Hauntings

The air bag was stained with blood.  Its starkness was startling on the white canvas.  The wood chips from the utility pole were still wedged between the shattered windshield and the frame.  I blinked uncomprehendingly at the wreckage.  The sister was standing nearby in a back brace.  Her movements  jerky.  Her posture rigid.  The brother remains in the Critical Care Unit.  The right side of his face torn away from bone.  His jaw wired shut.  The mother grabbed my waist and cried.

Untitled

Shane Koyczan's "making noise", resonates in the most cluttered and disorganized parts of myself. I am not swooping to extraordinary heights nor sinking to extraordinary lows.  Life inexplicably wakes me in the morning and leaves me tossed and tangled in the bedsheets at night.  I have the universe in my veins.  It pumps my heart and expands my lungs.  Yet I feel so all together ordinary.  Bound by routine and responsibility.  What do I want to MAKE NOISE about?  What do you?


"make noise for the son or daughter that lives inside you. maybe someday we’ll understand what our parents went through.

make noise for everything you think you thought you knew as if knowing was enough to tough off the hard times; noise for the mimes that won’t, for the people that don’t, for the children that can’t. make noise because the land of oz is crumbling and the tin man needs a heart transplant.

this is for each senseless rant that will one day make sense."
-Shane Koyczan

Whence I Came

Foster children carry things.  I didn't notice at first.  The hesitant fourteen year old girl with blond streaks?  She carries bags.  Tote bags.  A purse.  A backpack.  She also carries an Olan Mills style portrait from several years ago.  It's tucked protectively in the front cover of her school binder.  The smiles of her family mask the erosion caused by intravenous drug use.  Mr. Mills did not capture everything that day.  The seventeen year old girl who so strongly resembles her mother?  She carries her obituary.  A reminder of the interconnectedness of mother and daughter.  Addict and child.  If one could assign absolutes, it would be easier. Good people.  Bad people.  How uncomplicated.  How deceiving.  The love for a biological family is unyielding, uncompromising and takes precedence over social workers, law enforcement and juvenile courts.  It burns inside these children of loss.  A love that calls out to them continuously. A sound to which they abide. 
Foster children carry things.

"Wild Geese"

"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"

Mary Oliver

"on the birth of bomani"

"we have taken the best leaves
and the best roots
and your mama whose skin
is the color of the sun
has opened into a fire and
your daddy whose skin
is the color of the night
has tended it carefully with
his hunter's hands and
here you have come, bomani,
an afrikan treasure-man.
may the art in the love that made you
fill your fingers,
may the love in the art that made you
fill your heart"

Everything Isn't, Anymore.

"He's my baby brother" my mother lamented over the telephone.  I heard those words as I paced up and down, up and down, the hallway of my home while compulsively running my fingers through my hair. The conversation began with a benign "Hello" and was followed by "Your uncle has been in an accident."  During the re-telling of the events that had occurred the night before, there were abrupt pauses punctuated by broken syllables.  My mother, in her early seventies, is slight in stature with light blond hair and eyes the color of mine. I envisioned her nervously sitting in her sun room, balancing the phone on her right shoulder, magazines strewn carelessly about on the couch cushions next to her.   After the conversation haltingly concluded, her lament remained in my mind.  "He's my baby brother."  I have two brothers.  I am the youngest.  The only girl.  My relationship with them is full of complexities.  I accept this fact with little regard to change it.  Therefore, while digesting the traumatizing blow to the fragile ecosystem of our family, I simultaneously wondered at the fact that despite my mother's age, she remains the protector. The defender.  The one who takes care of her brother when he trips and falls or is bullied at school.  The one who sobs with him over his child's grave.  The one who anxiously awaits news of his condition.  I absorb the small pieces of this and resist the larger ones.  The ones that imply change.  The ones that imply uncertainty. And I realize that within one millisecond of an event, everything isn't, anymore.

Newtown

"I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then" ~Lewis Carroll

I wore my sweatshirt yesterday.  All day long. I tried to bury myself in the folds of the hooded material that was pulled tight over my head.  Anything to protect myself from the news.  From the Internet.  From the faces of the Connecticut children, brutally gunned down in their classrooms.  I felt heavy.  So heavy I could barely move my limbs.  My stomach lurched.  My brain became sluggish.  All I wanted was sleep.  Endless and mind numbing sleep.  Yet how could I be so cowardly as to give in to the demands of my mind and body?  I did not know the victims.  The touch of their hands.  The sound of their breaths.  The cadence of their voices.  Yet here I was. Lying in bed.  Begging for something, anything, to intervene.  And so the day progressed into night.  The only thing that changed was the light outside my bedroom window.  I pulled the hood even tighter over my head and closed my eyes, a growing anxiety became the ever present partner in my bed.  I awoke to the alarm, several minutes before it sounded.  I got up and walked the dog, lumbered into the shower and stood under the hot flow of a slow moving cascade of water.  And so my day began.  I returned to work. To the gentle smiles of my office mates whose eyes revealed the same hauntings as my own. Now the day is concluding.  In the concluding, I have started a blog.  Perhaps it's my attempt to reach beyond the emptiness that wraps around me like a vice.  I breathe in.  And out.  It's all I can accomplish.