General Updates

In looking back, I just noticed that I never posted again about Ian's mother.

She died. Jyl died too, by suicide, and my darling friend Aby died as well, by accidental overdose, in a relapse.

It was a hard year.


I know I've tried to write about my almost-mother-in-law's death several times, but I guess it must have just been too hard. I don't remember what I wrote or why I didn't post it. I have probably attempted to address Jyl's and Aby's as well, but I guess those words never made it through.


By some miracle--by a whole bunch of miracles really, and with a lot of help--we did manage to get married. In large part the wedding was beautiful, but looking back I have a lot of negative feelings surrounding the planning and the day that I don't want to try to dissect right now.

I have an office job, which I both like and hate. Mostly I enjoy my coworkers, and obviously the stability of a regular paycheck. But I feel trapped. I never see the sun. The sameness of my environment and my work, day after day after day, is rotting me away inside. I am starting to feel old, and empty, and (at the very high risk of being nauseously over-melo-dramatic) lately this has been leading me to ponder my own mortality in a very dark way. I am sure the awareness of one's own mortality is normal, and maybe early thirties is when it usually hits--but I am really not liking it. I was hoping to get away from the total surety that the rest of my life was going to be nothing but a long unsteady irrefutable slide down into a dark tunnel. Lately, mostly, each day has felt either the same as or worse than the last and the horizon looks dark and dangerous. I feel like I've made all the wrong decisions and now I just have to learn to live with them until I die. But maybe it will get better, right? People say it sometimes gets better.

Indecision

You know, I hate that I'm such an indecisive person, but if I weren't I probably would have killed myself a long time ago.

So I got that going for me, which is nice. I guess.

That being said, if I weren't so indecisive, I might not be so anxious and depressed all the time. It's hard to say which stems from which.



I'm sitting here in my parents' bathroom, because I stopped in here before leaving their house and I can't stop crying long enough to leave, and my parents are both on edge now and it just reinforces my belief that I have to control my emotions or else they'll fuck other people up. Which might be true, but it isn't healthy.

I was supposed to have a nice afternoon of socializing but I can't even get to my goddamn car.

Predicting the future

Badly, as usual. I've realized that one reason I tend to fall so easily into despair is that I expect the rest of my life to be all downhill from here. I can't imagine taking on a new responsibility because i feel certain that in the future I'll only be more tired, more anxious, more achy, less physically able and thus less mentally or emotionally capable.

I don't want any of my problems to have anything to do with my father, but I think maybe they do. I have two wonderful parents, but growing up with a parent that has a debilitating degenerative disease will do things to your head.

Oh.

Yesterday I was taking care of some cats for a friend of mine who has cancer, and I got a call from Ian. Turns out his mom--effectively my mother in law--has cancer. We thought at first that she might have had a stroke, but in fact she has an inoperable brain tumor. Naturally one of the first people I told was my good friend who recently had cancer. Got on facebook before writing this and at the top of my news feed was a post from a cousin who is fighting a long battle with cancer.

Guys, I'm getting real sick of cancer.

Thanks to aspirin in her system they can't biopsy until late next week, so for right now we're basically all trying and failing really hard to pretend that everything is still normal. We're all going forward with our original weekend plans, desperately gripping the illusion that we held so easily on Wednesday morning, and watching with rising panic as it dissolves into nothing.

I cried a lot yesterday.

Everyone is trying not to think about the radiation and chemo that will start next month, right after we come back from a week of pretend vacation at the beach. I am trying really hard not to think about how she might never hold the grandchildren that she wants so desperately to meet and love. There's talk of moving our wedding forward. She wants us to make sure we visit before her biopsy next week--the unspoken reason being that she fears she may never wake from it. This is the same cancer that killed her mother.


I don't know how to act. I'm not sure any of us do.

Duh.

After a summer of wearing Rainbow flip flops (very comfortable; not at all squishy) almost exclusively, taking an evening walk in athletic shoes feels like heaven.

(What are these things on my feet? Springs? Maybe I can complete today's burpee challenge after all!)

