Touched

 

Pushing my cart of groceries through the Fred Meyer sliding doors, I stop because the man in front of me has come to a standstill. I pause for a moment, not wanting to violate the sacred six feet of open space between us, but quickly realize he is lost in the screen of his phone and won’t be moving forward any time soon. To my left, a steady stream of patrons are making their way into the store, so my only option is to cut around the man to my right. Maneuvering the unwieldy cart as best I can, I manage to steer clear of the man, but accidentally clip a tall flowering plant on the edge of a garden display. It starts to topple towards me, the pot dropping off the edge of the slightly elevated display platform, and I instinctively reach down to grab it before it can hit the concrete. At the same moment, a woman whose presence I have not until now been aware of, does the same thing. And in that fleeting second of reaching for the flower pot and setting it back on the display, our bare hands touch for the briefest instant. It’s a flash of skin on skin, accidental and meaningless, but it goes through me like a lightning bolt, this unsanctioned contact with a stranger’s body. It jars me the same way TV shows do, when they portray day-to-day life from pre-quarantine times – friends going out to dinner together, families hosting parties, and strangers crowding into buses and trains.  All these people touching each other as well as the surfaces around them without any thought of the germs they may be acquiring or spreading with their fingers or their breath.  Behaviors that none of us would have thought twice about just a few months ago now take on a veneer of unbelievability, seem shocking in their disregard of social distancing norms. Because of course, both the woman whose hand touched mine and I are wearing masks. We both bagged our own groceries so the clerk wouldn’t have to touch the potentially contaminated reusable bags we brought from home. And we were both careful to take hold of the receipt by the end farthest from the clerk's hand. All these little moments of caution and attention to avoid not just contact with another human but with anything another human has touched. And yet in this moment – when I try to drive my cart as if it is a sleek and agile machine instead of an awkward box on sticky wheels, when I overestimate my ability to steer clear of the scenery, when my cutting the corner too tight results in what could have become a larger mishap – a woman reaches out to help. Even more than her fingertips, I am touched by her impulse to assist, to overlook the safety protocols and close the cautionary distance between us rather than letting me fend for myself. This, too, feels like a vestige of the old word, and if I can’t have the gatherings and the shared meals and hugs between friends that have been relegated to the world of television, I will take this: choosing to be present for a fellow human being when she needs a helping hand. Even if we both have to pull out the sanitizer immediately afterwards.

Juxtaposition

I was schooled early in embracing contradiction,
taught to marry the things that others found irreconcilable,
learning to pride myself in the paradox of my very being,
even if others found it ridiculous.

Later, I learned about cognitive dissonance –
the ways in which we all manage to live with the tension
of inherent, internal opposition,
to hold together things that cannot, should not, co-exist
without descending into disintegration,
which is literally the negation of integrity.

Still later I learned the power of simple conjunctions,
the subtle shift from joining two parts with a but –
sending them to their respective corners 
for coaches to mop sweaty brows
and prop up tired arms with the bluster of heightened emotions,
the adrenaline required for battle –
to joining those same parts with an and –
tension now conscripted as binding agent,
uniting disparate pieces into one whole.

I’m no physicist, but I think this is not unlike
the forces, weak and strong, that hold the universe together

and bond the very atoms of existence.

Joy as Extended Metaphor

Joy is the new pen I take out of the package when the old one has run dry, its lifeblood spilled out in sacrifice to the daily ritual of sitting in front of this window and writing what I see beyond the glass: my own yard, the sidewalk, the tree dropping its twigs and leaves onto the roof of the car I now rarely use, the street the dogs and I walk up twice a day, the yellow house on the other side with its ever-changing garden. The tulips of early spring, give way to irises by May, followed by roses and daisies in June and July. Joy is watching life progress like this even as it also seems to stand still, realizing that the closer I look at the stillness, the more moving parts it has. Joy is the dirt beneath my fingernails when I pull dandelions out of the lawn; it teems with slugs and grubs and centipedes, roly-polys and sometimes spiders. And joy is the dandelions themselves, continually springing back up in the spots where I rip them unceremoniously out of the ground, refusing to be eradicated by my callous diligence. Root fragments unwittingly left behind grow from near-nothingness, clawing their way through the dark, damp, packed-in earth, reaching for the daylight and the air that, as far as they know, could be mere inches or vast miles above them. Hope may have feathers but joy digs its way out of the dirt, and breaking through, extends its insistent head up toward the sky, spreads its leafy arms wide and unfurls its glorious mane, as if to rival the sun.

