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Last  weekend I carried a ripping paper bag of empty beer cans and birthday candles.  Halfway through the crowd it split open and we all laughed and I remembered that I can ask for help and there is time for it all.

I have been in love more times than I can carry. I remember the innocuously small things,

Like the way it rained ice in Yellowstone and the way we got “married” in Virginia in secret and the way my stomach ached with all the unknown as we ate honeymoon cheeseburgers in that motel. The way my nephew called my Steamboat home a treehouse and I wanted it to be true. The way we shoveled and chopped wood all four long winters. The big pupils and endless nights of moonlight bluegrass. The way I drove away from Colorado heaving my heavy ribcage alone.

The questions

my dog’s eyes asked from the backseat  atop all of our belongings.

I remember the way the humidity of Houston made anything but patio palomas a possibility. The way I carried a baby for a short while and the way letting it go hurt everything, even my eyelids. I will remember the days I spent on the beaches of California with boys from other countries. The way the van carried me to the redwoods and back again. The way we made a version of love in the dark on that small slat of a bed.

The way I kissed them all in tents and on mountains and on jetty rocks throughout my twenties. The way I formed my own foundation by pouring myself into cups.

I measure my mirth in memories. In the way my heart fits behind someone’s else’s ribcage.

He tells me that the reason I feel so much is that perhaps my cup is too full. That we fell in real love and I didn’t take the time to empty it all before I said yes, I can take yours too. Your memories. Your stories. I can make room for all the memories I want to make together.

I feel as though I slosh over the sides and it always catches me by surprise . Each jostle and story that was not mine leaves less room for the good. I have been filled up with a question there is no answer to.

Like how her body felt in the bed we now share. Like how it felt to be laughing in rivers with them. Why all of our eyes are souls and why mine won. What was real in loving them all at once. What those undeveloped disposable cameras are filled with.

I wonder of things that I can’t possibly hold. I feel as though I am trolling a long net, unable to filter what is worthy to keep. Let it go, he reminds me. Let go amd love it all. Love yourself.

Perhaps my mirth is in the depths of all of this. The carrying of too much. How I carry too much from the houses. The cars. The past.

How I can let some things go. How I can ask for  help. Maybe even how I can see it all as worthwhile and still leave space in my cup.

waiting

I am waiting for the heat to break so that I can fix the cracked hose and clear the spider webs. I am waiting to dip tired fingers into cool water and form clay again. I am waiting for a negative test.  Perhaps I am waiting to be tested. To throw my all into something worthwhile, shoulder first.  To be bruised by a passion and come out on another side. How many layers how much life? I read an essay in my own hand from years ago and realized I asked this then. How much is allowed?

I am waiting for  the squash to bloom somewhere so that I can feel movement in seasons. I am waiting for someone else to die and I am always waiting for someone to be born.  I am waiting for a bank deposit and for the coffee to finish. For the neighbor to move. For a wedding. For a song.

Immeasurable

My friend talks about vapors that we accidentally stumble into. She says it’s like a gray fog in a room filled with what was once there, or she says it could be a memory you weren’t even a part of, the creeps and coils into your arms until your bones ache like arthritis, and all you can do is blame yourself for getting lost. 

The wind blew mean through our ears last week and he said it so kind that we couldn’t let it blow our aura’s off

A cowboy gave me Patti Smith’s book and I lit a candle for the week. For all them days.

I listen to a book while I chop basil that tells of the four Buddhist immeasurables. 

“There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.”

The moon is a brightness this week against the winter blue of an early sunset and I have decided to take up running again 

I haul my body above the still mountain fog and the air is so damn cold like 

stumbling into a good memory

and maybe it could all just be a mantra for keeping your aura on tight

Ace of Wands

Cuban babies up well past eleven, sucking on bottles and music

Letting a small Italian woman with milky-blue eyes retell my life

The tarot cards speak of swords and fools and death. I understand more than I let on. Maybe that could be a superpower

My sister tells me in that old boat pub to not worry about giving my heart away. She says Jill you give the same amount of yourself to a stranger as you would to someone you love. She says don’t go changing but always remember that 4 quarters are better than 100 pennies in your purse

We greet the frayed parts of ourselves when we gather

My sister says it best that we’re our most us and I say it sideways when I say I feel too seen

We all know how to get there and we all know the way home

I stuff it in my pocket and let the nonna’s words fall into the seaweed

Understanding that I can write my own cards and still heed advice

We swap the love chore of collecting coffees in the morning and we share toothpaste, showers, birthday candles and cigars. We say we feel him everywhere but it means something different. My brother misses building forts in the woods. My mother misses being needed so borderline-badly. My sister and I miss knowing we had more time to right a path 

I watch humanity crawl the boardwalk at sunset and we all know the words to Bohemian Rhapsody in that way that only happens in the folds

Quiet superpowers with only the good quarters in my purse.

