Windows

Tremble
And lie
And Fear
That it's all falling to pieces
That I'm falling
To pieces
Pick it all up
And start
Again
For the first time.
Not looking at a woman I know
But it's strange to see
My face
With the mix of my parents features
And not being afraid
That the stranger in my mirror
That girl who feared failure
That girl who feared the unknown
In fear and mistrust
Of becoming the worst
Of that man I didn't know

But my heart
And his failures
Don't have to be the same
My grief has taught me
To stop lying to myself
To my friends
To the people who love me the most.

Smile stranger
Start to know
Why she smiles
What makes the tears fall
Look at her and fight
Any impulse to fear
The unknown.

Tremble
And face it
Whatever comes
And if she falls
I'll pick myself up
Start again.

Fear but never fall
Rely, on me
But on others too.
Be a strength for myself
And for the people I love.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall
Thanks for finally letting me see.

A year...

It's been a year. A year today, well yesterday, but I can't sleep. I spent most of today thinking about what life has brought my way in the past year. I've thought over the things I have accomplished and the things I still long for. I wonder if, as my father lived his final days, there was anything he regretted. I wonder what it was like for my sisters to see him go. To be with him in his last months, days, breaths. I was watching the TV show House tonight and there was a man dying... a man who had not seen his daughter in years. In his last moments he called her and left a message on her machine. All the message said was that he loved her. Without trying to sound cheesy, it was kind of like watching a wish come true... for someone else. I dream about being able to have that moment with my father. In the year that passed since I found out, well I have thought about him every day. It's the same as it was before he died, except now it is really setting in that there won't be the opportunity to say anything. Goodbye or otherwise.

So here is what I have wanted to say to him, since I was fifteen years old:

Dear Dave,

I miss you. I miss knowing what it is like to have a dad. I miss the thought that there is someone out there who loves me, even though he's too weak to reach out and tell me that. I wanted more time. I wanted to be able to trust in you, to have faith in you, to let you show me the world. As my friends move into their adult lives, I find myself questioning my worth. Questioning my ability to maintain a real relationship and it's because I don't know how to trust in the kind of unfailing love that I should have learned from my dad. You won't give me away to the man of my dreams. We won't dance to a predictably sappy country song while I wear a beautiful white dress and shoes that are far too uncomfortable, but so pretty that I won't care. You'll never know my babies... and I won't be able to tell you about them because I'm losing what little I have of you to time and a fear that I will turn out just like you if I hold on too hard. I have the same wave to my hair that you did... that awful wave in my bangs that I look at in the mirror and think... that's Dave hair. It's the only thing I remember about you... well maybe not the only thing. But I miss you. I miss the smell of your gray t-shirt as we hugged goodbye... that combo of cigarette and dad. I miss feeling safe. In that time before I saw you, really saw you. Why did you have to break my heart? Why are you still breaking it every single day? Why is it so hard to forget you? Why is it so hard to hate you? I can't you know. Hate you. As much as I want to and as easy as it would make things, I can't stop loving you because for all that our relationship wasn't, you will always be my dad. I try to remember you taking me fishing and letting me speak freely about my feelings. I try not to remember how much you hurt my feelings by choosing to fall prey to your own weakness. I try not to think about how I can see some of those weaknesses in myself. When will it get easier? When will I feel like all this love that I have for a person who breaks my heart finally seem like it is really worth it. Is there some line that we will cross. Ever? Even though you are gone and we won't have our face to face moment... or even a phone moment... do you know how much you changed my life? In good ways and in bad ways. I wish you had said goodbye. I wish you had said you were sorry. I'm sorry that things ended as they did. No matter what happened and no matter where I am, I know I will always have that feeling. That pull of sadness inside. I want to learn how to live with it... that feeling. So it doesn't hurt so much when I focus in on it. I will always hold you accountable for the pain you have caused. I will always keep that fear and pain inside. But there is also a part of me that will always remember my daddy. I just want you to know that. I need you to know that.

I love you,
B

~If you have ever wondered what it means to really say a forever goodbye... it's horrible. It hurts more that anything else. Like a piece of my forever is tied up in that long gone moment. So I breathe and another bit of life moves on... always moving on.

Home again....

So I'm home again and I feel like it. I feel like I am welcomed and embraced and in the place where I most enjoy being. I feel, much as I always do, that this place is more home than any I have know. I can't express fully how amazing it is to be so thoroughly welcomed by the friends that I love so very much. It feels amazing to be near my grandparents and our family.

I am so excited that this time has come, and am already fearing the day that I have to go back. Every fiber of who I am belongs here. And I won't lie, I wish that my family, that is to say, my mother, sister and step-dad, would move back here. I feel like two people between here and there, and I like this one better.

This is the first Christmas without Dave, it is the first time I have faced the notion that we will never have one of those perfect Christmas moments. He will always be a memory now. And let me just say, I don't really have any great Christmas memories with him. I have a few Christmas memories with his family, but they are not warm. Mostly, they make me sad. A bit lost even.

Part of me wonders if I will ever really be able to reconcile the loss of that ideal that I wished for for so long. I wonder if there will ever be a time that I can just say, it was all it could be, and simply accept that. Something tells me no.... but then again you never know what your heart will let you do. Maybe I will surprise myself.

Two of my friends are expecting a beautiful new edition to their family. I am so excited for them, and to have the chance to see a family come into being. I have never really seen the beginning from so close before. I am excited to see who this new person will become and how my friends will take on this new experience with her.

I went to a funeral earlier this week. A funeral for someone much too young. It makes me sad, but it is also a reminder for me that nothing stops, ever. Not life, not death, not the world. Nothing. Life has become routine, but even the smallest of choices means a new path and I have neglected that for some time now. Take with you, always, my love and the heart that I would openly share. Please always remember that you are with me, you are part of who I have become and what I will pass on to those in my life.