Letters to Myself

To My Younger Self:

I’m not sure where to start. There’s so much I could tell you – guidance I could give, warnings I could issue, reassurance I could offer – but I also firmly believe that I would not be who where I am today if you had not been who or where you were through every moment of my past and your future. It sounds trite, but in this case it really is about the journey and not the destination.  I am who I am because of all the many moments, choices and yes, mistakes you make along the way. Without this history, exactly as it happened, I – this specific version of me sitting here on a rainy April afternoon, typing on this tablet while a pasta sauce simmers vigorously on the stove behind me and the dogs nap in the other room – would not exist. And I – this specific version of me – want to exist. All told, I like who I am and my life is one I am grateful for. So I’ll skip the spoilers and specific admonitions and opt instead to tell you the things I tell myself, the things I most need to hear today. I’m not sure what they will mean to you, but here you go:

       1. Try not to be too hard on yourself.
       2. Embrace the uncertainty of life.
       3. Don’t just do what comes easily – put yourself in a position to fail.
       4. When you fail, keep trying. Life is not all or nothing.
       5. Keep searching for your voice. You have something worth saying.

To My Older Self:

Version 1: January 30, 1989

My Future

In 20 years I will be 28. I will be single. I will live in New York City. I will be a major in math, English, and history. I will teach seventh and eighth grade. I will teach at least one of the subjects I major in. I will teach in a public school.

I will live in a single house and have a flower garden in the front yard, and in the back yard I will have a fruit and vegetable garden.

In my spare time, I will draw and read. I will own a small, four-person car.

The End

Version 2: April 22, 2020

To be honest, I don’t think of you much or often. Maybe because I don’t’ fully know who you are. My vision of you keeps changing as I myself change . . . But that feels like a cop-out. After all, my eight-year-old self got things pretty right all those years ago. For some reason, my 39-year-old self doesn’t like to admit that I know myself (you) well, that my core is fairly constant through all ages, that committing a particular vision of the future to the page is not an irreversible commitment or something that I have to get “just right”. So, shall I give it a try, with a nod to the 1989 version of me?

My Future

               In 20 years, I will be 59. I will be legally single but happily partnered and fond of the companionship my partner provides. We will live in Washington state, either near to or within Seattle. Unless we live in Tennessee – it’s cheaper there and closer to family. I will still teach in some capacity or another, whether professionally or informally, perhaps through content creation or mentorship of some kind.

I will live in a single-family home with a flower garden in the front and a vegetable garden in the back.

In my spare time, I will read and write because books and language will always be central to who I am. I will be surrounded by animals: dogs for sure and hopefully some others as well – chickens, goats, maybe a cow.

The End

Except that it isn’t the end. This, too, feels like a cop-out. I’m hedging my bets, sticking to the things I can easily predict. The things that don’t require risk – either the risk of being wrong about who I will become and what I will accomplish or the risk of doing and becoming someone or something outside of what is obvious.

What my younger and my current selves weren’t quite brave enough to put out into the world is this: I am a writer. One who for most of my years so far has not lived into this truth. And one who is trying to do so now. And one who hopes – but doesn’t quite know in the same way as I know other things – that at 59 I won’t need to soft pedal this title but will have earned it fully and proudly. Hopes that I will know it for myself and that others will know it of me as well.

And if you’re not there yet, 59-year-old me, well then, here are a few things you might need to hear:

       1. Try not to be too hard on yourself.
       2. Embrace the uncertainty of life.
       3. Don’t just do what comes easily – put yourself in a position to fail.
       4. When you fail, keep trying. Life is not all or nothing.
       5. Keep searching for your voice. You have something worth saying.

Blessings

Where to even start?

This life I have:

so charmed and so hard,

so full of both and all.

This life I have, 

contained within this moment:

the scent of the lilac blossoms

plucked from the neighbor's tree,

its fragrant bough heavy with bloom

bending over the fence into my yard;

the view of the yard

through the window above the table,

which supports both the lilac vase

and the page on which I write these words;

the weight of the dog’s head on my lap

as I sit, writing, at the table;

the feel of his fur against my fingertips,

soft and warm from the afternoon sun;

the rise and fall of his chest

as he inhales . . . exhales . . .

inhales the lilac-scented air sustaining us both.

