Shelter

   My Mom's parents died seven weeks and six days apart, my grandmother in early October and my grandfather late in November.
   "It's the end of an era," my uncles mumbled desolately, stumbling through the house after the second funeral. People filed through rooms embracing each other and clinging a little too long, feeling deeply the  endless loss of our matriarch and patriarch.
   I focused my energy on avoiding tears and thinking about something else, anything else.  There is nothing else.  Autumn was ending and I knew I couldn't handle such all-consuming grief in the winter.  Losing the leaves and the flowers and the taste of life in the air is hard enough every year.  To add to that, especially to add something of this magnitude... unbearable.  I'll grieve in the spring, when I can handle it.  I can't handle it now.  If I process any of this, I'll fall apart and I'll never be able to put myself back together again.  They deserve my strength.  I can't dissolve into desolation.  Any breaking down would immediately result in my being inconsolable.  So I daydreamed about the future, getting married and remembering them from a distance.  My children will grow up with stories of these two, these gorgeous forces of nature I've had the blessing to grow up with.  Will this ever go away, this gaping hole in my heart, in my life?  Will anything ever feel okay again?
   I have never been particularly close to my cousin Burning Man but I passed time during wakes and postfuneral gatherings on couches next to him, struggling to stay dry-eyed. While everyone else congregated in the centers of rooms for comfort, we isolated ourselves in the outskirts, shying away from the intimacy of our unapologetically Irish Catholic family, finding silent solidarity in our shared solitude.
   Nearing the close of the weekend, our parents sent us to a local grocery store to return the cans and bottles that had been piling up for days. Perhaps I should pause here to explain, for those of you who aren't Irish; we celebrate the lives of those we lose very traditionally.  We leave work, school and responsibility for as long as possible, retreating back to our roots to cry and reminisce and revel in the memories.  We repeat the same stories, embellishing a bit more each time, until we make legends of those we are lamentably without.  And we drink.  We drink a lot.  
   We agreed to go willingly, finding the idea of fighting the harsh, inexorable cold (he still in his stiff gray suit and I in the inappropriately short black dress I had worn guiltlessly, a tribute to Rita's advice;    "If you've got it, flaunt it.") so much easier than enduring the love, warmth, support and security of our heartbroken family.
   Eager to escape, we loaded the car and drove away.  The drive was largely a continuation of the silent rapport we'd developed as a sort of a break from the tragedy we were immersed in.  Occasionally, we spoke softly, dispassionately about music and potential plans for college.
   Getting out of the car in the parking lot, the night was numbingly cold.  "This is colder than her fucking pool." I gasped, painfully, under my breath to myself.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw him smirk, though I wasn't sure if he had heard me or was adrift in his own thoughts.
   We pulled carts from a nearby stand and loaded them with bottles and cans, overflowing them and still not having enough room.  We struggled to push them through the parking lot, fighting the heartless wind.  Halfway through the trip, shaking from the cold, we stopped abruptly and looked at each other.   Brimming with repressed emotions, we threw our heads back and laughed, loudly, manically, hysterically.  Hypothermic, miserable, terrified, we laughed in anguish at the absurdity of the situation, of ourselves.  We confronted the metaphor of ourselves as the carts and the overwhelmingly abundant alcoholic litter as the tormenting grief and laughed at it.  Hard.
   We laughed frenziedly during our multiple trips back and forth from the car to the bottle returns and to the cashier as we handed in slips for $20.00 worth of $0.05 cans and bottles.  Customers stepped away to avoid us, nervous about our hysteria.  We laughed until our eyes formed tears, which slipped out the sides of our eyes and down our faces, leaving icy trails behind them.  We clutched each other, falling over, unable to suppress our lunacy and not interested in trying to.  Not bothering to even wipe away the tears, we staggered back to the car and got inside.
   We stayed in the parking lot for several minutes until we regained control of ourselves.  The drive back was rife with bouts of laughter, both of us beginning again any time we made the mistake of looking at each other.
    Arriving back at the house, we discovered our family exactly as we had left them; drunk, distraught, delirious. Too-loudly retelling stories with tears and laughter in the same breath.
   And I finally understood.