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We haul your sofa from Nambe and jump when spiders reach out from corners of the antiquities

Shag carpet hunting and navigating the thrill of the unknowns in the hardware store

We sleep hot in my sheets but I still reach to touch a foot, a back. In the morning we snooze to center and come back to the cuddle.

I miss you in the future lifetimes and I dream of things I had never compromised before

Babies and hard work and deep sleeps and the impossible joyful confusion of a happy marriage. Things I don’t know. But I know.

I pad around the floors and remember that I am always fine. I call my mom from the windy warm dog park and tell her things like yes I’ve been working hard and gosh it’ll be nice to be together again and I tell her I’m in love in sideways words and she knows. She always knows. I wonder how many times we are allowed to witness certain feeling stir up in the mud of the heart. A quotient allowance of joy. I wonder how many times the things we carve will taste good and I wonder if I will ever stop wanting to crawl into the sun and rest

I bike home from work to let my body crumple on the dusty brick floor where the sugar ants match and cry for the ones who pass and the collective loss of here. I let myself curl into the weight of grief. That non linear pavement that runs into the “maybe things will ease up” prayers fills the rooms and I can’t help but understand how much it stings. The stuckness of it all

I say goodbye and hello in the same breath these days because behind every full moon is the heavy slosh of moving forward.

Even in the impossible joy.

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Inspired  by John Taylor’s month away 

For once I’d much rather be me 

Tonight I drove past your street and I forgot to look. And finally ithe sky is cotton candy pink and blue again even the moon came out just a sliver sliver of hope the spring and the reminder that time marches on

What is a sliver of hope and the sky is clear blue again and the sun burns bright tonight and my friend smiles and we talk of goals and I edit words at the bar and I soak up the Wi-Fi and a smile from my best friends dimples that I’d missed and for once, I’d much rather be me.

marigolds

I want to call my dad and ask him what he’s been reading lately.  I want to tell him that I am trying to be good and I’d hear back, in an east coast staccato, “Can’t touch up the Mona Lisa, kid”

I want one of his clean-shaven cheek kisses in the morning and a giant squeeze of aftershave and toothpaste.

I want an Adirondack chair because he told he once that if you’ve got an Adirondack you’ve got your shit together

I want him to say ‘One two-three-four-five…what comes after five? Cocktails!”

All I really want to do is let this scream out that’s been building in my throat since I saw the edge.

Caught wanting to peel back these shrouds 

Weeping and laughing and shouting words that hold truth, without fancy fuckery

To drink a dirty martini with five hundred olives and dance in the desert in a skirt and smile

I’m tired of pastel graphics 

What will become of all of us once the internet burns?

Have we fled so far from the cave that we’ve forgotten how to make fire?

magical thinking

“Our breath is brief, and being so

Let’s make our heaven here below,

And lavish kindness as we go.”

― Robert Service

I carried one of his books back with me across the country. She stuffed it hurriedly and importantly into my bag. Pages swept with sea, torn and stained by a hurricane. I carried it to the desert and here it sits, on my old desk next to the marigold, importantly. I saved one of his masks from the old Ford. It fell into my lap as I pulled the visor down.

I’m having trouble being here. What is there to do that can be more important than sitting with a feeling? I am not certain that I am ever going to be the kind of person that I admire. Maybe it is best time to reckon with myself.

I would be a terrible bore to play chess against, because I am forever lingering. I’ve wanted to be the type of person that moves quickly and in a way that propels growth. Maybe I can be okay with the lingering. That could be enough for now. 

I just know that all I ever want to do is lie in bed and read dead poet’s words.  I want to sit in the soft sand and listen to seagulls fight over corn chips. I want to laugh with my aunt in the dewy grass and talk until memories feel real.. I want endless night hours, filled with slow dancing to Bruce Springsteen. To  slip between unknown meridians of time, because it doesn’t matter, really.

I want to sleep in my dad’s oversized old t-shirt until I feel better about waking up and making decisions that move me forward, away from here.