The morning alarm screams like a freight train.
I roll out of bed, your smell still fresh on my skin after a night of whispered regrets.
Cotton candy skies reek of new opportunities…
But the call of silken mistakes beckons.
You’re a snake in the grass, who makes me beg for your bite.
Like a crisp breeze in the air, I sense my body aging.
The gentle creaking of limbs.
The rustling of brittle hair.
The deepening lines on an ever tiring face.
The young sun still shines bright, but she’s growing weary of her bright glow.
And, though she has a few summers left of glorious youth.
Autumn approaches.
I woke up today and realized that I will never be a 40 under 40.
By 25 I was knee deep in diapers, raising three kids under three.
My ex, by the way, was living with another woman, having left me to lead the fun and fancy free life of a 20 something male who realized at an early age that he can make his own way off the emotional and physical labor of women he’s discarded.
By 30 I was going back to school to finish an undergraduate degree I’d started at 18.
By 35 I was in grad school where the rest of my cohorts were a decade younger, and none with children. That’s where I was told I couldn’t use commas.
By 37 I had two degrees. I also obtained my first job that broke the poverty barrier.
Now, I’m 41 and I’ve just begun to create a retirement account. My kids are grown or almost grown.
I wanted to be a writer, an author of books that will remain after my death, but increasingly time slips away from me.
I wanted to be a professor, a reader, an academic whose job was to think. But my ex stole that from me.
I have achieved so much. I understand this.
But I will never be a 40 under 40. And that is a hard pill for the dreamer within me to swallow.
Although.
I can’t swallow pills anyway (true story).
So I guess there’s still time for dreaming.
Graveyards are so much more than a final resting place
They are a collection of memories, shattered dreams, and half forgotten hopes.
A collection of consciousness laying underneath a curated lawn.
Perhaps that’s why, on the clearest day, a breeze always blows
It’s the whispered conversation of souls
In the spiraling modernity of a wired and connected world the influencers peer out of their square boxes. Against a pink or beige or golden background, they all share the same message.
Self-care. A modern woman practices a self-care routine.
The influencer will preach with the utmost sincerity. She is a trend setting prophet, and her bible is whatever pastel colored bottle has paid enough to grace her screen today.
The modern woman, her hair in a bun that’s perched atop her head, or in a day old sweatshirt that smells faintly of infant piss or vomit (or both) nods.
Self-care. She must find herself a self care routine.
But time is fleeting. How can one practice self care in the midst of a thousand daily chores that triple the minute one gets missed? Especially if the modern woman is expected to work, cook, clean, and perfectly parent at every god-damn minute of every single day.
Modernity is a dream
A beautiful one, sold in 10 second chunks of neutral colored smiles.
In reality, it’s profits for clicks. The capitalization of consumption.
And yet, still we scroll.
For self-care purposes, of course.
My dear,
You were never meant to pick up the pieces of a life cut too short.
It is the cruelty of existence that requires you to soldier on. It is not God’s will, it is not fate. It is…happenstance. And you have met it with wide eyed courage.
You must feel forgotten. Overlooked and overwhelmed. Angry at the world or God or the Universe for leaving you behind.
Guilty for your anger. Guilty for your rage. Guilty for all the roiling emotions that ebb and flow with the circadian rhythm of the day.
Because you’re the one who stayed.
My dear, I see you. I see your youth. I see your bright soul alight with childish wonder.
I see how it’s dimmed now that you can no longer explore the vast expanse of this incandescent world with the man you love.
You’re a changeling. Alone in the bizarre shadow called Earth now stripped of light.
But please remember…
Grief is not attached to morality.
Grief simply is.
You will feel knives of anger, shards of hatred, and moments of spite. You will feel sparks of joy, bubbles of love, and waves of compassion. And all this will barrage you in staccato rhymes of confusion.
Because you were left behind.
But my dear, you are not forgotten. Though it may seem that way.
You were left behind. But we are by your side.
A roar
Like rushing water
Fills my head
It’s all encompassing
enveloping me in a frenzy of fear
impossible to break free
The river rages and heightens until the flood waters peak
and I drift slowly back down
to reality.
It’s amazing, you know.
The extent to which women’s work is undervalued.
Take the Bayeux Tapestry
A stunning piece of work, handmade circa the 11th Century.
The tapestry tells a tale of knights and battles and victories and failings. A tale of kings and their conquests.
What remains? Steel and Armor?
No. Cotton and linen. Threaded and knotted and spliced and faded. It’s stalwart against the greedy hands of time.
Men. They are the ones remembered. Odo and Harold and Hastings probably. A tale of men, created by women. A history where the historians are forgotten.
Not the skills passed down from the old to the young. Not the time and effort and artistry. Not the artist(s) and historians and knowledge makers and holders.
Not the women. They are…overlooked.
But the tapestry remains. And so too does their memory, if you choose to look.
Love is an ugly word.
One that makes the mouth contort and twist round itself.
First the tongue must backbend before springing off the roof of the mouth to hover in midair.
Next, bared teeth bite the lip; scraping skin before the sweet release.
And the word floats like a promise of peace in the wake of violence.
She was born in the quiet hush of a snowstorm. Fifteen years later, there’s nothing quiet about her.
She’s as fierce as a tsunami and loud as a tornado.
Snow shrinks before the spring, and she, she is the raging river that’s left behind.
Hipstory 