Pieces in the Wind

Dear Friend,

How did we come to this?  I now understand why people say, "it just didn't work out between us." Sometimes the problems are so varied and confusing and sad that you can't do any better than a vague and cliche statement.

But I'll try to do better.

I wasn't hesitant to hand you my pieces.  The others had all paired off and I was alone, you were a friend that I both wanted and needed. I marveled that I found a soulmate in you - our backgrounds were so different.  Every time you gave me a glimpse into your past, I wanted to gather you, embrace you, and tell you that you were enough.  You did the same for me.

And sure, you had flaws. I knew that from the start. Demonstrative, arrogant, foolish, selfish, needy, vain.  But wasn't I all those things, too? If you listed anyone by only their faults (without the lens of love or understanding) then of course they would look like a monster.

We always said that we never would be those people - the ones that grow apart.  But I guess everyone tells themselves that sort of thing.  Why else would we stay in a relationship, unless we thought it would last?

But people make mistakes. People change, and now I cry when I read our old letters.

Somehow, our running conversation began developing holes.  We stopped talking about important things.  I became the third or fourth person you'd tell big news to.

And you made a mistake.

Sometimes I think this is just a lull, that we can't really be over. Not us. Not really. But some choices can't be taken back.

I don't know what I can offer you. I don't know if we'll be friends two years from now.  I don't know why you chose her over me. I don't know if you knew what you were doing at the time.

I don't know much these days.

Your mother used to say that we were made for each other - that our souls were knit together like those two friends in the Bible.  Maybe  we weren't. Maybe I should have been killed in battle sooner so that I wouldn't have to outlive our friendship.  Maybe I was convenient for you at the time, but your older friends are enough for you now.

We were quite something though, weren't we? I thought we were.

Sincerely,
Jonathan

Forgive the Hero's Self-indulgence

In story-writing, there are certain character types (like the hero or the best friend) that are used often enough that people have analyzed them and written whole books on how to best represent them when writing novels or screenplays.  A neat thing about this is that these character types can be found in real life – and often the way a best friend would act in a novel is how you can expect a best friend to act in real life and so on.  Yet another instance of art imitating life, or vice versa (I can never remember which is correct).

So today’s question: How should a mentor be written?  Mentors, such as Obi Wan Kenobi or Yoda in Star Wars, Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, etc., all hold common traits.  They may be a bit reclusive and strange, but they have once been in the hero’s shoes.  Their job is to earn and keep the trust of the hero in order to aid, instruct, and grow said hero into who s/he must be in order to defeat the Big Bad.         
Their end can be in glorious death (usually while protecting the hero), but there are also many examples of the mentor living to the end of the story and becoming an advisor to the main character.  Optionally, he can also allow the hero to ride off into the sunset after teaching him all there is to be taught.

One thing mentors are not supposed to do?  Betray the hero. 

As I’ve turned him over in my mind these past few months, I wonder if he was wearing a mask all along, or if people sometimes morph into villains over time?  I’m not sure which idea is easier to digest. 

To think that he was a wolf in mentor’s clothing all along is unkind to both him and myself.  That would mean that every laugh we shared was false, every piece of advice was simply a stepping stone to the day when he would turn his back on me and focus his attentions on someone new.  But the idea that he slowly morphed into something villainous is also an unwelcome thought.  If the one that I trusted to lead and teach me can turn on me, then what about all of the other characters that I’ve trusted in this drama of my life?  Will my best friend step out of character and leave me?  My mother refuse to take me in?  My true love find someone else’s arms to lie in at night?

I suppose the hardest part in all of this is that I thought that I would have him forever.  I thought my trust was well placed when I set it in his arms.  But when I saw him last, something cold and hard had lodged itself inside him where there used to be love and respect for me.  He was the one to turn away when my eyes searched his for some proof of who we were.  Asking why and when and how this all happened seems pointless after seeing that look in his eyes.

The knowledge that there are now two mentors that I looked up to and respected that have left me behind is difficult to bear.  First I was left while surrounded by the scent of pine - our friendship disintegrating like an old campfire's ash in a rainstorm.  Now I'm left in the place I felt sanctuary, where I used to feel so at home.

Maybe I need to grow up.  Maybe everyone’s mentors let them down and literature only makes us believe that those men and women can be trusted.  Maybe if I were more of a hero, if I were better, then they would have chosen pride instead of shame.  

Maybe I’m just a fool, thinking myself the hero in this drama of life.   