Life, by the way, is rolling steadily along. Had quite a bit of drama in the family/close friends group over the past six months: a long hospital stay, a twice-broken ankle, a cancer scare (that is to say, it was indeed cancer, but it's been removed), a bipolar relapse...but things have been leveling out, and there are also several weddings coming up, and there's been a good amount of playing in waves and sand, and a couple of friendships restored and others renewed, and a new camping hammock, and more reading than I've done in quite a while. Things are good.

A friend encouraged me to keep writing--I've known for a while that I needed to, but it never seems like the right time. Or never seems like the right thought. Or never seems nonthreatening enough. In good moments I have felt that I wanted to just live and enjoy it, rather than watching it through a camera lens, so to speak. But I think that running beneath almost all of my choices not to write has been fear and discomfort--an uneasy reluctance to turn my gaze too sharply on any part of my life. I still have not rectified this.

But lately there have been enough difficult moments to drive me back toward my pen, though I still have actually written very little. I have taken to carrying a notebook around to encourage myself to use it. 

I composed this in my head tonight on my way home from the hospital, and wrote it down in the driveway when I got home. I labeled it,

"April 17, returning from my 58th visit to the hospital in as many days."

It hurts too much to keep hoping.
Some days, all I can believe is violence.

I hear, in bright, energetic voices--
--too bright; they hurt my eyes--
--that honesty is all. That masks
only hurt.
I'll be honest: I've said it myself,
in better days.
But how can I believe it when I,
seeing my hero falter, wince, struggle for breath,
Feel my heart pound, and weaken, and sink into the ground.

It hurts too much to keep hoping.
All I can believe
is violence.

Dress

Tonight was the annual Christmas/holiday party at my godmother's house--the last, at least on Stratford, as she will be moving into a condo soon. It was a nice time--everyone was there, the food was all eaten and everyone seemed to have had just enough, the audacious young cousin was audacious, we sang carols at her command and listened to a story from my godmother's childhood, and a poem. And, toward the end, my cousin Megan, after complimenting my shoes, my scarf, then my bracelet, told me that she loves the way I dress. I wouldn't put this here except that I want to remember, because it's something that I never thought would happen. So many of my female cousins (particularly on the other side of the family) could be or are basically professional thrift store shoppers, and have amazing style. I am not naturally that way, and always admired the way they dressed, their confidence, the way they always looked so effortlessly put together--and I thought I could never do or have those things. I asked for help for a while and then just started to go for it. Looks like maybe I'm getting my wish, at least a little. And that's pretty amazing.

Two Weeks

I turned in my written resignation today, which is a little bit terrifying, but I am fairly certain that it is the right thing to do. Probably more than fairly certain, but it is difficult not to second-guess when the prospect of being jobless is as scary as it is. I think, though, that if I am responsible about getting enough sleep and taking my vitamins and watching my attitude/time management, getting a new job (or finding enough tutoring clients, which amounts to the same thing only probably better) shouldn't be too big of a deal. We'll see how it goes.

For now though, I need to tie up loose ends and finish these two weeks, and then I think I'll be heading out to California to visit my cousin Pierce. She's lived out there for ages and I've never been, and she'll probably be moving back East soon, so now seems like a strikingly good time to go. She's near a few other sets of cousins too, so hopefully I'll get several different visits in while I'm there.

Once I'm back: beach with Ian & co.

I ought to be in bed

But Chloe is home. My beautiful baby sister, who turns twenty in just over two months. I'm not sure how that happened. Neither of us is really okay with it.

But yesterday I was so worried that she might not be able to come that I made Ian sit and listen to the whole saga of her transportation attempts on our way home from the beach. (By the way, we went to the beach with his friends.) And today when came home from work and saw her I danced over and hugged her and she started laughing, because I looked so happy. We eventually took Miley for a walk, and when we got to the creek at the bottom of our hill, we stopped to listen to the water and the peeping frogs, and then we sat, and then we lay in the dirt and looked up through the trees and the stars, and she took and held my hand in silence, and I was so grateful for the place and the moment and for time with my sister that I wept a little, in silence.

Look, I never said I was cool.

