A Good Morning

Jackie woke up scrambling for her phone. It was wonderfully silent and joy of joys, she actually woke up plenty of time before her alarm. Snuggling back into cozy pillows and blankets, the cat at the end of the bed redshifted to drape herself over Jackie's calf in the most perfect position. 

Warm, dreamy and cuddled, she lets her brain drift and takes the easiest breaths she has in days. Idly, imagining additional chapters to the book she finished last night. Revisiting scenes and characters in her head. Then moving to fantasy standbys such as her oft wished for bookshop in a quasi big city with just enough population to keep her afloat, but not so much to become overlooked. Cities with neighborhood territories, all cut out and defended. Moves on to dream of coffee at a café and people watching wrapped up in a coat and scarf.  Hands curled around the cup for warmth and comfort. No cell phone to weigh her down with alarms and expectations. 

Jackie sighs dreamily, yes freedom from the today. Indulging in a pretend of later, of one day she will learn the name of everyone in a café where she reads each week. The bar down the street with decent music and a rotating art display.  Someone will be named Tank and it wont be the bouncer. The bouncer is dating one of the café baristas and tells her that the secret to a relationship split by time is attention. 

The cat begins to knead her leg, starting the wake up ritual. First the kneading, then the petting and then the fooding. Slowly, as slowly as possible Jackie begins to stretch out each part of her body. Rotating, cracking and counting her own breaths.  Sylvia Plath comes to mind and she listens to her own heart beat, and thinks "I will, I will, I will". 

More Air

Wild Geese
- Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Because some days I crave poetry like air

To Myself
BY FRANZ WRIGHT

You are riding the bus again
burrowing into the blackness of Interstate 80,  
the sole passenger

with an overhead light on.  
And I am with you.
I’m the interminable fields you can’t see,

the little lights off in the distance  
(in one of those rooms we are  
living) and I am the rain

and the others all
around you, and the loneliness you love,
and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe,

and the catastrophic dawn,
the nicotine crawling on your skin—
and when you begin

to cough I won’t cover my face,
and if you vomit this time I will hold you:  
everything’s going to be fine

I will whisper.
It won’t always be like this.
I am going to buy you a sandwich.

Journal 7

My world is changing. 

Heh, the world is always changing.  Your life today is not a carbon copy of yesterday’s life, but there are similarities, there are overlying themes and activities that require repetition.  Brushing your teeth, eating, bathing, working, and breathing.  Breathing…*shrug*  I want to think of the future, not those who no longer breathe.

My job is changing, actually my job is disintegrating.  My position will no longer exist as of October 1, 2015.  My company won a contract to expand.  Part of the contract determines that the main corporate office must be in a different city. That is understandable, but it has created tremendous upheaval for the staff of this company.  Who will move, who can telecommute, who is searching for a new job.
I am in an odd little pickle, as my job is not on the transfer roster.  Strictly speaking, it got farmed out to another 3rd party. So I am taking this as an opportunity to flip my process.  As of this fall semester I will be going to school full time and working part time.

I cannot stress how terrifying this is to me.  Not having a full time job is not something I am at all comfortable with, but I am so close to finishing school and I so need to be done with it.  My momentum is thinning and I need to bolster it.  So I am hoping FASFA will actually be awarded to me beyond the Feds saying “Yo, you qualify” and that my family who promised to chip in can actually do so.  I will find a part time job no matter what happens.  I am hoping to find something in my current field, so I can keep a hand in and even more hoping that I will be able to cover my own bills.

If not maybe I will borrow Natalie Goldberg’s idea of spontaneous poetry and set up shop on a corner somewhere.

Pulled bits of a convo

I keep day dreaming about past versions of me as china dolls, I don't even know why they broke and a new doll came in to play, but they are cracked and taped and worn in some fashion. My brain and my body is a construct of my own making and yet I seem to have such little control over either. Is there a point where there is a sense of stability in the expectation of erratic to be? 

I route it back to my three paths.  There is the path you desire, there is the path that being walked and then there is the path that snakes underneath like a particularly rickety catwalk and that is the one with all the crazy spirals and dips and slides. When your brain turns into to the Mousetrap game and you eventually think, omg not sleeping for 3 days is awesome I get so much done and now I can get my cat sushi for a treat at 2am, I am sure there is some place open for fucks sake this is California motherfuckers oooh maybe there is a place in LA it is only an hour away and I could also go to the beach and stick my toes in the sand.

Now I want to go to the beach.

Maybe because I know that path exists, walked my version of it.  I periodically peer over my current path to see that other path and my shivers are a mix of terror and excitement. There is a part of me that thinks if I can make my rigging strong enough, find a stable enough anchor, I can walk the path for a bit.

