December 27, 2011

No girl wants to say, “And then the grey seeped in.”

When you read this, just remember that you are hearing from a girl who believed in a Grey Kind of Love Story far longer than she believed in the exiled Sugarplum who trudged away from the ballet for a career in swapping teeth for silver under pillows near midnight.

This girl, she once prayed for Grey Love Stories the way a little boy prays to catch the soaring leather skin of a Yankee’s homerun hit. White-Knuckled Prayers for Grey Kinds of Love Stories. 

She was a girl who thought that grey was a pretty, little color fitting for a love story. Someone could you love in shades of gray, she said to the No Ones of the night.

She? Well, she once talked for days just to keep from saying the two words that needed her tongue, needed the air outside of her mouth, needed the lobe of a boy who didn’t love her the way they Love One Another Hard in those vampire movies.

…

It’s Over.

Them’s heavy words. Heavy like the bags assembled by the clumsy grocery store clerk who’s prone to packing the gallon of milk with the cans of corn and lentils.

Heavy enough to make you wonder if your tongue can take it.

If your lips might break it.

It’s Over.

Knees shaking against the dashboard, she found the those words somewhere along the rows of houses all drawn on the same architect’s sketch pad.

It’s Over.

Pull Over.

Pull over, pull over, pull over.

…

Girl, you got to find the strength to grab the door handle. Girl, you got to stand beside the car and watch him pull away and realize you still got the dignity, the will, the Know How to Know Better. That you deserve that.

Better.

You Deserve Better.

Girl, I know the way you’ll find it hard to Pull Away. From Him. As he pulls you in and tells you, he always did like the smell of the lavender shampoo you used in your hair.

But Grey, if you cannot see her yet, she’s the Maybe’s, the Some Other Time’s, the I Can’t Make It’s, the Promise I’ll Make It Up To You’s.

All clustered into One Grand Excuse for why he never called and why you stood in those heels that gave you blisters far before you ever got to dancing and waited for the car that never came.

It’s like a person who will tell you Every Day that they might think to love you One Day.

And there you’ll go, marching off to join the crows of girls who ache for the One Day. Perched up on the fence for that One Day, as if they were waiting for Elvis to appear from his dressing room.

But you are not a One Day Girl. You are not a Maybe Girl. You are an Every Day Girl and you need to know it so.

…

Girl, keep the grey for the dyed threads of your chunky sweaters. Keep the grey for the furs of the mouse that always grows restless beneath your refrigerator around 10pm. Keep the grey for the days that demand rain boots, but don’t let grey lend you a love story.

Grey just aint a color made for telling love stories. No girl wants to say, “And then the grey seeped in.”

And Girl, if you got to scream, Scream Loud. If you got to cry, Cry Buckets. If you got to run, Try Barefoot. And, if you got to find a way to wash him away, Then Wash. Hard.

You sit in the middle of your bathtub and pour out every squirt of lavender shampoo if you got to.

If you never want to find Another to tangle that scent of you in their fingers, fine. Leave that then. But leave all the same.

Leaving knowing One Day you’ll look up. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But One Day, you’ll look up and it’ll be Yellow. All Kinds of Terra Cotta Gold & Tie Dye. With no trace of grey.

You’ll have left that color for your sweaters. For the days that demand rain boots.

And your love stories, they’ll be Salmon Pink. Candy Apple Red. All sorts of Deep Magenta tangled with hints of Navajo White.

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December 23, 2011

For your knees might shake but your arms are strong. And they? Well, they were made to cradle a King.

If I sink back into the shoes of my 7-year-old self, sequined to the mark the debut of the church’s Christmas Pageant, then I was the star of the show.

The top of the program. Signing autographs outside the dressing room until the sun kissed down behind the hills.

I. Was. A Shepherd.

A sheet on my head. A staff in my hand. Standing off to the side of a stage just like this.

Should have been staring up at the sky, up a Tiny Tinfoil Star Tied Tight to a Spot Light. A galactic ball of energy that, when stripped down to the bare-boned simplicity of it all, simply whispered, “Follow.” To shepherds like me, counting sheep to pass the time. Follow. A King is Born. A King is Born.

But instead I stared at Mary with a beady-eyed look of Envy Perched up in my Pupils as a I craved to be the one to stand shaking in my sandals as a Golden-Glinted Gabriel stood by a kettle in my kitchen and told me I would birth a baby.

A baby born with ten fingers, ten toes, two eyes & one nose. Just to Save a Soul Like Me.

And some would call him Son of Man, and you might say E-Man-Nu-El. But for right now, let’s just call him Baby. Baby, let’s just call him Jesus.

I’d have traded all my Christmas presents to be the one to stand with the pink bed sheet on my head and the pastor’s baby in my arms. I’d have cradled that baby & rocked it. The way the New York City Transit Line Rocks a Thousand Single Tired Souls to Sleep in Just One Sitting.

I’d have swallowed every rule in swaddling until… until I realized the Mandatory Matter of the Mary in the Manger that Night. For she would be the one to go out to find the words to pair with the teeny, tiny words that she collected so furiously like sea glass to somehow form a lullaby.