Masterfade

     It seems so different this time.  Do I say that every time?  I might.  I can't remember, but I might.  But this time it's worlds away from where we've ever been before.  It's just us.  At last.  But is it?  I love believing everything you say.
     It's such a relief for you to meet my expectations in a positive way.  Your attentiveness is validating.  A belated validation, but a validation nonetheless.  And I think that is as much as I want from you.
     I live inside daydreams.  I weave lengthy, seamless performances from the terse syllables and laughter that constitute the bulk of our dialogue.  I construct you out of your disillusionment, conceptualize you as an abstraction of my impressions and avidity, using you as a distant secondary source.  I affirm myself in a way you never have in these capricious reveries that supersede you.  I am satisfied with them.  They are enough for me.
     Your indignation at the distance is sweetly comforting.  I feel so much closer to you when I'm pulling away from you.  When I attach, you let go.  When you cling, I run.  We can't get the pieces together.   We likely never will.
     It's perhaps disheartening that I remove myself from us in our bliss.  But I'm not leaving you, lover.  I'm just putting my heart away again.  I think we fare better when I'm not addled by adulation. 
     I chose the name Mr. Fantasy for a reason, darling.  

Here in the Going, Going, Gone

   Each step I take, it haunts me.  These are the last I will take here.  I lament my legs' every motion, as they propel me forward.  Watching the sunlight play on the frozen pond, realization sinks to the bottom of my stomach and settles there.  I will never take this walk home again.  I smile wistfully, recalling a hot day spent splashing and laughing in the pond with an open-eyed musician I should have gotten to know better.  And my final encounter on this trail with that beautiful Nature Boy I never got enough time with.
   This sketchy little city was perfect.  I remember my first night here, still debating the move.  Falling asleep, I knew my mind was made up.  This was it.  This place would belong to me.
   And it did.  From the moment I set foot in the North Country I knew it was mine.  From the vague, idealized concept to the chaotic reality of a vision actualized, every single detail was precisely what I had imagined.  This was the very first place my dreams ever came true.
   I could weave meandering, awestruck paragraphs detailing the people I met and what I managed to absorb from them in the too-fleeting moments of the year and a half I spent basking in the frigid air, but I'm too self-absorbed to bother.  That's not what I'm dwelling on as I pack my things and leave.  I'm thinking about myself.
    The soles of my feet will miss the sloping streets of this town, exploring and parading through them.  I feel a soft ache seep through them as they become conscious of the loss.  My bones will miss the bitter, biting cold that cut straight through to them, ruthlessly.
   I'm so thankful for what this place gave me.  Each of the 500 miles between myself and the rest of my life provided me with the beautiful, overwhelming opportunity to escape.  Outside the confines of expectations, I was finally able to examine myself and differentiate between who I am and who I had always assumed I should be.
   I am aware that college does this for everyone.  I don't think the universalness of the experience detracts from its significance. 
   What I leave with is gratitude.  Immense, flooding, staggering gratitude.  I watch the scenery disappear into nostalgia with a forlorn smile, mouthing Thank you, lovely.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  For every single moment.  Thank you for being exactly where I needed you to be, exactly when I needed you to be there.  Thank you for belonging to me.  Thank you for allowing me to need you.  Thank you for being everything I needed.  Thank you for being my idea come to life.  Thank you for being exactly where I belonged.
   And the knowledge that I'm not meant to be there anymore.  At some point I needed to confront myself.  And you made me do it.  And I will never forget that.  I may forget everything else.  But I will never forget that.
   I return home.  To reunite.  To reassess.  To recover, recuperate, rediscover, release, reform, rekindle.  Reconnect.  To become more than a stranger to my niece and nephew, yammering toddlers now, though I left them cooing infants.  Every inch they've grown without me has torn my heart out.  I want to snatch those sweet, smushy babies back from the cruel hands of time and start over.  I want every missed month back.  Though I needed those months in the merciless, forgiving mountains.
   Someday I will find somewhere else I belong.  I will again imagine a place into being and then immerse myself in it.  I will step into my fantasy-turned-reality and know This is it.  This is me.  This is perfect.  Until then, I am here, home, missing those beautiful goddamn mountains.  Home alone to contend with my illusions and delusions.  But I finally know the difference.