The other day (alright, a few weeks ago) Ian and I had dinner with my best friend and her boyfriend, and camp came up. Specifically, the fact that this new job I've got will mean that I can't work any sessions, and that I will therefore most likely be spending a lot of weekends up there. And Ian, in an attempt to be all wise and mature and winning (and maybe a little condescending), said something along the lines of, "maybe it's time to accept that the door is closing on that part of your life, and move on."

And that seems like a totally reasonable and obvious thing to say, I guess, but I was floored. I was so floored that I just keep talking about this story. I'm honestly getting a little sick of it, but I keep thinking about it every so often. Because it just doesn't work that way. I was writing about it the other day, in the van, on the back of some papers from work. Here's part of what I said:

"It is difficult to explain and a little embarrassing to admit how shocked I was. In truth I am actually sickened by the thought of 'the door closing' on Alkulana being a part of my life. How could I explain that sometimes a place, a community, an adopted family will get under your skin, and that Alkulana has seeped into my bones? I feel like Wolverine, except that instead of adamantium, my skeleton has been infused with the love of Christ." Because of camp. I love the way I do (and, considering the person I could be, I think I love rather well) because of this community.

Probably nobody cares who hasn't been there, and that's okay with me I suppose. Why should the cool silk of the creek at midnight hold any sway over you? Why should you feel warmed by the early morning sun swimming through the mist and touching down on our daily prayer circle? By the smell of campfire on all your hoodies? By the blissful quiet of rest hour or the welcome relief of a raucous late-night kitchen after staff meeting?

I can't make him, or you, understand. That's how life is. But I hope nothing ever changes the fact that when I am at my worst, when everything is unbearable and I can't find any light, I am sustained by this. It seems ridiculous. (Maybe it is ridiculous.) I know that. But those memories feed me when I am starving. I don't plan to put them away any time soon.

Let it rise.

I would wish so hard that the phrase "precious moments" hadn't been co-opted by that god-awful porcelain giant-eyed cherub crap, if I thought my wishing would change anything. The phrase isn't usable for anything meaningful, or anything other than an ad for that line. But the moments I spend with my mother--last week, rearranging the basement; this week, kneading bread and slipping it into loaf pans and pyrex bowls to rise--are precious ones to me. Some memories acquire a glow and a lustre as they age, but these have it straight out of the box. Sometimes I am reluctant to begin--running around removing bracelets and fitzing with an apron, filling my water bottle and tying my hair back with a headband--but the moment my hands touch the dough, it's over. There's no more rush, no more irritation, no more anxiousness. There's just me and my hands and this dough, and my mother and her wise hands and the dough, and the flour, and the kneading board. There is nothing else. It never lasts long enough.

I like the way we do things in our family.

12:20 am today found me in my grey boots that feel like slippers and rose-printed hoodie from Scotland and this beautiful hand-me-down skirt that Eva bought in India, squatting in twenty-eight degree weather on the bright red adirondak chair I picked up last week, watching my breath mist and dissipate and grinning as I waited for my mother to return with another strand of Christmas lights. Because we run on Africa time, and when the mood strikes us we run on the principle that there is no time like right this very second to do whatever it is we've been putting off--like stringing a couple of strands of Christmas lights across the front porch, even if we had to step around our Christmas tree (which all week has been casually leaning up against a pillar, studying its fingernails and patiently waiting for a space to be made inside) to do it. There is a sweetness to such moments that I can't imagine infusing any other space or time than midnight, with my mother, in the last few moments of the fall. I like the way we do things.

Perspectives

Sometimes I live my life in a swirl of smiles and affection--the sometimes-dreary trudge of days is highlighted for a time with shining memories or glimpses of my cousin's beautiful red hair, my best friend's smile, my best guy friend's hugs, gorgeous slanting rays of sunlight and the earth warm beneath my feet--and those are the things that matter. Those are the things I hold onto.

But other times, other days, other moments, it doesn't matter how much time I've spent with the people I love. It doesn't matter how much they love me. It doesn't matter how great I felt or didn't feel earlier in the day. The beauty of the sunset slides right off my temporal lobe and disappears into the cold river, and all I feel is bleak and alone.

