"It'll be ok"

How many times has someone said these words to me? How many times have I felt desperate to hear them, and angry and bitter that I was alone, and didn't hear them from a companion? Quieting my mind sometimes seems like such an insurmountable task...the worries about my bank account, how my life compares to what I imagine others have, my loneliness, my feelings of not being good enough or not doing enough to warrant love.  And yet if I added up all of the times someone has told me, "It will be ok", would the sum of that care outweigh the pain I put myself through pretending that no one had ever loved me enough to stand by me, pretending that I've never been loved, that I am really alone?

"It will be ok" - the magic words that say something so completely opposite of what they seem to say. These words don't mean that your pain is irrelevant, though they may encourage you to consider a larger context, to take a moment for perspective. They don't mean that you will be the same, or that anything will be like it was before. They don't mean that you will be good, even. They just mean you will survive, and sometimes that is the most comforting thing anyone can say.

"It will be ok" doesn't mean the speaker can fix anything, or even that the speaker will be with you when the clouds clear. I've still found the words to be powerful, a belief of someone outside myself in myself when I feel utterly incompetent, a belief in goodness and hope when I can't see anything worth saving.

"It will be ok" has preceded a lot of adventure and joy in my life, and has been itself the source of a lot of intimacy and tenderness. I can never get enough reassurance, though, and almost as soon as I hear the words, I'm missing them, and building fear and voids and needs and worry. If I had a magic power, I'd want to be able to open a photo album that would display all of the "it will be ok" moments of forty years, fanning them out in colors and emotions and connections of a life lived among people who have loved me and supported me and believed I was valuable, people who haven't done what I may have tried to puppet them into, but who have shown up in unexpected ways to tell me that it would be ok.

Hospitality of wishes

What if I treated wishes with kindness? Listened graciously to the desires of others without hearing obligations? Was patiently attentive to my own hopes instead of snarling, "It doesn't matter what you want." What if?

What if I heard wishes not as needs, and not as insulting fancies arising from privilege...what if I could recognize wishes as something gentler, something more significant...respectful preferences of a guest, or trusting confessions from one heart to another, or from my own soul?

Would I be less likely to fall apart later, hysterical about my lover, family, friends not meeting my needs - my ignored wishes returned to me in disguise? Would I be a better friend, less resentful, more present?

Would I sometimes give joyfully to panhandlers without discomfort, and sometimes politely decline without guilt, without needing to pontificate about my decision? 

Would I be less afraid of drama, secure in my own boundaries?

Would I be better equipped to listen to intense pain from those I love? Would I be less defensive and hurt when their pain is about me, and less likely to assume it is about me at all times?

Would I?

Would those I love feel more heard, seen...would strangers in my world feel more included? Would all of us feel less needy? If our wishes were treated more politely, if we ignored wishes less, and rolled our eyes less at disillusioned disappointment, and were less likely to tell each other that wishes matter less than needs, would those hopes be less likely to mutate into demands? What if it was ok to wish, without waiting for all needs to be met first? Is there a way to honor wishes, so as to be more discerning about needs, to limit what cannot be declined, to get better at honestly requesting care, to worship our fellow humans by giving them more sincere choices? 

What if my gift to you is to give you the freedom to decline my requests, without punishment? To promise that I will take care of myself if you say no?

What might it be like, if there were more choices than obligations?

I can see Terence's smile at Olive Garden in 1993, "Hospitaliano." Can I learn hospitaliano, towards my own wishes, towards the wishes of others, moving beyond "niceness" - a land of repressed desires and cyclical explosions of resentful needs - into a place of attentive kindness and self-sufficiency and earnest free will?

What if I had fewer needs and more whims? What if I said no more often AND more kindly? What if I granted more wishes and refused more burdens? What if I was more of a dad and less of a mom? What if we all were?

https://books.google.com/books?id=APshr1dOhk4C&dq=the+experience+of+being+needy+private+exclamation 

Two middle-aged Asian men with a selfie stick

A beautiful, laughing black woman in scrubs taking a walk with her boyfriend. A wispy white hipster girl with pixie hair & Risky Business sunglasses. I'm holding my coffee mug and a book, waiting for the signal at Fletcher & Huron at 10:22 am on a Saturday in June. I walk through the silent festival venue, passing a bewhiskered, muscley young man walking what appears to be a small red bear with a fox's tail. He's wearing the same glasses as the pixie girl, but without the sun protection. 