This has been a year of endings... and beginnings. Each event, each change has played into building a year I will certainly not allow myself to forget.

Happy Christmas...

and merry future... whatever it holds.

AT LAST!

The time has finally come and I am at last coming home for some time with my family and friends! I will be there in less than 24 hours!!!!!

remembering...

As a little girl, with my cabbage patch doll face and sandy blonde hair in waves down to my butt, I knew nothing of fear. At least not of real fear. I knew about spiders and the dark. Of tall trees and the sounds my old house made as everyone slept. I never knew of addiction, depression, or the total loss of control that even the dark fears.

He was my hero. A man who would appear with gifts and treats. Playing games and taking me on adventures. He was strong, kind, casual. I never had to follow the rules that my mother set forth. I was allowed to play and laugh and eat ice cream from the container. I could watch movies until I was in a mental coma and then I could watch them all again.

We would camp under the stars, he, my step mother and I, sleeping on a mattress pulled out into the grass. Or we would go fishing and I would see the world from that place that so often I forget. That quiet alone place, where it was just him and me. I think he taught me how to love being alone. I also think that his love of isolation is why I have such a deep longing for the simplicity of silence.

We never went to the busy places, no malls or parks. When we were together we had adventures. We went to the places I always thought were secret. He took me to, what he called, a tribal cemetery once, somewhere in the Columbia River Gorge. He told me scary stories about the graves. I believed every word, despite the pin wheels and plastic flowers. He had a gift for that, for spinning tales. I think that may be why I choose to write a shelter that people can cling to in the stead of their own realities.

I think that it is very possible that he is the reason I have such a sense of whimsy. He was never very in touch with real life. But as a child I never thought twice about it. In those days of mud and the heat of summer, of tea time under the sun with plastic garage sale teacup sets, of limitless possibilities and the freedom of ignorance, he was my hero. Our time together, though limited, was a kind of magic in my life. And why wouldn’t it be? He lived his life as a work of fiction. He wrote the life he wanted people to believe. What eight year old wouldn’t want to believe every word as fact? Disbelief is only a product of those moments that leave a person world-weary.

My serious parent, my real parent, never made me see that part. I never saw the hesitancy, the fear. I never once knew the panic of her mind. The sheer loss of control that comes from relinquishing that which you hold most precious into the hands of the one who has caused you the most pain.

My fairy tale never included the drunken anger. I couldn’t recall the tension, the fear, the hate, the broken nature of a heart in love with someone who would not love her but would not let her go. Threats and despair never entered my young world… not from that responsible parent.

It wasn’t until things turned sour in both homes that I began to see the nature of discontent. In one half of my world despair manifested itself in work. In the other home, I was allowed to stay awake late enough to see the slamming of doors and the searing of tears. I learned what it was to fear my hero for the first time. I would wake in the night to the sounds of his retching or his bone shattering coughs. I know the moment that he went from hero to human. From Daddy to Dave.

I was eleven. My birthday was coming up and I was with his family for the weekend. I was settled into my makeshift bed in yet another rental house. I woke up to reality. The light from the bathroom creeping into the dark I no longer feared. The sounds of sickness. Again. And it was as if I had finished the puzzle. That last piece fell into place. The reason he never shared is soda bottles. The reason he was always free to have adventures and never had to work, the reason my step mother drove pretty much everywhere.

My daddy was drunk. Pretty much all of the time. I finally understood that look in my mother’s face as we drove away from her.

Tick Tick Boom

I feel like everything has this clock attached. Every moment has this bomb... waiting and slamming each tick out into the world, no matter what it hits. When is it all going to go off? When does time stop... lately it feels like the clock is ticking faster. Like everything is moving at such a pace that if you don't really live every second, life is going to leave you without the opportunity to make it all up.

Every second, I am filled with an urgency I have never known before. Some undefinable need to be exactly what I am... only I don't know who and what that is supposed to be.

Unlike Any Other

I'm not going to pretend I understand anything. I mostly know that I just don't. I know that when I look at a person or situation I am only capable of seeing them from my own perspective. I can happily impose what I believe that they are on to them as I make notes, but the reality is that I just don't know what they are feeling. I don't know where they come from, I don't know the tally of their life experience. Life isn't that simple. No matter how much I wish it could be. I can long for things my whole life, but I can't force anyone to be anything that they are not. I can believe in right and wrong but there is no way for me to enforce others to follow my standards. For that matter, there isn't really any way for me to know that my moral compass isn't completely off in the first place.

I know what I believe in... for now. I know what I feel. I wish I could show people my point of view. I wish I could share my feelings, my heart, so that people could understand what it all means to me.

There is sometimes such a desperation inside of me that seems like it is just going to shatter me from the inside. It's like my instinctual self just knows how to be, but my imposed self is struggling with allowing for those things to happen. I want to understand what it means to feel free to be myself. However, I don't want to disenfranchise myself based on the strength of my emotions. I know they can be off putting. I am very aware that I am capable of, what some might deem, an overbearing affection. I do it out of fear you know. The fear of losing these people that are so precious to me. I hold on too tight sometimes... and I think it is mostly because I am authentically scared that they will walk away... and that I will lose them. And they mean too much, have been too great a piece of my life, for me to just give up.

I gave up my dad. Because I was afraid of who he was. Because I was afraid of who he wasn't. And sometimes I regret it. Because by giving him up so early, he exists as this idea... and no matter how hard I try, the reality of the man will never be there. I never saw it, so all I have is the looming nature of vague memories from a too short relationship marred by bitter unhappiness.