The second hand ground down like teeth, tonight a clot lobbed into a stream of clear evenings. Without fur or fleece, he couldn’t be herded forward. The coast was spoiling for collapse, snarled with nets and racked with waves. A boat rolled stalled offshore, its sail aflame and drifting. The rig was singed, but rain cracked the sky open and spun the craft like a pill in a dish. The dock was all knitted up with barnacles and kelp, foiling hopes of a clean landing.
11:56
His jaw was crammed full of partly chewed apple when the waitress swept over and queried, “How’s everything tasting, hun?”
Half-gagging, he reflected on how much he loathed this new tendency of waitstaff to shove inside the dome of personal sensory experience. Forcing down the mouthful, he jerked out, “Fine,” and watched her move on to spill coffee into cups the next table over.
Coils of steam listed from the pot, kicking off a memory of smoke, and he dragged his gaze back down to the plate of sad fruit salad. Having already culled the best bits, chunks of apple and ripe cantelope, he now nudged halfheartedly through a silt of deteriorating orange and granular watermelon.
A perennial cowl of fryer grease wrapped the back wall in dinge of spore and dust. He tilted his head and squinted to read the clock. Through a hole in the blinds the moon gleamed a spoke of cold light peripherally. He nodded. Nearly time.
sedimentary
Here’s what I’m doing: dredging out. Layers and layers of dusted-under sensibility, sedimented over a period of months. Geologically a blip; experientially an eternity.
What to say, really? Second-guessing does me in time and again. The only tonic for it seems to be outright utterance. Just hitting publish and let the pixels spin. What blogging is supposed to be anyway. And it occurs to me that I haven’t really blogged in years–or maybe ever. Always so hyper-aware of what I’ve written and rehashing it. So here I am, trying to do it differently, to unbury.
I sit on the 27th floor of a Chicago highrise, watching fat spiders suspended outside wobble in wafts, oblivious to height, busy casting and repairing webs to withstand wind and fix prey. I traverse shopping crowds on Michigan Avenue daily to and from the train station, passing familiar homeless people with their signs or sayings or rhythmic cup-shakings day in, day out. Everyday I’m someplace in the middle, navigating between extremes and under the radar.
What’s it like to be invisible? Feels like outliving oneself. Still here and yet not. I remember be-ing, but I haven’t in a long while.
All around are people pushing strollers, holding hands, going about daily business, and it feels nothing so much as utterly dislocating. Writing is supposed to help. I guess we’ll see.
what desperation looks like
In my thirtieth year I became filled with a wild and unquenchable wanting. I could not sate it with sin though I tried my hardest, white knuckling the miles between a sweet, arid marriage and sweaty sex on bare stretches of hardwood in naked rooms with sour towels and stale toilet paper and meltingly delectable sensation, consternation, damnation, sheer heedless hurtling into utter oblivion, my lord, o, oh and more oh.
disposal
This morning, finally, after months and months of moving all the fertility meds and books and ovulation predictor kits and pregnancy tests from closet to closet to storage locker to back deck, imagining various scenarios where I might give them to some individual or institution, I lugged the whole kit and caboodle down the back stairs and across the courtyard and dumped it all in the trash bins and closed the lid once and for all.
morass
Facebook has become the standard vehicle for birthday wishes. It flags your friends when it’s your birthday and even gives a convenient little text entry box so users don’t need to navigate anywhere to dash off a quick wish. The result is a Facebook inbox suddenly overflowing with thoughtful reminders of friendship and connection.
For me this year the irony was poignant–especially that message that wished me a day surrounded by good friends and celebration. The contrast between the wish and the reality has sat in my heart these last couple of days like a fat clammy toad. I’m left asking myself how and why I’ve brought about such a sad and isolated existence.
The answer, like so many things, is at once simple and not so simple.
Simply, I have failed, for a number of years now, to build and maintain the very friendship connections I so treasure and crave.
The why of that is a more convoluted morass of depression and despondency. I’ve struggled with “the blues” for much of my conscious life, but for awhile now they have succeeded in circumscribing my daily existence ever tighter and smaller.
Unpacking the why of it may not even do me much good. Taking regular persistent steps to change the pattern seems the only beneficial course forward to daylight. I need to reach out and get out of the living grave I’ve dug myself– somehow, anyhow.
barren dioramist
I’ve been trying to find god all this time. This becomes apparent to me this morning as I walk infinite rounds inside these four walls. Gear up, gear up, ever and anon ready to venture out– but continue circling bisecting and interweaving patterns through interior space– readying, readying for… something. As I arrange and rearrange objects, populace of a tiny planetary system, I concoct scenarios just so, balanced in vignettes. The endeavor is balletic as I stretch and step, bend and reach.
Something inside me snapped when I learned, when I embraced at last, the fact in the face of long years of inconclusive diagnosis and grueling pseudo-treatment, that I am, indeed, infertile.
Shortly thereafter: menopause. Hot flashes. Ooh la la instantaneous conflagration several times daily, nightly, sweat drenched and pit stained regardless of present company or otherwise engagement. Subjected to the aging body’s ill will in fits and fevers until one day they just stopped.
stuckness & stickiness
I’ve been stuck here for awhile now. Stuck again. Damned ill navigable slope. I’ve been cultivating the sticky sort of attentions I crave. Along with a bit of bumbling through brambles, up and down slopes, into puddles, over  boulders, and all kind of canted at a slant. And mires, oh yes.
What, you might ask, do I mean by sticky attentions? Come to that, why even bother? Just clear the way and sally onward.
But look! I say back– lookit alla this wonderfulness going on! So much to play with, to admire and rearrange and wonder at. So much to gaze at, lo– not so much my own middle belly parts, tho there’s a fair share of that (another story for another day)– but all around, out yonder, right there and there and there, golly, everywhere.
Frankly I never outgrew it, I often think. You see kids, out on the sidewalk, squatting over some red leaf, simply enchanted, and it is childhood perfectly poised. We say childlike wonder and craft tales about dreamy, gazy boys who wander off cliffs.
I tend to be more cliff-clinger than climber. Writing teacher Ralph Fletcher calls it freezing to the face, that writer’s paralysis, petrification, fear of ungripping fingertips to reach for the next handhold. Fear, Fletcher says, of making the inevitable big discoveries accrued through risk. Fletcher assures that the message takes care of itself in the writing of it. Trust the process, an entire generation of writing teachers intoned, responding to the leaden verbal structures marching forth from drill and repetition.
I dreamed
…of arranging heart shaped stones together in a pile in the center of the table.
names
When young I identified with the sound of my own name, Sarah–common enough, surely, but particularly mine. Sarah signified me tonally, instinctually and in a multiply evocative array of associations accruing over time. In those early years I felt myself called into existence by the very word, owned by pronunciation, as much possessed by as possessed of a two-beat fluid melody of consonants and vowels.
As a girl, I liked to play with names on notebook paper–Â a typical schoolgirl rite of passage, linking your first name with last of the love object and concocting fanciful monikers for offspring unborn, nicking them this way and that in elaborate slavic panoply. Some girls keep running lists of baby names down through the years. Some never outgrow a fundamental preoccupation with the nominative.