A lullaby.

Which is really just a Single-Stranded Melody for a King that Deserves a Symphony.

I would have slid down from the back of the donkey, a sweaty little boy whose name was really Teddy, and we all knew he wanted to be a wise man but he got down on Hands & Knees to Carry a Marry to a Bethlehem that Didn’t Know Her.

Wait, I would have said. And poured out into a crowd of people just like this, to as people Just Like You.. And You..

What do I say? And how do I sing? Because my vocal chords aint strong enough and I’ve not got the bones of Billie Holiday, and my breath? It just aint thick enough to Sing a Song for the Son of Man, E-Man-Nu-El.

I’d have searched until I found the one to pull me in by the pink bed sheet on my head and say,

Mary, you be strong. And Mary, Don’t You Cry. And don’t you doubt these aching, breaking arms of yours. For your knees might shake, but your arms are strong. And they? Well, they were made to cradle a King.

You suck in your breath, you pull back your shoulders, and you sing for the baby whose cries will crack the mountaintops. You sing for the child who already knows all his Little Children and has the Holes in His Hands to prove he loves them so.

Be you 7-years-old, a shepherd staring up at the sky, or someone standing on a stage just like this. Wishing she had more to give her King than a Single-Stranded Melody for the One that Deserves a Symphony.

Still, you suck in your breath, you pull back your shoulders, and you sing.

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December 20, 2011

And tonight we’ll catch the Christmas lights and remember a day when we treated them like fireflies.

Drive slower tonight and suck in the beauty that is living on lawns and awnings these days.

The World, she’s holding something peculiar to her bosom right now like the locket a shy girl held to her chest all the days of 1942.

 A sacred kind of time where fragile instruments—xylophones & harps & the high notes we rarely talk about, sitting on the fringe of Baby Grand pianos—get unbuckled from their dusty cases to be the centerpieces of Christmas songs that sit in our throats but once a year.

It will be gone soon, so suck it in.

Suck, the way you once sucked hot chocolate from your crazy straw on the Day You Realized Life was Designed to Turn Color with Heat.

Before. It. Slips.

Slips from the back door, out the side window where the wind chimes hang.

Slips like the wayward wafting of the aroma of Grandma’s pies just the year after no one could find her standing by the counter, checking the timer against the pulse of her wrist.

The season missed her that year. The season wept to the tune of Oh, Holy Night that year.

The World, she’s allowing this crazy, little thing to conspire where suddenly the December Air is hoisting up Certain Lines of Songs by the waist as if they were the ballerinas meant to steal the final curtain call in the Nutcracker Ballet at Lincoln Center. The Waltz of the Sugarplum Fairies. Up, up in the air they go.

“Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow.” “From now on your troubles will be miles away.”

Lines I never thought to believe in, with a fist to my heart, until the red cups came out and the wicker of the lawn reindeer caught frost in their limbs each morning.

It is a 31-day span of time made for Joy, made for Simplicity. For the stripping of the garland off the staircase to find we should have been giving to one another all along.

Should have been waiting under the mistletoe for you long before we tacked an advent calendar to the wall and pulled “Elf” out from hiding.

Should have been holding, long before Bing Crosby bellowed over shopping mall speakers that it was, in fact, cold outside. Too bad we really cannot stay. Too bad we have to go away.

Love sits heavy on custom cards these days—the one time of year where we might still think to use a stamp, lick an envelope and send pictures we took of our children on the beach in August, before that growth spurt in October, sailing into hands of Postmen who dream of the paperless eCards they’ll send when they get home.

Memories remind us what it was like to believe in something

Just Because.

Just Because

it was some sort of thrilling to believe that 32 hooves would shuffle on our chimney tops when the Sugar Plums fairies started dub stepping in our heads.

Just Because

it was more exciting than anything to don a bright red coat and a muffler between our hands, trying Sky High Kicks in Central Park before the Radio City Spectacular confirmed every ounce of our dreams to be a Rockette one day.

Just Because

there was something peaceful about changing out of the holiday dress to wear a bed sheet around our torsos and sit down, Indian-style, to hear about a story of a poor boy, born in a manger to two peasants. And we whispered into the ears of one another, “Did she say Frankenstein? Who’s Myrrh?”

Something peaceful in the chance to put down our chocolate-covered pretzels to cup a Linus-like message in our hands. Good News. Great Joy. Cupped in our hands, wishing we could feed something as magical as this to the reindeer.

It will go quickly. Slip away quietly.

In one week we’ll watch the trees—flopping and folded—as the doormen carry them out to stack beside the sidewalks of a New York City that loves the way people look to her for the holidays. No one hosts a Christmas party the way she can. Denver would admit it. Chicago would call it a fact. And San Diego sits, holding his breath, wondering if NYC will remember to send an invite to his door.

Perhaps it is the Christmas season, or maybe it’s all of life.

Regardless, it will slip through the fingers. Unpredictable. Quick. But beautiful if you stop to see the lights.