The fountain creates a calming backdrop to the maddening chirp of the chipmunk, who increases his volume & frequency as he notices me watching him. His voice echoes, after a moment's delay, in the vibration of the metal streetlamp post behind me. There are sirens, far away, like the sun, muted by the morning cloud duvets.

Tiny gold florets in flowers that look like pieces of cauliflower - if only Sandra were here to tell me what they are. 

The echo isn't an echo after all; it's a second chipmunk.

Just outside my apartment building is a cement trunk, dumping its load through a chute angled into my neighbor's backyard. It is probably what woke me, along with the 7 am sunshine happy to find no serious resistance in my almost transparent window-shade. Michael loses his mind over that window-shade. It doesn't block light, doesn't darken the bedroom, doesn't provide privacy. I don't want it to. It does its job perfectly, which is to suggest privacy, and to soften edges, without denying me my window to the world. I certainly sleep sounder, more deadlike, in spaces with blackout curtains. But I am not convinced I sleep better. The disorientation of waking in a space that has no connection to anything larger, to opening curtains and finding a world that went on moving without me and seems not to give a damn...I find the process of reintegrating on those mornings very unsettling, the work to rejoin the stream of life seems to undo whatever benefit I gained from uninterrupted sleep. I don't want my waking and sleeping to be so divorced from one another.

Tami mentioned last night enjoying seeing me re-emerge on Facebook, into my summer self. Slower, more thoughtful. I may have too much divorce between my winter and summer selves, between my work and leisure selves, to accommodate a fierce break in conscious states.

A butterfly landed on my bare toes and ran away when I turned to look at what was tickling me. Unless it was a lizard, or frog. It's in the cauliflower-flower stalks, small brown foot-tickler. Chipmunk Primo ran by the other foot to join his companion. My coffee cup is empty & I can't focus on Marie-Louise Von Franz. Bell towers and giggling teens on campus tours and the birds are so damn happy they don't have to wear a bra or be punctual or make good choices.

I gave up and laid down fully on the cool cement wall of the raised bed. I saw a woman who looked like Adrienne laying down on a bench the other night waiting for the bus, thoughts of "Rock on" warring with "Be considerate of others and how much space you are taking up." The former won, along with a bit of jealousy at her fearlessness, thinking I could never do that. I've sat up even now. People judge. People expect you to anticipate their needs. They shouldn't need to ask you to behave yourself. 

I lay down again. The cement is so cool. Welcome back, Jolie.

The ribbon on the Mylar balloon scuffs the donation pillar. The sun makes a break from the duvet.

I wondered as I walked here about the work/summer divorce, and whether I should be more integrated. Does holding your breath for ten months so you can roll in daisies (or have your nose tickled by cauliflower-flowers) create more or less wholeness and goodness in my life? Would it not be wiser to be more moderate? 

Education isn't a profession of moderation, though, for educators. No one expects a teacher to do a moderate job. They want a miracle. Miracles don't need to use the restroom at regular intervals and they don't accept "good enough."

I don't have a classroom of shining child faces any longer. Perhaps this is the time to explore moderation? Even though nothing about me is moderate, even though I work best fluctuating from extremes, unable to leave the library stacks until the entire collection has been shelf-read, unable to open my work email or follow a schedule of any kind in July. Is my window-shade moderate? Or is it just a way to get away with another extreme?

Michigan itself is extreme. This planter was the epitome of frozen desolation a few months ago. David commented last night on the copper dedication plaque for the fountain, how the plows had not been kind to it. How can his brain even connect the neurons required to look at sun-warmed metal & concrete and imagine snow plows?

The air is soft now. The sun is reminding me I haven't applied any SPF. Chipmunk Primo ran back to his start point, and then went off searching for the foot-tickler in the flowers.