Two quotes, unrelated.

First, from my mother, via text, after she found out that I had gotten a haircut:

"You have bangs? Oh, I'm so sorry."


Second, from my uncle, regarding the ideas of forgiveness and judgment and humanity:

"Forgive people what they say. Invent a possibility that that's just the highest expression of love they're capable of at the moment."

Things I've been forgetting.

Last week when I was tutoring Layla out on the dock, I saw something white bobbing in the water under the walkway. It looked like one of those soft, white, round mushrooms (which don't grow in the water, of course), but turned out to be a goose egg. Despite my best efforts, I failed to effectively convey to her that the watery sound from inside the egg meant that it was dead, that it was rotten, and so on. Anticipating the smell and fearing the view I didn't want to crack it, but I allowed myself to be convinced. I carried it away and downwind from the house, stood back, and cracked the shell with a stick. I would have let Layla, but she lost her nerve at the last moment. It seemed that somehow water had seeped into the shell, so what came out was a terrible smell, a piece of embryonic sac, and half a shell's worth of grey liquid. Layla spent the next ten or fifteen minutes telling me that I should have cracked it more gently, though I tried to explain that "baby goose eggs" need to be kept warm in their mother's nest; that all of the goslings had already hatched and didn't she remember them?; that floating in the water for weeks will never let an egg live. She said that she had hoped that if I cracked the shell gently enough, it would turn back into a baby goose.



I and my father went to pick my sister up from the Greyhound station the other night, and from the parking lot I looked up into the night sky and saw dozens of bats swooping and gliding through the air above the baseball diamond. In my experience, bats don't usually soar and glide, actually--they flutter around and frequently change direction to go after insects. It's also rare to have such a clear view of their motions, though, so perhaps I just haven't been as observant as I might. The lights from the stadium shone straight up into the air, and I can only assume that the air was filled with enough light-loving nocturnal insects that the bats could just soar straight through the beams and get a mouthful on each pass. Good on ye, bats! I love 'em.


Friday, just before the goose egg incident, Sara and Brian and I went to see the VMFA Picasso exhibit in its dying days. I don't love Picasso particularly, but as ours was the only museum on the East Coast to get the exhibit, and as Mr P is super duper famous and influential and all, I felt that I should go. It was good. I mean, he's talented, you know. Also, he really likes boobs. A lot. Just a heads-up, there.

Saturday S and B and I went to an herb farm and took in a talk about beekeeping and met up with Anna and her friend Amy, who seemed pretty cool. Anna and Amy and I accompanied the beekeeper back to his hives and watched him replace the queen and the observation frame and essentially got another lecture lesson about beekeeping, which was really cool. We ate some lavender iced cream and some honey iced cream and some chocolate iced cream, and I (and possibly Brian, but not while I was looking, not that I was looking often) helped Sara pick out a bunch of herbs and tomato plants and suchness for a hopeful new garden for her family. We got variegated basil, among other things. Not elfin thyme, though, despite my rabid support. Sara and I also bought fricking adorable beeswax candles in the shape of a little bear with his arms around a beehive (the stereotypical old beehive shape, rather than the more practical but significantly less cute boxy hives of today) and with a relatively large bee perched on the outside of the hive. They smell like honey of course, thus making me want to consume honey, and they are unreasonably cute, and I can't understand how Sara plans to actually use hers as a candle. I'm pretty sure I could never set that thing on fire.

Also on Saturday with S and B: impromptu (for us) fish fry; Strawberry Fields Festival where were sold unsprayed strawberries, spinach, kale, and no free kittens. Lovely. And buying cookie dough and cooking cookies not-as-long as the wrapping says, thus producing perfect soft, gooey cookies. And Kelly and Junior happening to be near my house, and being convinced to come over, and Sara and Brian leaving to dinner.

Saturday sans Sara and Brian: Hanging out with Kelly and Junior, and retrieving Chloe from the bus stop whilst they take in Picasso in all his slightly obscene glory.