The way they cascade the limbs. The way they can take a home, full of hopeless bodies that don’t know Family the way they know the first few lines of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and somehow make anyone want to come inside to see if magic hangs on the brows of the bodies the way it hangs from the beige shutters.

That’s the hope in it all. The delicacy. The possibility. The chance to believe.

That’s the season. That’s life.

It’s all just the chance to find some sort of reminder to hitch to our hearts like the star on the tree: It sure is wonderful, all of this, and some kind of rare we should talk about more, when the white lights take you in to be held by a hope you never knew you could hold.  

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December 12, 2011

It’s as if we’ve been granted this Immense Potential for some Remarkable Storytelling, if only we use it right.

Some people only need to be lent a single sentence to captivate us for some kind of tiny eternity.

There are days when we find ourselves only two feet away from a body that will have us ripping clocks from the walls just two hours later, wishing we could chuck the ticking things from the highest of skyscrapers. Make Time Stop.

It can happen every day if we allow it to, if we believe the world is something to be entranced by, like the librarian with the purple-rimmed glasses.

Sitting Patiently. Legs-Crossed. Hands in Lap. Waiting in Awe for the Pages to Turn.

These Words. They are dedicated to One. One Who Captured Me With a Single Sentence.

She had a way of making her words latch on to one another like Children Atop the Creamy Clay Pueblo Storytellers.

“There are some books I cling to because they are indispensable…” It was all she needed to write in her tattered diary for me to know she was a writer, and a good one at that.

Her selection of favorite classics– from the Rilke volumes to Alice in Wonderland– left me wondering if my own diary had begun 60 years ago or so.  Her words made me ache. Her appreciation for life caused me to stare at the diary for ten minutes, every one of the 6,000 seconds scampering to the forefront, all wanting a glance. None wanting to find their Secondly Selves wasted.

I traced the outline of her black and white portrait and forgot for a moment where I was standing. In the middle of the United Nations’ Main Lobby. Surrounded by an extraordinary commemoration for the women of the Holocaust.  Lured by the life and telling of Helene Berr, a young woman who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just five days shy from Liberation’s arrival.

It wasn’t merely her knack for prose that swept me away from my afternoon’s work to sneak peeks at her not-so-private diary.

It was the reason she wrote that caught me. 

Perhaps the very reason why any of us should sharpen a pencil, open a new word document or pick up a pen and decide to Say Something.

She kept a diary throughout the Suffering Times of the Holocaust, during the times that some still don’t speak for, for an image she drew in her head of her fiancé, Jean Morawiecki, holding the book of her confessions close to him when he could no longer hold her.

She Wrote To Leave Someone She Loved With Untold Treasures of Her Heart. She Wrote Only To Leave Someone with the Single Story.

Helene Berr, she was no Anne Frank. She carried no childlike anticipation within her that the sun would come streaming through the fences of the camp and nest in her curls as the liberation came. She knew all along that she would not make it. And so, she kept that diary for the man who would still need something to hold after all the tragedy seeped into his hands.

She had this chance to make a mark. And so she did.

I have often taken for granted my mobility and potential to leave a mark on this world. With an age of the Internet where it literally takes less than five seconds to imprint something that will stay forever, I take it for granted that one day, if someone is clever enough with a Google search, they will be able to find me.

I spent last January entrenched in the stories of Holocaust survivors, cascading the walls of the United Nations. Some wrote books. Others, like Berr and Frank, had diaries published. But it is a generation of people who are falling away to Old Age. To Life Lived. To years that swapped youthful skin for the whispering of wrinkles upon the faces of those they passed. And I find myself sitting and squirming, praying that we will pick up these stories and push them forward. Because they are Captivating. Because they come Packed with Teaching Moments. Moments that Teach Better than Textbooks. Better than Technology.

I am praying that we are all learning and understanding from these testimonies. Using them as a foundation to draft our own. To take nothing for granted. To leave no page without remnants of dabbled ink.

We have this crazy, crazy ability to leave a mark that will stay. To Imprint. To Stamp. To Collect. To Tell. With a few single Taps on a Keypad.  To tell stories in a more permanent manner that those of the Holocaust, World War II and the Great Depression never had. And so it becomes our job to be storytellers, wouldn’t you say? To pick up stories that are close to being washed away by the tides of a paperback yesterday. To gear ourselves up with the Very Best Verbs & Adjectives to tell stories to the Next Generation.

It’s as if we’ve granted this Immense Potential. Immense Potential for some Remarkable Storytelling, if only we use it right. IIf Only We Use It Right.

It isn’t so much about sitting plugged into a computer all day concocting an internet persona that we envision will live on for lifetimes. It is plugging in after have lived it. It is going out into the world and doing Great Things, having Great Adventures. It is trying new things, being daring and excitable, wide-eyed like children seeking “Mama” in all the places around us.

Paying Attention to One Another. Staying Present to One Another. Not wishing away moments. Not always itching for the next chapter to begin.

