Tendrils

Words teeter on the edges of my mind, thoughts plump and wavering, waiting to drop in tandem with the tears on the edges of my lashes.

The world goes quiet.  Smoke in the air has created a strange, unsettling day, and when I walk I'm sure I'm moving slower than I usually do. 

Some days I wonder, is this just what happens when you get older?  It isn't a surprise, the spreading cancers.  It's no longer a question of how or how surprising, but a question of who now and how long until.  These are the times when your soul screams at you, do something, but there is nothing to be done.  The unimaginible manifests, and we stop wondering how we can survive it because there is no longer any choice. 

I don't know her but I've known her for years.  Through these words she weaves, beauty and poetry and inspiration and camaraderie, raw and vulnerable, she has shared herself with the world.  In her sureness and unsureness, she has given so many people hope and made us feel less alone.  

Before I knew in my heart of hearts that my own story, narrative and memoir, was the spine that holds me up in this world, I knew her words touched me for reasons I couldn't fully understand.  She has captured the magic of connecting through experience, a magic I now see sparks of in my fingertips and am learning to nurture.

Ten years ago, I met her, the only time we've ever been in the same room, maybe the only time we've ever been in the same city.  She was the first blogger I knew who wrote a book, and it was beautiful.  She showed me that this weird but heartfelt virtual place IS for real writers.  Rockabye sits on my shelf still, her signature scrawled inside the cover.  So much has happened in those years.  

Her family is like a fairy tale, magical, and full of so much love I can feel it states away.  She is the kind of parent creating the children we will be thankful for when they are the ones in charge.  I think things will be better then.

My heart is made of vines.  Some of them grow and encompass those closest to me, but in this digital world some tendrils have shifted and blinked and become virtual, ends opening in faraway places to people I somehow love without physical connection.  I think giving away pieces of my heart is part of how I experience my humanity.  

Her words are poetry and beauty, they are raw and unwavering, her own vines are reaching and spreading into so many hearts and they come into me, touching me in that longing, black hole part of my soul where the desperate love and sorrow live side by side.

My star stuff is a glitter and dirt mix of empathy and longing and love and strength, black dust of the times when it was dark, specks of light from the future I'm building, and a spattering of loss that rises and falls within like oil in water.

I love them and my heart aches for them, these faces that seem so familiar of children I have never met, these hearts dear to the hearts that are dear to me, these mothers, these sisters, these lovers.  My words are my gift, my soul, they are all I have, so I write.  I pour myself like hot wax and they leave their impression, and I know I am not the only one forever changed.

Strange Bedfellows

I used to be a great sleeper.  I would slip into a light snore almost before my eyes were completely closed.

Now I find myself laying in the dark at 3 AM, confused at the lack of heaviness in my eyelids.

My dreams are strange.  They aren't nightmares, but I wake unsettled.  My mind and body don't leave dreams behind upon waking.  Sometimes they linger beneath the surface for hours after waking.  I carry this nameless muddy confusion with me into  Danny's room.  He is back asleep within moments, his breathing even and slow.  I carry it back to my bed and will my body and mind fruitlessly to just be more tired.

I am a stranger to insomnia, and I am not enjoying this newfound relationship.  I try to use The Secret- reaching into the universe calling for the Sandman to come, but it seems that method works no better in the dead of night than in the daytime.

Time passes and anxiety builds, I think about my alarms, knowing that the more time goes by, the more difficult it will be to wake again.

3 AM comes and I give in, I admit to myself that sleep may come but it isn't close.  I pick up my phone, this double edged distraction.  For a few minutes I let my mind focus on Facebook housekeeping and Instagram photos of faraway friends and fat-positive feminists.

Just as I finally begin to feel that weight creeping into the corners of my eyelids, my blinks coming 3/4 speed, a heat crawls across my chest and down my arms.  I guess it shouldn't surprise me as a woman in my late 30s to finally become acquainted with these flushes, night sweats like the younger, flightier sister of the menopausal hot flashes all women hear about and steel themself to expereince everything - not if, but when.

I used to be a great sleeper and now I wake to a quiet house, the short hair at the nape of my neck sticky and my thighs slick with that skin on skin hot blanket hot flash sweat.  The blanket off, cold air feels like relief from the suffocation of the same covers that felt so cozy two hours ago.

The most unfortunate part about these strange bedfellows is the absolute quicksand feeling of 6:30 AM.  I have never been a morning person, and these new nighttime roommates exacerbate my aversion to the morning alarm.

Some days I nap after work, the exhaustion catching up with me, and wake to bedtimes and cuddles and wondering how many times I'll be awake tonight.  Some nights sleep returns, relief like the summer rain after a drought washing over me.

I used to be a great sleeper, now irony is my love being the one snoring first, as if your bed can only tolerate one good sleeper and a time and it's not my turn anymore.  He snores and I lay next to him, wondering how long tonight, how many minutes, and will they turn into hours and will I sleep deeply and how many times tonight will that familiar click open and padding down the hall of little feet interrupt my no-pattern sleep patterns?

Nighttime now means something else, a hot-cold-awake-asleep dance of dreams and waking.  I stumble, pirouette, trip and spin through the hours between twilight and dawn and as I dance I remember that I used to be a great sleeper.