Fire and Rain

The sky is near tears today.

I get so tired of all of this. This thinking, this reasoning, this constant voice.

There is no quieting it for now. I grow tired of my own company and reach out. I listen to their stories and carry them home with me. I take them to the place where everything lives and they crowd in and raise their voices too.

I dream in houses and turns and twists and unexpected rooms. I wake screaming with the horror of the lights turned on and the room suddenly empty. Something dark has leaped in the window and snatched important people from me. I choke and startle and creep shaking through real darkened hallways to check breathing forms, undisturbed in slumber by my cries. I can't shake the feeling that something is missing and bury myself in a book to forget.

The waking nightmare is that it's all slipping away from me. That my charade will end and no one will guess the answers and I will stand there, foolish; sweating and miming the actions of a real life. There's an empty room where I store up all the words. It echoes with forever. It hisses to me from behind a closed door and my lesser self wants to toss a match, lit and careless, and see it all consumed. I want to walk amid the silent ashes of it all and listen to the dampened quiet that follows disaster.

Sometimes the cheerful flame by which they warm their hands and light their ways is just the reflection of a conflagration that devours a soul. The safety glass holds and their distance is safe and they can't hear the screams. They don't smell the melting tallow and the burning hair. A fire that burns and burns and burns and never fully consumes. I explain to them that the forest sometimes needs to burn and that we are the interlopers. They look around, confused; their forest isn't burning. I am grateful they can't feel the heat. The gentle rain on its way will do nothing to assuage the flames, though. Only add to the hissing, the nonstop background crackling din of potential energy released into nothingness and smoke.

These are the demons who speak to me. The ones that sit in the base of my skull, just below my right ear lobe. I can feel them there like a presence in the room sometimes. They fog my words as they come out, the take the meanings and intentions of my surroundings and smear them with oil; distorted, out of shape, grotesque. They tell me the things no one else will admit and so I trust them. I believe they are my friends, the only truth speakers on the days when the mirror lies and the voices of love and affection drop quietly to the ground. Matter of fact, pitiless, and full of the confidence that comes with proclaiming half-truths.

It is not all beautiful. There are these days that come. The days that the sky is near tears. The high pressure areas have relented and the clouds and I cry in the sudden release. It was unnatural, you know. Out of season, all that brightness. Too vivid and perfect and burning up the grass; blinding enough to believe that it could always be that way. It's beautiful in its way. It has to be. I pledged my allegiance to this kind of beauty years ago. The shadows illuminate the smile. They must be there, the relief of an etching, the texture in the landscape.

I get tired of all this, though. I get tired of renaming the ugly as beautiful, for excusing the softness that forms, easily damaged. I grow so weary of redefining, rearranging, wandering shamelessly into light. The fire rages on and blackens what it licks. It will regenerate. The phoenix will rise and the lupines will bloom again. I know this. I get tired of this knowing. This thinking, this reasoning, this containing. Were it only I to consider I would cry a new Dead Sea and lie back; let the salt water hold me for a while.


*Author's note: Lest you fear for my sanity, I am working on a series of free write exercises over different topics. I was named after James Taylor's Fire and Rain and that was the inspiration for this post. This is not a confessional, nor is my blog my personal diary.

I Dreamed of This

I am puttering. Putting things to rights after a weekend of ignoring most of everything except the people who live here. I am surrounded by piles of paper demanding attention, piles of clothes that must get clean, piles of dishes that need to be scrubbed and then refilled, piles of words that must be rearranged and sorted out and written again. I am tempted to groan. I am tempted to complain. Instead, I am drinking my coffee and thinking about my younger self. The one with larger jeans and smaller frame and longer, darker hair. The one who sat and looked half-starved at families in public places and snorted with derision to hide the aching want. The one who spoke of selling out and giving in and letting oneself go.

This younger me could not let herself go then. She was tightly wound and afraid the broken parts would fall out on the floor. An upturned purse with tampons, gum wrappers, empty pens and cigarette lighters splashed around for all to see or avert their eyes and gingerly step around. This younger me would never have given in to the soft places inside, the ones that lie curled and fetal around another sleeping body that is small and dependent and cries out in her sleep. This younger me mocked the selling out because she didn't understand that she had anything of value to trade for her dreams.