It is living in the Here. Scooping up the Now. Finding ways to make the Present Moment blush.

And then recording it all for Our Children, for the Future. For those who will still want to hold us in the days when we can no longer be held.

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December 8, 2011

Meet Hannah: She needs your love letter today.

It’s been tough to write here lately.

If I am being honest, I work a good ten hours a day and all I am left with, when I reach the keys, is speechlessness. Over all of you and what you’ve done with this “little love letter project” of mine.

These days I feel my wings thumping from behind me. And I stop to remember how much I would have killed for this, lived for this, when I was sixteen years old. Full of Fear. Full of Hesitation. Wanting him to like me. Willing to pretend for just a single chance at a sacred word inflated with the Helium of Pretty Girls and Football Players, Popularity.

But today I have a chance, a chance to reach back and write a letter to a girl just like me… I’ve had the chance to speak with Hannah’s family over the internet and this is what I know…

Meet Hannah.

Hannah is a 16-year-old whose parents recently divorced. She’s taken the divorce hard and has recently become very depressed. Her letter requester wrote, “Hannah was picked on when she was younger and it muted her vibrant personality that she had when she was small. Now she is hesitant to let the real Hannah shine through, though she is a very artistically talented and beautiful girl. We really hope that these love letters will speak to her heart, and will be a spark for her when she feels lost and alone in the world.”

Oh, Hannah. Hannah, Hannah, Hannah.

The things I want for you already. And so today I am writing a love letter for you. And I have Kaleigh Somers, a girl whose heart absolutely swelled for you before she ever even knew your name, writing one beside me. And I am hoping that my readers, the ones tracing this post right this moment, will join me in writing a love letter for you today.

Please take the time today to write a love letter to Hannah today. All letters should be mailed to Hannah’s Bundle, PO Box 2061, North Haven CT 06473. More details can be found… H.E.R.E.

Today I am reaching out to coworkers and asking them to write a love letter. Reaching out to my all-star team at She’s the First and asking them to write a love letter. To friends & family & you, to script a letter for a girl who needs to find her wings.

Won’t you join me?

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December 4, 2011

Have yourself a Merry Little Living Room.

I realized then, in that Living Room that only existed for Five Nights of Six Girls’ Lives Somewhere Square in the Season of Giving, that if you find something inside of yourself that can be given to make another fly when you are no longer there to compare wings, then you give it.

“It was two years ago.

Can you believe it?”

Her message pops up on the screen, the corners of the chat box cutting into the layers of ugly Christmas sweater images sitting in my newsfeed.

“The Living Room,” I type.

I know she is talking about the Living Room. I know it will lead into a conversation that will be both good and bad. Both the tangs of sweet and bitter. We’ve never felt anything like those five days. It has not been the same since. She knows it. I know it.

You don’t know how this blog started. Not a single one of you. And if you did, you would realize that it was all one big, giant accident. Two years in the making and it all started with an accident. This blog only exists because two arm chairs, a tangle of tree lights, a battery-powered candle,  five other girls and a Living Room existed first.  

The five of them might be reading this right now and if they are then I want to make sure they hear this: To the girl in an office space in Boston: I am lucky to know you; I wish I told you that more often. To the girl curled up in the campus center with a coffee in her hand, waiting for the next campus meeting: Dinner last weekend wasn’t enough to get out how much I miss you these days. To the ambitious young lady scrolling through this post on her BlackBerry as she gives herself a break from the law school text books: I am your biggest fan because you’ve always been mine. And to the two world shakers, sitting side by side in Kansas City: I could not be more proud of you.

It started Two years ago Today with just Two of us sitting in Two oversized arm chairs, probably at Two in the afternoon. We decided to maneuver the beastly chairs into the middle of our campus center’s stage, sit them around a fake Christmas tree that breathed a sense of Home for the Holidays into the both of us with its pretty little plastic limbs. Any college student knows that it is important to claw and clutch these moments where the holiday season miraculously shows up amidst a chaotic cluster of final papers and tests.

We came back to the two arm chairs and the tree later that night. Another one joined us.

Three Arm Chairs. Two 12-Page Papers. One Tree. And we decided to call it our Living Room.

Another night. Two more girls joined us.

Five Book Bags. Four Arm Chairs. Three Laptops. Two 12-Page Papers. One Tree.

And one battery-powered candle that provided us with flicker of fake glow with one flick of a switch. We roared in laughter over that candle. Oh, how it glowed. We figured that a Living Room needed pictures, so we brought frames. And a candy bowl. What is a living room without a candy bowl?

The last girl tapped in. She demanded a kitchen. She studied better in Kitchens than Living Rooms. So we extended our Living Room and added a table and chairs.

Eight Red Cups. Seven Leftover Brownies. Six Girls. Five Book Bags. Four Arm Chairs. Three Laptops. Two (still not done) 12-Page Papers. One Tree.

Six girls, headphones plugged into their computers, all humming to a different tune but consciously inching closer and taking turns in pointing out that it might never be this way again. One would head for Rome. Another for Prague. One would graduate. They pointed out the hard stuff: that it would never be this way again.