I notice my bladder. Marie-Louise wrote an entire couple of pages about the significance of human urination, the unstoppable force, its significance as a symbol of human instincts & nature. I smiled reading it, thinking she had never talked to a teacher. Everything she said about urination was entirely false for anyone who's ever worked a job where they were "on the floor": factory, retail. I suppose most of her clients and friends were of a certain social class.

I don't know if breathing more shallowly all year through would be better, worse, more authentic, more stable than the sprint/collapse I live now. I know last week's training during my first week off filled me with unreasonable rage & comical distress. I am not supposed to be working. I have ten weeks off and this three days is an unacceptable encroachment of my privilege. Not sure if it would have been so inconceivable if it had happened a bit later, after I'd had a week to start breathing again.

The sun is hot enough now. I will join the crush of youthful drunk strangers at the river. I will separate my floatation device and wander down the river alone, with their voices in the distance. Slowly, thoughtfully, breathing.

It is time

It is time. To put away email, to text your entire phone list. It's time to announce your presence, to lean in, to let go. It is time to wonder, risk, explore. Time to try. Time to say yes. Time to breathe deeper, laugh with your eyes closed, and let tomorrow worry about itself. When it is time, all barriers will melt before you...except for those which stand, which will seem righteous rather than sinister, and petty rather than overwhelming. All puzzle pieces will fit, all tones are in tune, all emotions are true. When it is time, it is both easier than ever to attract a mate, and harder than ever to find simpatico with one. For when it is time, you are whole, as a child is whole onto herself, observing her world. And without the conditioning which tells us to pair bond, what girl-child would submit to the shame we serve up for our woman-selves each day? 

I'm better at having a broken heart than you are

The thing is, I'm just better at having a broken heart. I've been tossing it at boys since I was 8 years old. I know this letdown. I know the path. I don't like it, and the hill is a bitch. But I know it. Its grooves are familiar, and as much as I hate finding myself here, I know the way home.

But I bet you don't. And here's where my strategy of open-heartedness will pay off, while your choice to wall away in your castle denying you feel will fail. I love and scream and swear with a full throat and an outstretched hand and a constant willingness to see my faults. Your exacting nature does not permit such searching; you will never waver from your course, will never back down, will never reconsider. You are too careful to be broken, and you will quietly gather any disobedient hurt bits and hide them away. No one will know. And you will be even more precise in the future. Even more rigid. Impervious.

Messiness doesn't mind mistakes quite as much. A guileless love is unashamed of heartbreak; a childlike and effusive love knows and accepts the cost of emotional sincerity - or simply forgets it. I throw my heart away joyfully, with glee, with abandon, just to watch how beautifully it tumbles down the hill.

And thus I know heartbreak. I know it well. 

And you do not.

All my exaggerated pantomimes and microscopic linguistic analysis of my own emotions don't seem to be encouraging you to express yours. And I cannot feel them for you, although I sense that part of what drew you to me was the hope that you could delegate this task. But if you cannot feel and express and make sense of the boundaries between your emotions and your responsibilities, if you cannot see how this is not "extra work" but is the foundation of being intimate with another person, you cannot have any patience or understanding for someone who lives each day on the floor of the sorting house, slowly sifting and classifying and making piles to organize the chaos, trying her best to build meaningful intimacy with the people in her life.

I saw you tonight, ranger on the move, passionately arranging some deal on the phone you told me was broken. Good luck to you. But I think you have more feelings than you care to admit. And I don't envy you that realization.

I am better than you at falling apart, and that means I have more experience picking myself up.

Shattered

I love seeing my friends. People I love, with whom I have history. I look forward to trips, excursions, parties, bar nights and brunches, operas and sledding and movies and dance clubs. I love getting spontaneous invites and surprise visits and hearing people I'm out with suggest "one more place?" - extending what might have been a perfectly lovely breakfast or walk or happy hour into a day or an evening of catching up, telling stories, and connecting. It doesn't sound like "one more place" as much as "I don't want to part."

But the ends of things, the return trips, the goodbyes and partings and breaks in these connections get harder and harder to step through - the more excited I was to begin, the more planning and preparation I exerted to make the meeting happen, the more time that has passed since I last saw the person I meet.