Today I give that younger me a hug. I reach back through time and space and tell her not to worry. It will all work out. I tell her that things will be hard and then lovely and then hard again and lovely still. I tell her that is just what it is like to live. I tell her that things will not go as she has planned, but they will be better than she ever dared imagine. I tell her to relax and enjoy the steps ahead.

She bristles and doesn't listen. She's not supposed to. She was supposed to ignore the advice of wiser souls and come smashing, whirling, prickly and hard through her path to get to here. She was supposed to test the very fiber of her body, her faith, her mind, her soul. She was supposed to dash herself against hard places to break open and see the soft light that was hiding inside. She was supposed to do that. She was supposed to etch these canyons and these valleys of scars so they would heal and overflow with the rushing joy that fills them now. She can't have known that the inundation would come and bring verdant life to the desolate places, that her harvest would be so bountiful that she had plenty to share with friends and strangers alike. But she'd secretly hoped.

This younger me looks up from that well of time. She winks and hunches down further around herself. To protect from the cold that seems to permeate the skin tightly wrapped around bones, to protect from the coming days of confusion and making one's way, to protect from herself and from the wishes she dares not make.

She glances at the piles of paper, clothes, dishes, and words.

She whispers quietly with breath of smoke and sadness:
Enjoy it for me then. This is the life you have dreamed of.

Escorted Through Sleep By My Muses

I walk into the room and set down my bag. The room is dim and foggy, as yet unformed. The only tangible things are my overnight bag and my sense of dread. I am at a retreat of some kind. Like summer camp for adults. Excruciating sharing and splashing in the pool, small talk with strangers around a fire and someone will surely weep openly over an ancient wound before the weekend is done. I sense networking. The very word crawls up under my skin like an invasive weed and drains my energy. I want to be alone.

 I look around the room. My subconscious has done well. Thick carpets of Central Asian origin, a window seat without a window, piled with pillows. Inviting and safe, like a nest. The bed is a dense thicket of silk, velvet, fresh cotton sheets, more pillows. All of it - the carpets, the pillows, the blankets, the walls - is done in the rich jewel and earth tones I prefer. There is an empty desk - simple, small, of dark wood. I am comfortable here.

The dread starts to abate and I turn to grab my bag and find some clothes. My trickster mind has hidden my bag and replaced it with a closet. Resigned, I know I will find my clothes there. The closet is filled with negligees, all of them white. They are beautiful, tasteful, thrilling, revealing. My thought is not: I can't go out dressed like that, but instead: I will have to shave in order to go out dressed like that. I hate to shave, but I need to wear those dresses. I want to wear those dresses. They will make me beautiful.

 A basin appears on the desk, rich shaving lotion and a good, sharp razor. I'm naked now, perched on the edge of the desk, carefully shaving my legs. There is a pounding at the door and I'm gripped with doubt. Am I late for an activity? Is it a welcoming committee? Is it a roommate? Go away, I silently tell the pounding and go back to my legs.

The door bursts open and there are three. A jostling crew of burly men. Handlebar mustaches, large piercings, covered in beautiful tattoos. They don't frighten me. They amuse me and I bid them come in. They are playful and large and they fill the room. They touch everything and exclaim. They bounce on the bed and toss pillows at each other. They pull the nighties out of the closet and say it's time to get dressed. Not yet, I tell them, I'm not ready. They pick me up and toss me back and forth between each other like a game of keep-away - naked and soapy, half-shaven legs. Stop it guys, I tell them, I'm trying to do the tricky part behind my knee. They only laugh and toss me some more.

Somehow I have managed to finish shaving and get dressed. My new clothes glow white against the darker tone of everything else in the room. They are slippery and cool against my skin. They fit perfectly, but feel foreign on me. Too beautiful, like an impostor. My burly men laugh through absurd facial hair and assure me it is really time to go. One on either side, one in front - my entourage. My sidekicks each offer me an arm. I look down to take them and realize their tattoos are words. Thousands and thousands of words. I am excited, I am relieved. I look toward the open door and I wake up.