(B)rambles

"she’s seeing little hims running around her knees calling her mommy and him daddy. she’s seeing him reading Langston on a brown over-stuffed lounge chair and her sitting at a desk large enough to contain her mess, and to the right a window A window that looks out to the beach ‘cause he finally got them there. dreaming, she thinks to herself, he said once, in a poem, dreaming, I was only dreaming...but I didn’t get on that train, he continued, and ended up running right into jail."
- Lesley-Ann Brown in A Love Poem (Ten Years After the Fact)


Fifteen months ago, my life changed. In strange, subtle ways. In ways not so subtle and ways I cannot say. Part of the cryptic story involves death. Another, life and love. And also rebirth.

But we won't talk about death here, about violence and broken gravestones. About finding the strength to mourn in unexpected places.

We'll speak of a breathless call at 2 a.m. I'd slept in my clothes and looked as rumpled as I felt. I drove to the hospital; she gasped in the seat. We walked the maternity halls, a haggard, wary pair, like lovers, reading the noticeboards, waiting.

When my goddaughter finally came, her suctioned head looked like a soft pyramid. She had confused eyes like black flames and defensive hands. We all cried. She taught me about loving something bigger than myself.

I've seen my own wonder and childhood in her eyes, been willing to fight and kill for her safety. And her mother's. When she clings to me, when her eyes light up, when she giggles and steals my crackers, part of my soul melts. Again and again.

Her mother reminds me when I need it most that I'm loved purely by two beautiful females.


"Every story is a history, however, and when there is no comprehensible story, there is no history."
- Charles Baxter in Dysfunctional Narratives

Sometimes you wake up and, without rolling over, you know that they're there. This person you've shared your entire life with, whom you'd rather be without at times. At times you barely nod. But they live with you, are a part of you. A steady weight at the center of your chest. Love and hate.

"It's like that moment when, often early in the morning, perhaps in a strange house, you pass before a mirror you hadn't known would be there. You see a glimpse of someone reflected in that mirror, and a moment passes before you recognize that that person is yourself."
- Charles Baxter in On Defamiliarization

That's kind of how I feel about writing.

But it's easier to paint writing into a box to pay the bills, to live the life that makes sense. To write 10-word tag lines, to sell ideas, to write 18 inches of copy, to sell the news.

And then one day I rolled over and looked it straight in the eye. We'd been co-habitating for so long; we knew each other too well. All it took was a muse who believed. And a workshop.

Stripped bare, writing became that Thing I Could Do. Also, That Thing I Was Meant To Do more than I was doing. No longer a dream deferred. No longer tied up in tragedy and public responsibility. Possible.


"I used to call her the "storm goddess," because she was at her best surrounded by cataclysm. She could stir up others with drink and drugs and magic incantations, and then when the cyclone was at its most intense, sit down at calm center and glow."
- Virgil Thomson

Goodbyes can be bittersweet and full of resentment. Every hello, forgiveness. On mornings, my love wakes me. I roll over and look it straight in the eye. Later, I want to tell my goddaughter that it is Possible, that cemeteries are for the dead, but the living find peace there.



Photo by Mika from Corbis