The goodbye ought to be just as happy, if not more. I am loved! I love! The connection was evidence, affirmation, and a new treasure chest of stories and memories and beautiful things I can look at and hold onto when real life, and separation, come back. The beginning ought to be more fearful and sad than the ending - it might not go well, it might not happen at all. Yet beginnings don't crush me with worry and dread - I'm too energized by change and unknown and figuring things out. All my fear, all my sad, all my love twists inward at goodbyes. Returning home pulls my heart down into my stomach. It shouldn't - my bed is the most comfortable bed on earth. My apartment fills me with joy when I walk in. But to get there, I have to separate from these people I love.

These people I love so damn much. I knew I loved them, came to see them, looked forward to their company, but I had forgotten what exactly it felt like to be next to them, to touch them, to hear their voices. The shape of their faces when they smile and the texture of their skin on my fingertips and the exact span I need to stretch up to wrap my arms around their shoulders. I had forgotten what it was like to love them with flesh and voice and eyes. They were just an idea I loved, but I remembered when they hugged me all these other things that I had forgotten. How tender they are. How full of kindness. How open-hearted and sensitive and joyous. How brilliant. How beautiful, one right next to the other, a sofa full of heroic divinities. And now I know I will forget them again, and they will go back to being an idea, instead of this one specific unrepeatable utterly human being.

I want all of my loved ones within arms' reach, every single one of them, all the time. And I also want this feeling of falling in love with them anew, because it has been two decades and they have become entirely different gorgeous versions of the exact same person I loved the first time, fully bloomed and shimmering-winged, and I get to fall in love with an exciting stranger that is my best friend, has always been my best friend. This love, familiar as myself. I know you like I know my own dream world, but you have all these stories I don't know from these lives you've lived without me, and all I want is to sit next to you and listen to you and watch you be familiar and brand new in buttery baklava layers of sweetness. It is so good to be near you. And I am so very happy, and sad also, because I already miss you. I cannot hold this liquid moment still. I don't want to forget again what it feels like to be your friend.

Each summer my father would appear at the airport as a stranger that had gifts for me. And I wanted nothing to do with him and his foreignness. But ten weeks later after I remembered who he was I had to leave him at that airport and forget all the pieces of him again. And I'm tired of forgetting. I want my loves. Someday they won't be at that airport and I will have forgotten them and there won't be any way to remember again, how they smelled and how they cleared their throat and how they told a punchline.

And the lies Helga tells her son Freddie when he quite rightly sobs at every goodbye, telling him that he will see these people again, that there will always be another time, these lies we tell ourselves so that we don't fall apart like toddlers at every airport and train depot and bus station and repacked suitcase, these lies aren't doing the trick for me anymore. I miss you now. I miss you for every one of the hugs and laughs I will want to give you, that I wanted to give you for twenty years, that I will have in my heart for you, even though my head will turn you back into the idea of you, without your you-ness to surprise me, and hug me back.

I know that missing you is good, and beautiful. I know that I am lucky to have so much love in my life, so very lucky to have these pains of missing you because I have loved you well and hurt myself to sever from your sphere. I know. But I am in public, and I don't have the space or privacy to cry these heavy tears, to process this sadness, this love that wants to stay next to you and wants you to exist only for me until I feel like I can love you all the way through, a full saturation of color, until you can fully know and I can fully know you understand. Only then, only when you really really understand how I love you, until I know without a moment of doubt that you see what my heart holds for you, can I feel peace at you existing outside of my space, can I drive away from you with a bittersweet smile instead of feeling ripped, the quiet letdown of a finished ice cream cone rather than the wailing misery of a fallen scoop melting on the sidewalk.

It is beautiful to love and to be sad at separations and goodbyes. But it is not beautiful quite yet, not until I can properly rage at the hideous injustice of loving people out of arms' reach, people who may not understand how important they are to me.

"You haven't asked her"

"But you haven't asked Jolie what she does." 

His statement froze the three strangers mid-stride. They had been about to melt back into the party; the olive-skinned woman who talked and danced and pealed laughter at her own jokes, her quiet partner whose face didn't seem to move even when it did, and the rotund man lecturing them all on holding cell phones next to their heads. They had chatted, or rather the dark woman had told stories, and Michael had drawn her out further, polishing her loquaciousness until she relaxed and remembered her personality, while the pontificating man had attempted to dominate with Mr. Wilcox-style wisdom. But the conversation had run its course; the kohl eyed woman and the tousled hair man were energized and glancing about the room, ready for further stimulation now that this intercourse - begun in hesitant fumbles - had given them courage, and the quiet still one was going to be the same wherever she was dropped next. 