And they were right. Never since then have the six of them shared a single space where the laughter is just the right amount of Heavy and their dreams sing loud enough, above the Christmas carols, just how true they planned to become one day.

At the time, I had this WordPress page and two blog posts. Already, I hated blogging. The whole thought of it scratched at the back of my neck like a tag left carelessly on the shirt collar. Until one of our nights of endless studying in the Living Room, one of the girls started to ache. Her heart swelled. She needed something beyond  a life chat or a hug, a reminder that she’d be ok. I remember walking away from the Living Room that night, plugging my computer into the wall and soaking in the silence as I played with words like cold broccoli and wrote to her. Tap,tap,tap & Publish. I remember thinking: there is so much that we cannot give to one another but I suppose there is trying.

This blog was born out of that Living Room. That Try. That Give. That realization that I never wanted a space for me if I could find a way to make it about someone else. And from it I’ve learned that our lives might never be so much about ourselves as they are about the people who sit beside us. Who Round Our Dinner Table. Who Call Us First, After We’ve Hammered Our Pain into a Text Message. The ringer on our phone goes off and already we can hear them saying, I don’t care if you are sobbing, just speak.

I realized then, in that Living Room that only existed for Five Nights of Six Girls’ Lives Somewhere Square in the Season of Giving, that if you find something inside of yourself that can be given to make another fly when you are no longer there to compare wings, then you give it. That, while you sit in a moment as pristine as the seconds after all the flakes have settled to the bottom of the snow globe in your hands, that we really don’t get any kind of Forever with One Another. We get Chances. We get Moments. We get Raw Opportunities. We get Doors Wide Open. We get Unforgettable. But we don’t get Forever’s. Never. Ever. If we knew that now, and if we remembered every time we found our feet standing beside someone we wish the world for, what would we give? How would we give? Would it be everything? Would it be more than we could ever imagine?

Some days I think about it, how I’d give anything to go back there to the Living Room to the Six Girls Who Made It Home, to thank them all for giving me this starting thread in a tapestry that has mended hearts, inspired others, and Grew Me Up  in the best way possible.

I know I’d have given more if I really stopped to think about the Forever that would escape us all in the moment, slip from our fingers like the holiday season. I know I’d have said it more: I love you but I’ll never keep you here, far away from flying. But promise to turn back sometimes and tell me how you’re soaring.

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November 28, 2011

Lady Gaga, she was born this way. Me? I was born for this.

If you’ve ever felt the love of another deeply, on the brink of fiercely, then I know you’ll pick up writing easily.

Easy like the slow ease that slipped through the cracks in the doorway to the bathroom as you stood beside your mother and learned the art of lipstick for the 300th time. Top lip. Bottom lip. Apply. Purse. Pucker.

That’s it. All I care to pass on after two years spent wedging words into this space.

Feeling the love of another so deeply, so fiercely, that you swear you could be the one to take that Same Love and groove it finely into someone else. That skill, that confidence… That will make anyone very good at anything they try.

If you’ve got that kind of Fierce Love, pick up a pencil and let it spill.  Or a brush and let it go. Or a spoken word and let it ripple.

It’s my secret.

I’ve never taken a writing class. I’ve never draped my name in accolades. I’ve only watched my mother make black bean soup in the kitchen. I’ve only watched my father pour change in a jar. I’ve only stood so close to a man playing the saxophone in Central Park, perhaps too close, so I could pretend for just a second that he wanted to teach me how to breath. With Fire. With Passion. That he wanted to teach me to Breath Breathlessly.

After two years of coming to this blank slate of a WordPress page, my secret to all the words is this: someone loved me good at a young age, good enough to convince me that I was worth breath & life & day, and that, if I had all these things, I would be ok. Tomorrow would be ok. And that if I was to be One of the Lucky Ones with this Rare Kind of Tomorrow that I’ve mistakenly used as a laundry basket for the things I One Day Might Do, then I should use it to make others believe the truth: that they too are all worth breath & life & day.

And that if I was here, standing here, then, it had to be for something. And I might as well explore and find My Something in this world. Because really, what else is there? I’ve believed in pennies turned heads up. In reindeer pawing  just above my turquoise shutters. And I’ve believed that we were all born for Some Kind of Something.

Do you believe it? I mean, do you believe it enough to look for it? To give up for it? To wade in waters until you find it? To wade & wait and actually believe that you were born for Something much Bigger than what fits in the palms of your hands?

Me? I was born for this. Born to be held on subways and cafes. Born to be cradled at the spine, clutched in waiting rooms, held tight by the last flicker of a candle burning at the wick. I was born with this unexplainable, untouchable turns intangible turns untamable, madness inside of me that has left me wondering how you and him said goodbye. Leaves me carrying her heartbreak, his loneliness, the old man’s elation and the skinny girl’s pride, shoveled into my chest until I can dump it on a page. And sit. Just sit there. And find a way to line up words like soldiers, line up words willing to speak for unspeakable things: like Tragedy, like Death, like Heart in the Throat, Late Night “I’ll Meet You Anywhere” Conversations that might just end in We Won’t Make This Work because Here Let’s Circle It On A Map, The Miles That Drag Us Apart that will eventually turn into Let’s Just Forget It Until Morning, Until You Board That Plane, Until I Cannot Feel You Any Longer And Your Sweatshirt Loses Scent. That is what I was born for. My God, I am a bundle of breath because of it.