Sunday: church with Chloe and Junior (who opted to stay, possibly partially because he seems to really, really love the couch in our basement. It really is excellent for sleeping), and an afternoon spent with my excellent cousin Sara (not to be confused with the Sara of Saturday), talking and reading magazines and rifling through items destined for the Goodwill.

All in all, quite a nice weekend.

I think there may have been other stuff, but I am not sure. I may have forgotten still.


Song I've been playing on repeat for a couple of days now (I haven't watched all the way through this video, so I apologize if there is any unforeseen weirdness):

Tone.

You know what's utterly delicious? Leftover Chinese food: beef with broccoli from that takeout place down the street. You know what's really not that delicious? Salad with no chicken in. Just saying.


ALSO COMPLETELY DELICIOUS AND WITH WHICH I AM UNREASONABLY OBSESSED:




Also omg fried rice is the best thing ever, ever, ever invented. Ever.



On another note, it totally sucks when people seem really awesome and then you realize that they don't actually, you know, like, understand the concept of boundaries. Or, for example, the idea that the world doesn't revolve around what they want. Or that their problems are not my problems. It's not the most endearing thing in the world.



On yet another note, Sunday was largely really awesome. Jack and our parents and I had 8:30 am "brunch" for mother's day, after which Jack and I each crashed for several hours. Generally I try to get to church on Sunday mornings, but we had been to the funeral for Kelly's grandmother on Saturday, which included a mass. It was (of course) very sad, but the service was beautiful. Being around so many people that I loved was beautiful. So anyway, no church on Sunday. When I woke up there was a distant* cousin stopping in at our house on his way out of town, so we talked and had lunch, and he's an interesting fellow. Possibly an electrical engineer? Or trained as such. I spent most of the rest of the day cleaning my room (relative success!), and at one point took a break to walk Miley. There were several separate points of awesomeness on said walk:

I smelled honeysuckle!
I also smelled cut grass!
I also smelled cigarette smoke, which would normally be not-awesome, except that it was coming from Gina, whom I have not seen in probably eight years. She lives in the Norfolk area, and her mother is a friend of my mom's and her maternal aunt--River's mom--lives behind us. She and her mom and grandmother AND HER DAUGHTER were in town for mother's day. Her daughter is six now! I had never seen her before, but she is so beautiful. It made my day to see them.


































*I actually have no idea how we are related, but "Armistead" is a family name, and I'm pretty sure someone referred to him as a cousin at some point. Actually, there are rather a lot of people to whom I am related, but related in some completely obscure (to me) way. So "distant" here really only means that he isn't a first cousin, or (as far as I know) a second.

Happy day-after-Easter, loveys.

I haven't really been writing anything lately, except for short little things on my cell phone which are largely about sunsets. Perhaps I'll copy them over here. I haven't decided.

This past weekend though I was in upstate New York visiting my friend Lindsey and my godson (her son) Ian and his twin sister Adrienne, for their birthdays and, incidentally, for Easter. It was tiring and also really good to see them. Also though, it was cold. And when I stepped off the plane tonight into the warm, humid Virginia air, it was almost like a religious experience. And when Jack and I drove home on the interstate with the windows down, and talked the whole time. And when I walked with Miley through the moonless night, under the quietly, constantly rustling leaves of the trees. And when I smelled the wet dirt and the little creek and the hay strewn across someone's lawn. It is emphatically spring, and I love it. I do not ever want to move to the North.


ALRIGHT. Some of the things I wrote on my cell phone notepad:

4/22--This April morning the sun rises like a rocket, drawn up by invisible strings into the low hanging clouds, from the horizon to some unseen place behind the rainswept cloud bank in a matter of minutes. Last evening I watched the spring in the treetops, the sinking sun kissing and melting through the outstretched arms of warm wood, bathing the earth in green light.

4/24--We're flying through the ethereal world between cloud layers, in a perfect palette of muted white and graded blue. Slivers and spots of light from the setting sun spread softly and quietly across the Western horizon.

