fact #40

sometimes in the middle of the night, a memory finds me and i lay silently, watching the memory like a movie, amazed at how much i've managed to block out. 

fact #39

sympathy cannot be allowed to overrun the neccessity for personal accountability. 

fact #38

it is disturbingly easy to ignore the glimmer (or car crash) of your own future staring you right in the face. 

detonate

for a long time i struggled to figure out how to live as the person i'd suddenly become. a person who woke up one day and was no longer anyone's daughter. what does that mean? what does that look like? who are you once that original title is disintegrated? what becomes of my daughterly rebellion, especially when said rebellion had been so long under way and so close to being won? 

.

who am i to yell at?

who am i to war against?

i war against a dead woman's ghost and memories of an absentee father.

what does that mean? 

what do my tantrums accomplish? 

.

i spin in sadness, always unexpected, for however impossible and stupid that seems. i mean, it seems stupid and impossible even to me.  i am aware there is plenty to be sad about.  i should never be shocked by sadnesses arrival. accepting reaity has been harder than i'd thought it'd be. 

.

alex said: when i think about your story and your family and what you've come up against, i think it's incredible you didn't detonate your own life.

. 

i like that she chose that word: detonate. 

.

i remember a good and awful majority of my explosions. 

i look at my lips and eyes and see my mother.

i look at my shoulders and eyebrows and see my father.

i am glad to have set the family molotov cocktail down. 

now: the arduous task of inching away and not picking it back up. 

Will

i receive an unexpected text from an old friend in my hometown near midnight. he is on the opposite coast so it isn't quite 9pm for him. he wanted to check in on the one person he knows in New York, a person whose face he has not seen in nearly a decade. 

he tells me small facts about his family, his wife and children whom i know nothing about; the instruments the kids are learning to play, his wife earning a 2nd Master's Degree. 

"Also, I am still working for my Dad in the orange grove."

i read these simple words and remember the smell of the place, the road leading up to it through palm trees, of being stung by a bee for the very first time while driving passed it on the narrow two-lane road. the bee had flown in through the passenger-side window and stung me in the face. this road was flanked by a deep irrigation ditch. unable to pull over until we got passed the stop sign at the far end of this long road, my friend was finally able to pull the stinger out of my throbbing cheek, it pumping its poison into me that entire time.

my eyes stung with tears  being suddenly reminded of his father's orange grove and i can tell you it is something beyond sentimentality, something well beyond nostalgia or yearning, that brought such a reaction on: it was the reminder that Beauty and Tenderness persist... have persisted in the exact same place this entire time that i have been gone.