"You haven't asked her what she does." Michael repeated.

I wasn't ready to talk to any of them. I had tried, though not very hard, truthfully, but I had smiled and responded and nodded and opened my mouth and inhaled, ready to offer words. Other people had been quicker. Or perhaps cleverer, or surely smoother. I hadn't had anything truly wonderful to say. It is easier to let them have what they want. They want to hear themselves. But Michael's words had shamed them, and the Italian woman focused her sharp, striking eyes on me. "Well? What about you?"

I stuttered. She was standing too close to me, and her eyes paralyzed me. She was waiting for me to be amazing and I was warm, and flustered. I don't need the attention. I already am getting more than my fair share of attention, just standing here in my new dress with the tulle-stiffened flounces, shifting my weight in shoes that are just barely uncomfortable. I just want to observe, and be in my head, and let Michael charm everyone else for me so no one notices I haven't said anything. I can't think of what to say. They are talking so fast and I don't know them and don't know what they want from me yet, other than for me to be unthreatening. It is easy to succeed at demure if you don't open your mouth, but now I have to speak and am going to give myself away.

She smiled slowly, watching me struggle, and remarked, "How pretty you are." I was surely supposed to have said something more clever here, but I did not. Michael told them how smart I was, and I watched the conversation form iron bars around me. He was looking at me with such tenderness, knowing I was twisting in discomfort but not realizing putting me on stage was making it worse. He is proud of me, he wants me to be shiny, but I can't be shiny right now, I have too many arms to be shiny, and I love him for being his business self and taking over the room but I just can't do anything more complicated than polite right now. I am slowly leaking life force onto the stripped wooden floor when she strikes, "When are you two going to get married?"

I want to burst out laughing. If anyone who knew me, knew us could have been here in this moment. If he would leap in to save me right here. If she would stop toying with her prey and would have pity on me. "I've already been married," I reply lamely, goawayjustgoaway lady drumming in my brain. I succeed in dumbfounding her, just for a second. "I didn't like it."

"But...but look at him!" she refuses to accept defeat. "Look at him! Of course you want to marry him, you haven't been married to him!"

"Yes, he is very handsome." He is, and God only knows what he is making of this exchange in that tight labyrinth brain of his. He is very handsome, so handsome I can barely look at him when I'm angry, or flustered, or supposed to concentrate on other people. He is very charming, walking into this party and cultivating every person here so that they eat out of his hand and thank him for the opportunity. He is very skilled, very clever, and very aware of how awkward I am. And perhaps I should be pleased that this is the only thing he doesn't do quite perfectly, setting me at ease, manipulating me. Because I think he misjudges the cause of my unease, never suspecting I could be insecure about him, about whether I've pleased him, about whether he thinks he got the bad part of the bargain with me on his arm tonight, and my head stuffed with sawdust.

I want to tell him I don't need the compliments, that the attention is crushing me, that I just need his arm around my waist and the freedom to be vacant and rest on his social skill. But I don't have enough articulateness to even make the attempt. I touch his hand over our shared plate of food. I try to mind meld with him, staring soulfully into his eyes. "What?" he asks, startled. 

I didn't have a very successful evening. But for all of my personal stiffness and dullness, I did nevertheless walk away with this moment. You haven't asked her. All his smoothness and charm, like an athletic ability, and he so fit he is able to double back and pick up stragglers on the steep hill, without worrying he himself will tire. You haven't asked her. You haven't paid attention to my mate. You will stop what you are doing and show her homage. I will use my power to compel you to do so. And this millennia-old male power maneuver that would have enraged me if I were at full capacity, would never have happened if I were at full capacity, and breaks my heart with love at this moment. I am the one he cannot read. I am the lonely child and he is trying to bully his friends into playing with me. He doesn't realize the only reason I try to engage strangers in this mood is to be beautiful for him.