And tonight (and this I did not put into my phone), we flew near a thunderstorm on our way between LaGuardia and my hometown. Though I know I look like a small child and a person who has never flown before whenever I do this, I love to press my face up against the airplane window and watch the lightning in the clouds. The clouds themselves are rather stunning--sculpted shapes of the darkest possible gray filling the sky above the city, and enormous banks of it piling up in the distance--but in the darkness they have no definition. Each lightning strike looks like a tiny sunrise, and it highlights the hidden depths of the clouds for the smallest instant. It's gorgeous.

Just an observation

This whole "having a social life" venture might be fun, but it's rather exhausting thus far. And that's all I have time to type right now. Going to be late to my aunt's if I'm not careful.

There should be more introspection.

I mean, isn't that the point of all this?

Things (not introspection) :

As I took a break from my painting and consumed a grilled cheese sandwich this afternoon on the steps, I watched a sweet, scrawny little spring robin scoot around the yard. He looked a little scruffy, and he reminded me of a meerkat the way he'd run forward a little way, stand up straight, look around suspiciously, then make a few furtive pecks at the ground before scooting off in another direction.

Here is what I was taking a break from:

Do you know how hard I worked to not screw up that manicure today? Really hard. 

Before painting, I met my family (that is, my mother and almost all of her siblings and their spouses/significant others) at a local coffee shop for breakfast. I was informed of this gathering only last night, but it's my youngest uncle's birthday, so I stopped by for a few minutes before work. I wasn't thinking and I left my camera in the car, but took this with my phone:

It didn't come out extremely well, but this is balanced by the fact that if it were a good picture, i.e. a picture taken with a real camera, you wouldn't be seeing it. You know I never upload photos from my actual camera. That is way too much work.

I love the birthday gatherings my aunts and uncles hold for one another. I love that I have a mother who tells me about these things and includes me in them.


Hey, apparently, now that it's past midnight, today is the first day of spring. Isn't that exciting? It is. It is exciting.


Introspection just seems to slip my mind lately. It wanders in, but by the time I sit down here, the train has left the station.


Somebody date me. I say this as though I just gladly jump into relationships when they're offered. SIGH.

I have been noticing lately that in my writing there are words that just don't seem to stand out enough. I'm trying to think of a way to make this make sense, but maybe it's not even a real issue anyway. Maybe I just don't notice them because when I read back over something I've written, I skim a little bit. It's just that I've noticed that there have been important words that seemed to disappear between those around them, and get lost in the confusion. Maybe I'll work on this.

Heat

I mentioned extraordinarily early spring flowers the other day, yes? Well today the temperature (on my car thermometer, anyway) hit 91. On March 18th. It was odd to drive with the windows down and not feel any lessening of the temperature inside the car. It was odder still to be doing so with a winter coat on the floorboard of the passenger seat, and to know that I'd probably be wearing the coat again within a week.

Chloe and I went back to Carytown--

Oh yes, I never posted that did I? Thursday Chloe and my mom and I used our massage-and-manicure vouchers from Christmas. Now my nails are red and awesome. While waiting for our turns to be rubbed down and painted, Chloe and I went to Ten Thousand Villages and commenced drooling over scarves and such. So today we went back with (on my part, at least) scarf purchases in mind. I dissuaded myself though, and bought a messenger bag and a change purse/wallet that looks like an owl. It is rather adorable.

My mother sang in a concert performance tonight of John Rutter's "Requiem," so we all (except my brother, who was working) went. Relatedly, I have made a mental addition to Dream House Extraordinaire: a singing room. Or a music room, whatever. This doesn't necessarily mean a room to play musical instruments in so much as it means a room with COMPLETELY AWESOME acoustics. I'm such a sucker for them. When I was exploring ruins alone in Scotland I found myself in a domed stone room and I couldn't help but sing. And then (tonight) I remembered the acoustic "echo spots" at Mary Wash and decided that maybe, in addition to the singing room, there should be sweet acoustics hidden all over the house. Yes. Yes, there should.

I have forgotten what else I meant to write, as usual, and also as usual I don't really feel like uploading pictures. (Don't be too disappointed, dearies--just cell phone pictures of things I bought and considered buying at the store.)

It's nearly 1 am again, so goodnight.