I am so fiercely, madly born for this that it leaves me walking away from this page. Crying where I shouldn’t cry. Pawing at God’s door like a little puppy. Because I want it so bad, every minute, to just give every second of this Short Little Thing Called Life to letting you know that you’re worth it… In Similes & Metaphors, you’re worth it. In Anecdotes & Allegory, you’re worth it…

I don’t believe people when they try to tell me how to be a child of God.

A child of God? There is really a way?

I say, if you want to be a child of God then find that space of breathlessness within you and then death grip it. Don’t ever let it go. Let it turn up your chin with the sunrise. Let it rock you to sleep. Let it leave you failing to put your finger on it. And let it be the very thing that makes you believe that people who lead breathless lives are the ones who first say, I’m worth it.

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November 22, 2011

The Forgotten Fairy Tale of Should’ve, Could’ve & Would’ve

Like any normal child, I started writing letters to my One Day, Some Day daughter when I was 11-years-old. I’ve been writing her into the margins of my diaries for eleven years now in hopes that one day she’ll find these books buried somewhere in the attic and know through the etchings of my messy cursive that I wanted the most for her. Even when I’ve had no idea what to want for myself, I wanted the most for her. The following posts are for her, my One Day, Some Day Daughter.

To my One Day, Some Day Daughter:

This is a story made for the day when you wake up, Hair Knotted by the Pull of your Pillow, and stumble straight into Should’ve & Could’ve & Would’ve: a trio of sisters that the world should call witches, for they’ll snatch up your dreams and scarf down your desires, and Fix You Up Pretty in a Too Tiny Box that God Never Made You For.

He made you for dancing—for words too eloquent to say with more than a whispered voice—for tinsel delicately strewn on the branches of baby evergreens—for icing, thick and sugared on the tops of every little thing you touch. 

But one day, one gloom-stricken day, you’ll stumble into a cottage of sorts, with doors that lock behind you, to find Should’ve herself and the things she thinks you were made for.

You’ll know her by the rings piled on every long, stickly finger. The Diet Coke she clutches in her hand. The mole on her face, right beside the curl in her lips caked with a lipstick color that Chanel phased out two decades ago.

She’ll look you straight in the eye and ask you where you’ve been.

“A little late to join the par-tay, Babycakes. Aint that right, Could’ve?” she’ll say to you, slapping her gum. “HA, HA, HA, bet you were off thinking you could make something of yourself. Like you could move, bah! Like you could make a difference, BAH! Could’ve? COULLLLDDD’VEEEEE!!! Where are you!!! Getttt innnn hereeeeee nowwwww! And bring the cat!”

Could’ve will emerge, wearing a bathrobe. Always one to wear a bathrobe. And a hazard zone of red hair perched upon her head.

“Yea, yea, yea,” Could’ve will say, shuffling into the room with a fat orange fur ball tucked under arm. “What the heck do you want…. And WHO are YOU!?”

“My name is….” You’ll start to say.

“Shhhhhh… we really don’t care! Names don’t matter in this place. Dreams don’t either. And certainly, certainly, not your silly little ambitions. Leave those at the door. Should’ve, get the remote. Judge Judy is on!”

From a corner of the cottage, you’ll watch Should’ve & Could’ve sink into the television, into a world they’ve always known. A world with no pushing, no pulling, no climbing. No maybe. No possibly. And for that matter, no Possi or Bility.

With a creek and a slam, the front door of the cottage will usher in a young lady. Young and fair, wearing a green cape, the hood draped over her long black hair.

“Where the heck did you run off to, Would’ve?” Should’ve will holler, not turning back to see her sister’s flushed cheeks. “We’ve got Doubt coming over for dinner in an hour and you gotta sweep the floors!”

“A date…” Would’ve will say meekly.

“A WHAAAAA?”

“A Date.”

“With Whommmmmmmmm!?!”

“Try.” The name comes out short. Abrupt. You’ll feel the heavy gust of shame whipping through the cottage the moment Would’ve lets the name drop from her lips.

“Try!?!” Could’ve will roar. “You went on another date with Try? You stupid, stupid girl! What have we told you one million times before? Try does not go for girls like you.”

“I know you’ve said that but he’s charming and endearing and…” Would’ve will say.

“You are different, Would’ve! Cant you see that? He will notice soon enough and then he’ll break your heart. People don’t try on a girl like you! Give him up….”

“You think you are special and you are not,” Should’ve will chime in. “Stop it already, Stop the Some Day, Stop the Day Dreaming. Stop the Special. Stop the Stand Out. You’ll only get hurt from boys like Try, he’s probably already forgotten your name.”