When I climbed the wall with E and C, I realized I haven't shook that hard with adrenaline in years.  Not since I was racing to T's house with my heart beating in my head and my stomach twisted. It was nice to revisit that level without the death at the end. To have myself feel the relief after and a sense of success even though my successes were small.

I don't want the parts back necessarily that I broke, that were broken.  Finally, I think I've realized that.  I mourned the woman that was before my manic, when I was nice and polite and I didn't fuck up friendships 6 ways from Sunday. When my heart ruled my head and my pussy could only make suggestions when I was daydreaming but never got to speak aloud. 

I keep thinking of my past as a puzzle mess.  Those huge picture with in a picture within a picture and maybe there are actually like 3 or 5 or 15 different puzzles in the pile and writing is a way to sort and put parts of the self puzzle in it's nice little box, but once you get 3 or 4 pieces together you realize that maybe those pieces don't go and maybe they do go...so nothing gets put away and you are just sitting in a pile of yourself that is not yourself because it is still in pieces on the floor.

A friend said  "I am who I decide to be moment by moment." and I am going to take all those puzzle pieces and I am going to grind them up and make them into Whim Dust.  When I want to write about what I remember, I will tap out a line, inhale and see what comes up in my head. Because she is right, who we were is influenced by who we are. I can only say who I see now and then play matchy match tomorrow with who I see then.

Journal #6

April is coming.  I can feel in slipping in under my door, wafting through the window.  The deceptive coolness that I wake up to in the morning luxuriating in, till memory takes hold.  Till my gaze falls upon a simple black plastic container that holds court on a bookshelf.

I am so tired of talking about a dead man.  Of dreaming, missing, being angry at a dead man. He cannot fight back, he cannot soothe me, he cannot do anything but be a pile of ash in a simple black plastic box on a bookshelf.

I am supposed to be thinking of an essay to write soon.  The Self in a Relationship.  So many options to chose from.  Shall I pick the man who left me first, or the most current lost.  Which death that has laid it's own fine spiderweb of scarring over me shall I pull out to examine.  I have a hard time moving past the still healing wound to the scars of the past.  Why ignore the pink, somewhat scabbed, always itching with parts still gaping slash across me?  Nights like this I am glad I keep my nails short and crave heavy nail polish to thicken the edges.  I fear I will give into my old high school urge to rend flesh with nails just to see if I can make the outside match the inside.

Bloody hell that is melodramatic.  I will not harm myself, I haven't made it this far to give up in a corner of the desert.

This is where I get to be melodramatic.  I keep myself silly, bright and unvarnished as much as possible for those around me.  To be brutally honest, it is for me mostly. I rather play the fool, and have nights like these were April pools at my feet and soaks into my skin, then live like that always.

Tonight I wish to paint my feet indigo and go dancing in the moonlight. Feel the coolness of the desert breeze sink into me, so I can call up the memory when the summer truly takes root.    I want to map my travels in the sand and watch the wind blow them away.  Instead of taking the car, and traveling by one headlight to a desert that seems to only exist in my head.  I will snuggle back down into bed.  Tell myself a story of a future where April has little hold on me and the pile of ash in a simple black plastic box has even less.

Dolls

This entry has been quite difficult. I seemed to have hit a downward drop in my mood cycle. This drop most likely caused by loss of my pet. Part of me feels like I am being over dramatic, she was only a cat. Then I remember she traveled with me to this state and I had her for 13 years. Thirteen years! That is a long time. I miss the comfort of her breathing. I came to this state with two cats, a dog and a man. The only two left alive in that group is me and the dog. The dog lives back in California now with the man's sister. I am left alone here in Arizona. That feels dishonest, I am not alone. I have managed to build myself an amazing support group and I am blessed to have found so many wonderful friends. But they are Arizona contacts, our relationships have Arizona roots. My California roots used to be intertwined with four other beings, and now it is just mine. They feel so thin and bare; so very singular.

I was thinking of my brain attic again. I have discovered a window that looks upon my past. Above this window there is a shelf and on this shelf are rows and rows of Whim Dolls. From the tiny doll that represents me when born, to the current typical doll size doll with razor cut hair, piercings and tattoos that show me now. Each doll is a lesson. Each doll is an Whim That Was. I look at their faces and see the cracks and bandages. See the scratches and dents. Know that while they are all broken in someway, it was to grow, to learn, to change, to move up into the next doll. I step along the shelf, shuffle my feet to the left following my own years down the row. I come to the last doll. The Whim That Was that I currently miss the most. The Whim that existed before the great years of grief. She hasn't existed since 2012, but still I gaze into her eyes and try to remember what it felt like to live in that head. When I try to find the current doll for the Whim That Is, I find myself staring into a mirror. I wonder what change will come and what will I look like next to myself?