Thanks for doing the dishes.

Sometimes we treat people like dishes.

We clean them up, wash them, put them away in the cupboard
only to pull them back out and use them all over again.

Headaches

When I have a throbbing headache, I forget what it’s like to not have one.

My skull is tightening. My cranial tectonic plates are moving and trammeling my head. Every light source hurts my eyes and I wonder if things have always been this bright. Have they always been this shiny? Have they always been this potent? The light is no longer something outside of my body, but a part of me because it reaches through my eyes and into the back of my head. The pain intensifies. Text is blurry and it becomes a chore to simply look across the table. I have an intense desire to close my eyes and put my head down on my desk; that strong pull just to let my eyelids sink, let me sink, to give in, just let me sleep!

I forget what it’s like to be without a headache, without 9/11, without your two cents worth, without the scrutinous science of people, without this cloud hanging above all our heads, and without this fear of not being enough if you don’t say I am.

Sitting in the conference room thinking about what to do about my headache, I didn’t want to go get aspirin because I had lost faith in the fact that there was an escape from it, that something outside of the pain existed.

If I can lose sight of an aspect of life with something small and insignificant like a headache, how often do I do elsewhere in my life?

How often do I not talk it out because I think nothing but a parade of elephants will always be walking through the room? How often do I lock you out of my life because I am afraid you won’t be who you say you are? How often do I not confront you because I believe conflict will always reside here? How many times do I not go down the hall to get aspirin because I think that nothing else exists?

I cannot continue to live my life in this room. If I do, I will always be on the wrong end of the hall. I will always be quietly floating in a puddle of what-ifs and imagined pain, wondering if things have always been this bright.

Following the Veins

During the late hours of the evening I lose the ability to hide much of what I feel. As I grow more tired, the shield that I rely so heavily upon during the day is the first thing to go.

My die-hard optimism dissolves and I’m left alone in the room with my raw emotion. I am forced to be honest with myself because I no longer have the energy to rationalize.

At six o’clock I can argue with you and be frustrated at you for not handing out the benefit of the doubt to people, but by eleven I’m crying and just as confused as you are.

But it’s the conversations that are supposed to end at ten-thirty but end up going until one that help me make sense of my life. I can pour myself out and we can whittle away at our frustration until we come to the root of the issue.

I’ve never been here before, so I don’t have the answers. I’m just as confused as you are, and that has to be enough. All I can offer is what I feel and what I’ve known to be true thus far. So when we hit conflicts, this is what we need to do. We have to carve away at what bothers us, what fills us up, what makes our day, what breaks it. Pull back the rationalization, the excuses, the trivial words we toss out to fight showing our weaknesses. I’ve never been comfortable enough to do that. But if you’ll help me whittle away, dig deeper, and peel back the layers, that’s more than I could ever ask.

We have to follow the veins back to the heart.

Coffee Grounds

My eyelids are heavy tonight. Five hour nights don’t suit me well, so I had to resort to coffee to get me home.

I went to the freezer to retrieve the tin can of coffee grounds. Next to it was the ice pack that I used to aid a recent nosebleed. There’s nothing that stops a beautiful, snowy Saturday afternoon like the taste of iron and blood spontaneously running down the back of my throat. It robbed me of my entire evening along with the ability to eat and a peace of mind. There’s nothing so small that is so intruding.

I pulled off the plastic lid and immediately the rich scent of the Columbia coffee beans spilled into the kitchen. I cleaned my coffee cup in hot water while the coffee maker gurgled and steamed. Within three minutes the kitchen was overly warm. The cold creamer hit the fresh, hot coffee and bubbled slightly until I stirred it up and it became a car ride companion.

It’s just after eleven and there are still plenty of people on the road and awake at my house. I much prefer the lonelier hours of the morning. There’s something to being the only pair of headlights on the road. It’s a sanctuary. It’s just me and the car humming on the road.

And now I’m home. Late-night reruns of spy television shows run in the background to keep me company. The curtains are closed for the night and the porch light is left on. The single lamp that is on in the livingroom whispers its yellow light softly and begs me to sleep.

I am giving in with the last bit of coffee that’s gone cold.

To bed.
To another morning.
And to bed.

Of the Inauguration

Mornings waits for our people, and we are glimpsing the dawn.

Godspeed and wisdom, Mr. President.

 

Noodles meet Martin Luther King

I was making dinner for my boyfriend tonight. I was kind of going off of whatever he had in the pantry and was banking on there being enough noodles for the meal. There was less than one portion of macaroni noodles, and less than one portion of fettuccine noodles. I presented my dilemma to the boyfriend.

“So, which do you want? Fettuccine or macaroni?”
“Can’t you just make both?”
“Don’t you think it’d be a little weird for the macaroni and the fettuccine to be hanging out together on the same plate?”

And then I remembered that it’s Martin Luther King Day. Wrong day to discriminate!

“Ice caverns and snow tunnels lead to the surface and the counter top.”

This is the kind of cold that makes breathing impossible. It’s the kind of cold that with arms reaches into down into the lungs and constricts the windpipes in a clean and holy freezing. A cold that within minutes causes the assassination of limbs just as the coughing sets in. Frostbite in its purest, deadliest form.

Will your dead fingers and toes will forgive you?

But, we are home inside the subzero temperatures. It’s the novel to our plotline. The skeletal structure to our empty conversations. My organic curiosity to your love of being the answers. My confusion to your occasional need to talk to me like a child and a long-lost lover in the same sentence. The midnight table for the sliced, orange moon.

This is the cold that sequesters us and changes us. The previous enemy that became a loyal friend in a hospital room. A complete stranger a confidant. Former and formal friends turned messengers bearing omens. The people I’ve always regarded as just faces in my life a turn into the what-ifs, the have-beens, the could-bes, the wishes, the transforming, the becoming.

It all leads up to this moment. We’ve locked ourselves inside an imaginary kitchen of an imaginary house. We’ve got blankets, coffee, and warm pastries. And we’ll talk about anything but the cold.

Weather/Whether, Pt. 3

(Part 1 is here.)
(Part 2 is here.)

3:33pm

There had been a few minutes of cloudless thunder. The sky flickered a couple of more times, but slowly everything was coming back to normal. The sun was burning through its inky shell, the grey sky was being painted back to a burning blue, and the river of smoke was draining like a pool at the end of the summer.

Weather/Whether, Pt. 2

(Part 1 is here.)

3:04pm

I immediately dropped my controller and went the window. It was like someone had used a dimmer switch on the weather. The sky that was a pure blue just minutes before was now a flat, dark grey. The sun was still in its place but it looked like a ball of wet black paint. Still no clouds. The level of light outside was the amount that usually occurs after twilight but before it’s truly dark.

Weather/Whether, Pt. 1

For weeks the actuaries and weathermen have seen tiny anomalies and inconsistencies in weather patterns across the country. After devoting massive amounts of attention and prediction to these little stochastic occurrences, they predicted the exact date, time, and location of where all of the anomalies would come to a head and wreak havoc.

Not even the weather stations could tell you how all of these elements would come together. No one knew what a literal, perfect storm would look like. They just knew it was coming.