You’ll see it unfold. See the happiness seep straight from the bones of Would’ve as she stands in the center of her Too Tiny Kitchen and tries to erase Try from her memory.

Dismantle his name in some sort of fashion.

Boil the T in the pot for the dinner made for Doubt.

Sweep the R under the staircase, beside forgotten cobwebs.

Wash the Y away in the sink after the dishes pile up.

She’ll forget the flowers that Try brought her. She’ll scrape away the times when Try showed her how to climb a tree and look down from the top.

She’ll take to pushing the felt of the eraser across the chalkboard of the time when she and Try laid down in a pile of leaves and he took her hand in his. “Would’ve, do you have a middle name?” he asked.

“Well, I suppose it’s Have. My name is really Would Have but people call me Would’ve for short.”

“Hmm,” Try said, “Have. It is a really pretty name. What does it mean?”

“I don’t really know. I’ve never really known it and I’ve grown up hearing from my sisters that I’ll never know it. I guess it is word that makes it possible to believe that if you want something then you could hold it, secure it, clutch it. All those things.”

“Are there things like that for you? Do you want things like that?”

“Well, no one has ever asked me that. I don’t really think about it.”

“You should think about it more,” Try said. “I like it better than Would’ve. I will call you that from now on. Have. Have. Have. My Little Have.”

She’ll forget that Try ever told her she was different in a good kind of way, special in a certain kind of way. And you’ll watch her Sink, Sink, Sink into a Stew of Sadness over the Try she’d never have.

And Would’ve, not quite the Have she wanted to be, will see you standing off in the corner, in the Shadows of the Shack. And she’ll give you a look that aches, saying, “Go…. Go….” And you better go then. You better go then.  “Before they notice you’re gone… Go… Go…”

And as you go, slipping out the door and away from a world where Too Pretty Girls get pent up into Too Tiny Boxes, Would’ve will tuck a note into the crook of your hand. And you’ll become a messenger for a girl who needs her Try.

“To my Dearest Try,

One day I may know you better, in a way where I am not so afraid of you and I am not so petrified by the good you could bring to me. Right now I am just the Would’ve, stuck beside the Could’ve and the Should’ve that I’ve known my whole life. And I am longing to know something different… longing to know what the world would be like if I could just be Have. Have. Have. Have.

One day, I’ll fly away. One day, I’ll fly away.

Love,

Your Little Have”

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November 18, 2011

Let’s just start with a Single Story instead of miles in shoes that never fit us before.

Up until yesterday, the person who came up with the statement “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” was on my “If we cross paths, I am entitled to punch you in the face” list.

Truth. He or she was right up there, wedged between the individual responsible for spelling “love” with a U and the genius who began the “Wuts up? Nm, U? Nm. Cool” phenomenon. So, if you see any of these culprits lurking around the café or the aquarium, or wherever you lurk, punch them in the face and tell them that Jane Austen and Shakespeare sent you.

I’ve always thought it was a horrid, stuffy statement. Walking a mile in the shoes of someone else. Wah, wah, wah! They are too tight. They don’t fit. The heels are too high. And they are clunky, clunky, clunky. I can barely stand and you would expect me to learn how to walk?

I’ve been a long time chewer and spitter upper of “shoey” statements until these love letter requests began rattling my world. They keep pouring into my inbox and half the time I just want to write across a page: What keeps you walking? How the heck do you even wake up and decide to walk?

Shove it in an envelope. Drop it in the mail.

It’s like we are keeping this big secret that if released into the night would be the key to telling another that we’ve been there before. That we’ve known those same shoes, splayed with mud. That we’ve worn the same rain boots, the same sneakers, to bite back the pain. And how did it get so lost? How did it become something we only talk about under the lights of glassy conference hall, before a speaker with a booming voice and 8,000 individuals who are shimmying into the skins of vulnerability like a wet suit.

I’m believing lately that it is easier to tell an Ugly Story, to guide another into a Safe Place of Sameness, by first sinking back into those shoes that fit our feet at the time. The converse sneakers we slid into on the night where we gathered courage by the  armful, like hot whites falling from the drier, and found a way to tell him it was over. The snow boots we wore on the day a police car pulled up and forever rearranged the way we would take family photos. No mother? No brother?

It’s remarkably easier to tell you about the pair of black heels, with the now frayed bows, that I wore while falling in love for the very first time. How they fit my feet. The blisters that later kissed my heels when all I could say in the mirror was, He Kissed Me. How that night was jutted with stars and I thought someone might say it to me, “You know, you are beautiful”. And even if they didn’t, I’d still know it was glowing off my skin. How I got caught in the rain in those heels once. And I didn’t mind. The mud & water were good for them in the same way that falling into love was good for a girl made up of 80% climbing.

It’s simpler to tell you that I wore a pair of combat boots most days when I lived in the Bronx because they made me feel braver. Black boots from the Gap, I’ll tell you how I zipped them straight up before I ever tell you how I lived a scared kind of life. A life that left me wondering, as I waited for the walking man to light up on the other side of the road, “Am I Really A Child Of God? Or Has He Forgotten Me In All This Mess?”