Deadweight on Velveteen

   Tonight, an unexpected phone call from a friend.  She's crying.  She hasn't gotten out of bed in a week.  She feels the constant need to throw up.  She hasn't been to work or class.  "I have completely shut down.  I've never shut down before.  I miss him so much.  I don't know what to do.  I miss him so much.  I miss him so much."


   For the first time in years, I remember this state vividly.  Slouching lifelessly through hallways, disheveled in unlaundered pajamas.  My hair straightener cold for weeks.  My makeup drawer unopened.  Thinking I'm dead.  If I'm dead why do I still feel like this?  Sitting through classes, dejected, without energy to hide the endless, though luckily usually silent, tears.  "Do you need to go to the Guidance Office?  I can give you the notes."  Barely bothering to shake my head in response.  Can't speak, can't even manage to mumble.  What could I say?  Words seem so meaningless.
   Passing him in the halls is unbearable.  He won't even look at me.  He eases by so gracefully.  I fall limp against lockers, struggling to breathe.  I feel so abandoned.  I am

   Kid A was a dream come true.  Long blonde hair, deep blue eyes and a guitar.  And such a mind!  Littering conversation with musical, literary and political references I couldn't yet wrap my head around, he was so clearly evolved beyond the rest of us.  I was awestruck.  And he was dangerous.
   Any sixteen year old boy enjoys attention, but a skinny, awkward, lonely, manic depressive musician cosumes it. And Kid A's appetite proved insatiable.

   We stayed up all night discussing music and psychology.  I was as hungry as he was, though I fed off approval rather than devotion.  We spun our desperation into superiority complexes, dismissing the people around us as oblivious, unoriginal and worthless.  We interspersed our spiteful reproach with bouts of suicidal self-loathing, belied our jealousy with scorn and bitter self-congratulation.  We were terrified.  We had the entire world at our feet and we were terrified.  

   I am dead and he smiles sweetly, welcoming the days with a sublime serenity I used to know.  Though he is far better at pretending than I.  I'm only convincing on camera or on a stage.  Retrospectively, this reflects a fundamental difference between us; I was an actress and he is a liar.  He is the only thing I think about.  Waking up in the morning, there's a moment where I don't remember.  My mind is blank.  This is the best I will feel all day.  It ends abruptly with clips of dreams crashing through my head.  In every single one he forgives me.  In every single one he acknowledges my despair and saves me from it.  Habit and my Mother's orders get me out of bed and to school.  Getting dressed is useless.  Food is horrifying.  I am dazed.  I am hopelessly alone.

   We go through this repeatedly in the three years he spent relentlessly exploiting my feelings.  Though I spend those three years relentlessly allowing him to.  I am engulfed in brutal misery each time it happens, though never quite so tormented as the wretched first.  I learn to numb, to disengage.  I truly believe I will never feel alive again.

   But I do.  And she will.  She will wallow languidly in anguish for what feels like decades, until the grief softens.  It happens so gradually that it's nearly impossible to pinpoint.  It just slowly gets less physically painful to get out of bed in the morning.  And somewhere along the line, less psychologically so.  Until it eventually feels okay.

You Can Bring Me Flowers

   I love this part.  It's perfect.  I get so hopelessly lost in everything you say.  I keep this part to myself.  I spend days on end smiling to myself.  I walk into tables and chairs in a dizzy bliss.  I'm enamored with every single word.  This is what no one else understands.  This is why we stay together.  This is why I stay with you.  Because you make me helplessly, deliriously, trip-over-myself happy.  And we're the only people who need to get that.
   Each snowflake enchants me as it falls past my face.  Somehow, in the dark and the cold, alone, I feel so complete.  We are fools. I am so grateful for our foolishness.
   I dissolve in every single smile.  We confront our agonizing history where your unapologetic neediness meets my repressed maternity.  And we transcend it where you coerce my nurturance out from within the self-defensive bitterness.
   It's so much sweeter to let myself succumb to the moment.  It's so rare that I relinquish even an instant of control.
     Are we finally going to figure this out?