This life I have,

holding so many moments within it:

the rise and fall of hope

as I wake . . . sleep . . .

wake to the dappled fullness each day brings;

the feel of joy and sadness in my hands,

spilling out of my cupped palms

over the sharp contours

of the space I have carved out for them;

the weight of knowing and not knowing

what it is I hold in my hands

and what they can never contain;

the view of a life perpetually transformed,

the hardnesses – fierce agents of change –

highlighting the bright, the soft, the sweet,

then becoming light themselves;

becoming with time and grace,

the scent of the lilac blossoms.

A travel journal entry from the place where we now live

I expected it to feel more foreign, this place we now find ourselves in. But I feel the lack of shopping trips and dinners out and friendly hangouts less keenly than one might have thought. Even the loss of my livelihood feels softer now that the initial wave of shock and sadness has rolled through. Instead, I am struck by the pervasiveness of the mundane and the familiar, the daily rituals that mark the passage of time and carry me steadily from one moment to the next: brewing a pot of tea and sitting down to write my morning pages while the house is still quiet and dark; stretching out last night’s stiffness with a YouTube yoga video and a quick walk through the neighborhood with Zoe; checking the to-do list and planning out the day; later, preparing dinner, doing dishes, and reading in bed until my eyelids grow too heavy to continue. Also: sneezing countless times a day, almost never while in reach of the tissue box; mixing yogurt into the dogs’ kibble and letting them take turns licking the spoon; telling J he can put on whatever record he is in the mood for after dinner – I don’t mind either way – and tucking my cold toes into the warm arches of his feet when we go to bed.

Yes, there have been changes as well: waiting for a two-hour delivery window to become available in the Prime Now app instead of a weekly trip to the local market; sitting on the deck in the late afternoon, soaking up the sun’s rays on my back and neck, instead of sitting at my desk, struggling to stay motivated for the last few hours of the workday; washing my hands so frequently that the skin on the back of my knuckles becomes cracked and dry; living under the same roof as my brother for the first time in twenty years and chatting with him and J over dinner about recipes, New York City, or Hannah Arendt.

All of these things are new, but none of them feels strange. The additions and shifts, like the thinnest of threads, have been woven into the existing fabric of daily life, creating no perceptible distortions in the warp and weave. Only the closest scrutiny reveals any change to the texture and thickness of my routines; overall, they feel as warm and comforting to me as ever.

There is also, of course, the overarching sense of uncertainty infused in all of it, old patterns and newly-forming habits alike. We know so very little right now about what is truly going on, how long it will last, or what life will be like next week, next month, next year even. But this is not actually new, is it? The uncertainty was already with us, before we arrived in this place, masked by the seemingly steady nature of the status quo but teeming under the surface nonetheless. This space we are now in has simply heightened our awareness of the fact that any place, any time, any life is always, by its very nature, precarious. And so I must learn to weave this understanding into the daily rituals, along with all the other changes, until it too is one more thread in the tapestry, an integrated and integral part of my life.

[Like the previous post, this one is also a response to a prompt from the Isolation Journals.]

Letter to a Stranger

Last day of the Isolation Journals 30-day project, and I'm starting to go back and clean up my entries. I won't be posting all of them, but this is from Day 1:

Dear Naoma,

I picked out your name long before I knew you would never be born, long before I fully realized that the traditional role of wife and mother was not for me. It was my grandmother’s name, and when she passed during my sophomore year of high school, I thought it would be fitting to name my future daughter after her.  I knew it would mean a lot to my mom to have the name carried on in the family, and I myself was named after my other grandmother, who passed when my father was still a teenager.  And so you came to exist in the only place you ever will – my mind.

It’s odd, when I think about it now.  Even as I secretly imagined explaining to a future spouse that I had your name picked out or watching mom go flustered with delight at my choice, I declared to all who asked that I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to have a family. Over the years, “wasn’t sure” changed to “pretty sure” and then to “mostly certain” as I saw how few women of my generation, as well as those before me, were able to care for and raise children without utterly losing themselves in the process.

Yet despite this growing recognition of my own fears and desires, I still thought (and yes, even now sometimes think) of you as an if. If I find someone who will be my partner in life and whom I trust to co-parent with me. If I find the balance within myself to nurture both my own individuality as well as that of another human being, without compromising either one. And of course, if I happen to give birth to a girl. All these if’s persisted in my mind, even as the chances of their fruition became smaller and smaller with the passing of time.  And the truth that I struggle to admit even now is that, unless the universe throws me some especially unexpected curveballs, my decisions have rendered these if’s, and you, obsolete.