I’m starting to believe that it really has nothing to do with walking a mile in the shoes of another. Maybe it would be just enough to acknowledge the walking. To commend, even if we cannot understand, the fact that we all got up today and decided to push forward. That some of us are wearing cowboy boots and contemplating if the world would care if we were gone tomorrow. That others are lacing up baseball cleats and rounding a set of bases for a best friend of ours that is hooked up to IVs in a hospital room.

What good would it be to walk a mile in your shoes? The world needs me to walk in my own. Just tell me that you are walking. Tell me when you get all stuck. Tell me when you need to sit. I get it, I get it, today might just be a day for walking a few steps instead of Fully, Really Away this time.

Let’s just start with a Single Story instead of miles in shoes that never fit us before. Stories about walking. And the shoes we wear to face the day.

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November 14, 2011

Your daddy is no Rumpelstiltskin and I’ve not got the bones of Betsy Ross.

Like any normal child, I started writing letters to my One Day, Some Day daughter when I was 11-years-old. I’ve been writing her into the margins of my diaries for eleven years now in hopes that one day she’ll find these books buried somewhere in the attic and know through the etchings of my messy cursive that I wanted the most for her. Even when I’ve had no idea what to want for myself, I wanted the most for her. The following posts are for her, my One Day, Some Day Daughter. 

Dear Daughter of Mine with the neon pink nails,

Honesty sits square on the kitchen table in our home, somewhere between the salt shaker and the pan of brownies that I managed to burn. And so, I’ll just be honest and tell you straight: Your daddy is no Rumpelstiltskin and I’ve not got the Bones of Betsy Ross.

I’d be lying if I said I never thought how your life might be different if I’d been the girl all wrapped up in thoughts of red, white & blue while your daddy Rumpel watched me from across the roller rink. If I’d been thinking of stripes as he said to his fairy tale pals, “There’s my star.”

I’d be foolish not to tell you that some days I wonder what it would have been like if he and I had collided like a firework pent-up in the garage for far too long. And if the rest had just been called History. If we’d wrapped ourselves up in a One Day American Flag and laughed up to the rafters about a Some Day Daughter: You.

Dear Daughter of Mine with the zebra-striped nails,

I would have started sewing early for you if I’d been a Betsy with a Rumpel by my side. While Sleeping Beauty snoozed in our recliner and the dwarves played Apples to Apples on the floor, I’d hold up the latest cloak for Cinderella and she’d surely nod. Pleased.

“This one is Strength,” I’d say, folding the finished cloak and handing it to Little Boy Blue. “Can you run upstairs and hang it up for me? Right in the middle of Grace and Peace.”

“It’s a fine, fine collection you’ve got for her there,” Cinderella might’ve said. “I only wish my mother had been alive to knit me these kinds of cloaks, for the days when life gets tough and shoes don’t seem to fit right. But why are you knitting them all so early? She surely won’t fit into them until she is grown.”

“Cinder, Cinder, Cinder,” I’d tell her (because everyone knows her nickname was never Ella) “The sooner I make them, the sooner I can wear them. I’ll wear them Monday upon Monday so that no Some Day Daughter of Mine ever questions if someone’s love for her is like a well-worn sweater. So she feels me all around her, even when I’m no longer there.”

Dear Daughter of Mine with the pearly white nails,

I know there will be a day when life is going to hurt you, crush you, make you feel the magic has seeped out from your billowed sleeves. And what will I do? What will I do without a cloak of Strength to place around your shoulders? How will I manage without a closet full of Hope & Serendipity & Agape– hemlines of yellow & purple & silver– for the days when life starts showing you that she’s got teeth and she’s got bite?

Because I know I cant stop it. Cant stop the first boy who will break your heart. Cant stop the first time that you start to doubt the One who made the sunsets all for you. Cant stop you when you cry & spit & curl into a bucket of tears on the floor. No piece of silk will stop that. No cloak of gold will halt the sting.

Dear Daughter of Mine with the aqua blue nails,

I’ve come down to my knees for you nearly 1,000 times, in hopes that He’ll give me what it takes to stitch it all within you. Because I’ve not got the fingers of a Weaver and I’ve not got knitting needles all up in my hair.

And so I tell him everyday, “Break my heart and shatter my bones if it means I’ll have something to teach her when Growing Up hits her like a tidal wave. Place me into spots where I am weak, where I am hungry, where I am helpless.  Show me how to crawl instead of walk, walk instead of run.”

Dear Daughter of Mine with the red polished nails—my Some Day Daughter Sleeping Soundly Somewhere South of Saturn— there’s no closet full of cloaks waiting here for you. But I am waiting. Waiting for the day when your laughter becomes the soundtrack for my way to work, the lullaby for the sleepless nights.

And I am learning. Learning to go as Black and Blue as a Bob Dylan song to make you feel my love.

And I am stitching. Already stitching my heart into every sleeve you’ll ever own.

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