Just People

We're all just people. That fact could be disappointing if it wasn't too busy being a huge relief.

I feel like I have less and less to say, and I don't know why. Everything inside of me feels still and silent and fine to slip into the shadows and watch. Maybe that's what growing up will be like for me. Softer, not louder.

I'm settling into my life, at least for now, at least this life. Later, things will shift imperceptibly or all at once and I will squirm into a fit. Maybe someday the squirming will stop, and I will think, I've been here long enough to know how this works. I've done this before.

I just realized that I've always assumed I was born generally knowing how to be mortal and human, but how could that be? I bumble through everything, and why not? I'm just a baby on this earth. I'm just people.

Practice

It's been a long day. Turns out, some aspects of not working are harder than working (though leave it to me to find the rub in my idyllic situation, regular old debbie downer). I didn't realize how much I relied on my job and its paycheck and routine time commitment to validate my days, and now I am constantly trying to figure out the worth of my work. My work. What I do to fill my time when the entire day is mine.

For the few of you still reading this blog (yay, Amanda!), you've probably noticed a drastic upswing in posts. That's me trying to find my writing voice again, in addition to slugging it out on the page. It is so so so hard. Unexpectedly hard. Want to quit hard. Nothing comes easily; everything is second-guessed. So I'm just coming back to this place again and again, hoping that hard won't last forever or that enough lovely and light will happen to make the hard worth it.

This sums up the day:

“Sometimes I think it’s harder for me to be transparent to myself than to appear so to the reader.”  

--Nancy K. Miller

Amen and amen.

My view

I am at the community library, admittedly eager to be taken in distraction because it strains less than the work I am trying to do. I listen to the man on the phone who asks the other end her blood type. I watch an unknown hand play with the electric blinds on the wall facing me, up and down, up and down, up and down. I'm slightly annoyed. I stare out the windows to my right: how the dirt patterns resemble that of brown trout, how even dirt accumulates beautifully. I scan the books on the shelves to my left: Programming Video Games for the Evil Genius and Naturally Fun Parties for Kids and Ventriloquism  and George Harrison: Living in the Material World. Apparently, I'm sitting in the nonfiction section of the library, which explains why the writing is giving me grief. Too many kinds of truth.

Suddenly, as suddenly as any plot twist happens in the kind of truth I write, a young woman walks into the scene pushing a stroller and corralling a toddler. "Say hi to Daddy," she says, and the toddler clambers onto a young man sitting by the blinds. His cheek-kisses are loud. The woman unstraps a blonde baby girl from the stroller and adds her to the dad's arms. Then the woman sinks into the kitty-corner couch and watches.

So different from my life.

Sometimes I resist sharing how eager anxious desperate afraid impatient I am to know what that feels like (a family, a husband, a child). That tune's been sung so many times before; no need to add. But it's still my heart and still my song, so today, I'm owning it.

On Borrowing

I was standing in line at Great Harvest, waiting for a loaf of honey whole wheat, and trying not to stare. A woman behind me stood with her mother, waiting for a loaf of something with raisins in it. 

Maybe it was the way they touched, arm in arm, then holding hands, then daughter's arm around mother's shoulder--how their togetherness evolved. Maybe it was the permanent confusion on the mother's face; that she brought her fingers to her mouth and dropped them again, discouraged that even her motions were beyond comprehension. Maybe it was the mother's white hair, her face heavy with wrinkles, how she wore her age like a mask.

For all of this, I found myself wishing I could explain: No, you're not a novelty to gawk at; no, I don't pity you. You're so familiar, only I haven't been able to remember until right now, watching you, and if I look away, maybe I'll forget again for too long. Thank you for your daughterness, your motheredness.  

June

Last Sunday, I made a new friend. Her name is June, and she turned 90 on June 26. Her husband Ralph died three years ago, and June keeps his picture in her reading room. She says good morning to him every day, and he smiles back at her. Sometimes she says more, but she didn't tell me what. 

June wakes up with the sun and does the day's work. She gardens and vacuums on different days because she doesn't have the energy for both. Once the day's work is done, she gives the rest of her day to God. She feels guided to study things that help her bless others. 

June believes in miracles.

I was supposed to be doing this writing, but...

I was supposed to be doing this writing, but my fingers stopped working. I don't mean they stopped moving. No--they tapped and rolled and tensed and released. They passed interesting sounds back and forth, one hand doing the wave, then right index finger against left in a dueling duet. They experimented with taps on the keyboard and on the table and on the skin, finding that each surface sounded satisfyingly like the raps of a childish drummer in a civil war marching band. Rat-a-tat-tat-tat rat-a-tat-tat-tat rat-a-rat-rat-rat-a-tat. They enlisted my leg--the one that always wants to keep time--and suddenly I was all tapping. Not writing. Just tapping, but not just, because I was looking out the back door at the pear tree, slightly less burdened with each passing day, and at the deck, slightly more burdened and stinking from rotted, fallen pears, and as I looked, I thought I might like to dance on that deck under the pear tree and really let the tapping loose.

[Meanwhile, the fingers persist through my daydream. "I wish I were in Dixie, hooray, hooray; I wish I were in Dixie, all the good boys are in Dixie. La da da da dum dum da da doo doo doo da dum dum dum da dum da dum dum da da doo da da doo da da doo da da dum."]

How lovely to be under the pear tree instead of here not writing because my fingers aren't working, having taken a vacation to the town of tap.

possible

i think i want to write because my windows are open and the presence of recent rain is encouraging. it even rains in the desert, in the summer; so: many things are possible. 

the thought calms. 

i've never liked failing, so i don't spend much time with possible. i prefer probable, i adore definite, i crave absolute, and as a result, i've become a career coward. we all have risk meters sewn into our hearts--sometimes they're called comfort zones--and though i have no idea how they are calibrated so differently for each of us, i understand perfectly when i've gone too far. possible is outside my comfort zone. i like calculated stretches. 

and yet. i've lately chosen my way to the edge of the cliff, hoping to force a leap or a fall, or most likely, a leap that feels convincingly like a fall right up to the last minute. it's possible.