Because I have chosen, for better or worse, a partner whom I love but with whom I will never bring you into the world. And I have decided that trying to be my own person is a hard enough task without taking on responsibility for another life, that the kind of balance I believe to be necessary for a healthy family structure is not actually within my reach, and that the effort required just to attempt it is too daunting even on my bravest days. It’s better, isn’t it, not to involve you in my inevitable failure? I’d rather not take us both down, if I can help it.

This may sound thoughtful, noble, considerate even. It’s not. T.S. Eliot comes to mind, as he does so often: in short, I was afraid. Afraid that I couldn’t attain even a modicum of the ideal, afraid that it would cost you too much and even more afraid that it would cost me everything. And in that fear, I chose that you would never come to be.

I feel somehow that I owe you an apology for this. Because of me, you will never know a mother’s embrace or feel the warmth of the sun on the back of your neck or dare to eat a peach (yes, Eliot again).  And I will never get to see your face – are your eyes light or dark? your nose straight or crooked? – or hear your voice crying out for me in the middle of the night.  I’ll never tuck you in at night after reading a bedtime story or teach you how to ride a bike.  And I’ll never show you old pictures of your aunt and uncle or tell you stories about what life was like for us when we were your age. For this – and so much more – I am sorry.

I must admit though, that sorry as I am, I can’t quite bring myself to regret the decision I have made. I do sometimes wonder what might have been had I chosen differently and had your if become a when. I wonder, would I have liked being a mother? Would it have been as I difficult as I thought? And would it have been worth it, after all (Eliot one more time, of course)?  But regret, no.

Ultimately, I felt a sacrifice was required one way or another.  Perhaps others see it differently, but for me the choice was this: lose myself to raising you, subordinate your well-being to my own pursuits, or choose not to bring you into the world at all.  Growing up as I did, both witnessing the first and experiencing the second on a daily basis, I chose the third option.  I chose myself over you. 

At least this way only I will ever feel the consequences of the sacrifice: I will never know the joys and hardships of motherhood, but you will never know the feeling of coming second to my passions or the guilt of having subsumed my life within your own. Because you will never feel anything at all.

It must seem strange, and the opposite of motherly, this lack of remorse. Which is exactly the point, I think. There is no regret because in choosing myself, I chose this current version of myself. This person who is flawed in so many ways but who has learned to navigate these flaws passably enough, learned to recognize her shadows and demons for what they are and live mostly at peace both with them and with herself. This person who is not a mother. Can I really fault her, can you really fault me, for making the un-motherly choice?

Although, if blame must be assigned, I suppose it should be to me.  It is most certainly not your fault. You did nothing wrong—you never had the chance to. And though you will never know the name I chose for you, Naoma, I always will. Despite everything, I still think it is a lovely name.

With love,

Your un-mother

Resurrection

One of the first warm days of spring, and we're sitting out here on the deck, soaking up the sun, Zoe and I. Every now and then a rustling disturbs the otherwise quiet day. Well, quiet except for the distant buzz of the nearly empty roads.  One car passing by every now and then is somehow harder to tune out than the steady stream of traffic I usually hear wafting over from Aurora. And that intermittent rustling? It's hard to tell whether it's Wash shifting in his sleep or just a tarp moving in the wind. As I listen, trying to discern one from the other, I notice other easy-to-pass-over sounds: mostly birds I think, some more distant and some much closer. Perhaps they are talking to each other.

It's been nearly a decade since I last posted anything here. I don't think I had many readers to begin with and I doubt any of them will still know how to find this page.  This was always mainly an exercise for myself and it will remain that way now, all these years later. It's Easter week and thus it seems appropriate to be resurrecting this old part of my life (myself?). Resurrecting and transforming, I think, since the muddy waters I swim in are made of different stuff these days. Or at least, I swim through them differently. Maybe both.

For one, I've gotten used to the muddiness. After five years in Seattle, my vision has grown accustomed to the grey. Even looking at these words -- the harsh contrast of black typeface against stark white -- I have to squint to see past the glaring brightness of both screen and sun. My tolerance for ambiguity feels immense most days, to the point where I prefer blurred lines, handwriting that is hard to make out, walls that may or may not even be there.  This writing -- its tone and opacity -- are a case in point, a counterpoint to its physical appearance.

But then, maybe this isn't that different from what was always my truth deep down: a devotion to indecision, to seeing all the angles and wanting one to be right but not being able to settle on which one in particular that is. It's the old story, told again. Resurrection.