitt (CC0 Public Domain)
Beneath fairy lights she sits
contemplating her next steps
like a grandmaster strategist
surveying the field of battle;
one wrong move could mean
sacrificing her queen
to destruction and damnation.
The cool breeze
of an April night time sky
kisses her skin
and envelopes her
with the memory of a life
she has tried to forget.
The stars do not shine for her,
and there is no running
from their absence.
The silent moments between
the breathing of the wind
are pregnant with promise.
In the distance,
as in herself,
a storm brews.
Guilt burns inside me
but I keep swallowing
the acid to make
up for grievances
long past forgotten
by others.
I know I need the wood
to warm up
the desolation around me
but I just can’t
drop this cross.
Three and a half weeks. Twenty-three days. Five hundred fifty-two hours. Thirty-three thousand one hundred twenty minutes. That is how much time remains until Christmas break.
It’s a bit comical that school resumed from a week long Thanksgiving break today and I am already counting down until the next one. Don’t get me wrong. I love my job. I have the best kids that a freshman Pre-AP English teacher could wish for.
It’s just that I feel I can’t hear myself between the shuffling of papers, clickety-clack of keyboards, white noise of whispered conversations and sometimes garbage truck rumblings of class discussions, and the high pitched bleating of a period bell. Even now I am struggling to really put out what I mean because thoughts of tomorrow’s lessons and papers that need to be graded are vortex within me.
Last night, I wasn’t tired when it became time for bed. I wanted to write, but the words were stuck behind the grading, planning, and professional development I felt I should’ve done over the break. Instead, I stayed up to watch a few episodes of the show I’m currently bingeing. Two and a half hours after I should’ve been asleep, I lay stationery in bed while my mind raced against the coming of an early morning.
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, a few tendrils of light filtering through my curtains lit up the edge of the journal on my nightstand like an invitation. I tried to remember when I had last written an entry and what that entry had concerned. I knew then the real question should have been why haven’t I written in so long.
Before the Thanksgiving break, I was a frenetic madwoman on the precipice of panic. I teetered back and forth in the cacophony of sound that was my day to day, and my ability to be who was needed in the classroom and in my relationship started to fail. Over the break, I had the chance to listen and to write and to renew. I knew this is what I needed, of course. It’s just sometimes that voice is drowned out by life.
Looking at the neglected pages of the journal, I was promptly reminded that I am only as successful as my ability to hear myself emptied upon the page.
I want to write
and tell you what happened,
to put the truth out there that
you know who I am
even though you might hear differently,
but the words are splinters of glass
nicking me on their way out,
blurring what I really mean to say.
Refrains of “why is this happening to me” echo
in each calculated interaction
I have with the world,
but there is no real rhyme to these things.
They just happen.
This should give me some modicum of comfort,
but it doesn’t.
“I deserve this” joins the chorus,
and this pitiful acknowledgement
of mistakes made
adds to the swirling amalgamation
of doubt, self loathing,
and words too hard to write.
I don’t deserve this though.
No one does.
But there is no one I can tell this to
that cares enough to hear it.
There is a torment of not knowing.
Not knowing what to do.
Not knowing how to feel.
Not knowing what the future holds.
Not knowing if these words will be my last.
Not knowing if I will overcome any of this
(even though people tell me I will).
The worst pain is that of having an apology
but not knowing who to give it to.
Perhaps I should give it to myself,
to the world,
to you:
I am sorry for not being who I needed to be.
Something enigmatic and yearning played about the edges of this moment when the marching of cattle plumed the dust of memories into the morning. Time to reflect and reminisce would come and bring with it the mercy of fulfillment that only weary muscles, dirtied hands, and reddened faces produced. For now, a determined and knowing grin cast low beneath the brim of a stetson welcomed the new day with the beating of horse’s hooves.
We stand hand-in-hand leaning over the railing of the little bridge that crosses the river in the park behind our house while the city behind us becomes a kaleidoscope of light in the icy water below. We’ve been here a thousand times repeating the same ritual, repeating the same wish, repeating the same crushing weight of always knowing the answer is no, but we come back anyways because hope is all we have left now. We drop the last tiny paper crane into the water, a silent plea cast out through the darkness like a message in a bottle to the world, and we watch it flutter to rest on the water’s surface and bob up and down as if replying “Your resilience and faith has been rewarded – wish granted” before its pulled under by the current.
Let me
wear jeans for professional dress.
Don’t teachers teach better in jeans?
I heard that was true,
and if not, it should be.
Let me
just sit down and cry,
release the expectation that I have
all the answers even though I sometimes
don’t even know what I want.
Let me
etch “Carrie was here”
into the glass ceiling
and shatter it
as I dot the i in my name.
Let me
forget the shame
of bad decisions past
and prevent them
from haunting my quiet moments.
Let me
speak my mind
even if I lose my eloquence
and revert back to the girl on the ranch
doing a man’s work.
There are these moments when I picture myself benevolently aged, a bittersweet smile of the past playing about the crow-footed corners of my eyes. What I wouldn’t give to have a conversation with her. The woman who weathered storms. The woman who brought storms.
What would she think of me with my self-pity and social angst?
“Child,” she would say, sipping Zinfandel through her favorite My Little Pony mug a lover from long ago gave to her, “It is not the darkness in the life of an artist that creates art. It is the hope that the darkness will end that helps the artist create life through art.”
I would cast a side-eyed glance at her, but since we occupy the same mind and body, she would guffaw at me and kiss her teeth as she knocked back another swig.
“It’s just like that story we loved as a girl and would always cry at every time we came back to it. You know… the one where the guy crashes his plane in the desert and meets the alien boy and he tells him this story about a fox and a rose,” she would prattle on.
“Le Petit Prince,” I’d sigh back. “Everything that is essential is invisible to the eye.”
“Exactly. Except there are also scars the eye cannot see, but that doesn’t mean we let them pervert our heart,” she’d sagely nod in the annoying way old people do right before she takes another gulp which causes Twilight Sparkle to mock me with her smug smile. “Like this wine. The fruit of which is sweet from the vine but fermented can leave a bitter aftertaste both in the mouth and in the actions taken under imbibed persuasion.”
Adding punctuation to her words, she would put the mug down and lean forward in her chair, donning the doggedness that my mother wore when you knew she was right, when you knew she didn’t bring the storm but was the storm, “We must savor the delicacies of our lives, no matter how bitter. We must not take for granted the world within the smallness of us.”
Each day I do in exercise in self-loathing. I turn on the shower as hot as I can stand it. I disrobe and step into the billowing steam. The water flushes my skin scarlet with anger, humiliation, confusion, and remorse. I lay my head against the tiles and I close my eyes. As a literature teacher, I know water is supposed to be a symbolic cleansing. As a human being, I know this is just a figure of speech. There is nothing that can expunge shame.
It’s been a long time since I did this – poured myself out onto a page and shared out for the world to see. These past few months have seen irrevocable change, and things are much darker than they ever have been. It’s as if the light optimism of my youth reeked like the dead and was buried in secret haste. Only something foul clawed its way out.
Once upon a time I knew who I was or at least had solidly clung to its semblance has to have that perception. I am still amazed at how that concept is so fluid and temporary, how the winds of fortune or misfortune can shift the sail of the H.M.S. Identity.
I don’t expect understanding. I don’t expect sentiment and encouragement. I don’t expect any words I put down to make any sense to anyone let alone myself. Without a rudder, I am aimless, and these words I’m stringing together do not provide the relief I so desperately seek.
Unbound 