It’s too hard to comprehend.  I’ve tried to turn it into a textbook study to try to analyze it, tear it apart, and somehow force it to conform to some sort of logic when what I'm left with is simply this:  He may as well have chopped off my foot and taken it when we parted for the last time, since he helped to build me in the first place. 

Perhaps the limp would be a stronger metaphor for the fact that I am struggling to navigate this hero’s journey alone.

Unanswered Corrospondence

The heart is a strange thing.

Because you're gone and I miss you like crazy. Like absolute insane crazy.  But when you reach out, I don't want to respond to your letters, answer the phone, or even see your face.  Because what's the point? You'll be gone as soon as I finish writing.  As soon as the phone is back on the hook.

As soon as your face goes away with the plane, soaring miles and miles away, my mind will reach to try to see your image on its own.

I'm terribly selfish, I know. I should always be excited to keep up with you.  But we used to be real and present, I used to see the thrum of your pulse when you were laughing, and the brightness in your eyes when we stayed up too late talking.

And somehow, now it always feels like we're just reaching.

Bonnie and Clyde and Love and Disgust

It isn't fair. But then, I suppose, nothing ever really is.  She threw him a wink, he smiled back and together they danced to the beginning of the end.


I doubt either of them saw it coming, I'm sure at the beginning it seemed alright. Good men don't plan to ruin a young girl's innocence, good girls don't plan to spend their first night with a married man. Or at least I hope they don't. Maybe they knew all along. Who knows?


But what is not fair to me is a mother with four children now to be carried alone. A husband who loved two women too much and not enough. [And who fell from grace and ended up alone, deservedly perhaps, because of it.] What's not fair is that a young girl is lying and because of her lies sides are taken. Silent lines are drawn. Prejudices set in and the futures of many are shifted due to the war that is now born from deception.


What is not fair is that sin entered the world and made things complicated. But perhaps the complicated part is that I don't expect it. Perhaps the complicated part is that I think too much of people, and when these things happen I wonder what the terms "good people" or "Christian" even mean.


But I know that's just bitterness and I shouldn't allow it. It's just that bitterness is an easy and welcome bed to lie in for a time.


I guess the problem is that the whole situation makes me a little sick, and it seems foolish to take sides in a war that honest to heaven will never have a victor. Because truth be told Someone already won.  The Serpent's hiss became a song and two people chose to dance.


And all I can do is hope that truth will be told someday to the people that it would make a difference to. That something good will be gleaned from the ashes - even though that very thought seems ludicrous to me at the moment.  And all I can do is hope that healing can find people even if they've lied themselves into holes so deep, revolting, and treacherous that I can't even fathom the climb it would take to get out.


But I guess... all I can do is hope.

Rainstorms and Ducks

            Attending church without my husband is a funny thing – something that you’re used to doing with people (it used to be my parents and family, then my husband whenever he isn't working) suddenly becomes something solitary and you’re forced to talk with the people around you.  As a closet introvert, this is not really something I look forward to greatly.  But there’s no better place for it than church, so I shouldn’t complain. 

            During Sunday School, I went downstairs to find a seat at our eschatology class.  I found one in the corner of the second row, next to a man (his name escapes me, so we’ll go with John) who was sitting completely by himself.  I remembered him, though we had never spoken before.  His wife had died almost a year ago, and he had lost a bunch of weight after that when he had stopped eating.  Then he’d been put into a nursing home, which under the circumstances seemed like a very good decision. 

            I smiled at him, though I doubted that he would talk to me.  I was surprised. 

            “Nice day,” he commented.  His voice was almost too soft for me to hear, though with some straining I could.  I studied the grey cloth of his suit and the way it hung too large on his thin, meek, elderly frame. 

            I smiled again and nodded. 

            “You cold?” he asked. 

            Goosebumps speckled my skin (the church I attend has some strange aversion to turning on the heat in the fall) and I nodded.  “Yeah, it’s a little chilly.”

            He nodded.  “Your family here?” he asked.

“No,” I said and swallowed a rough lump in my throat.  “They attend somewhere else now.”  This was my first Sunday attending church without my husband or them.  It was emptier than I expected.

“My daughter,” he continued, "she looks like you a little, she attends church somewhere else too.  She likes the music a little more lively than we do here.”

I nodded.  “Although in the evening we have drums here now,” I offered. “Have you heard them yet?”

He shook his head.  “I live at a nursing home now and someone else picks me up.  I hate to ask for a ride twice in one day.”

I nodded in what I hoped was a sympathetic way.  I felt bad for him, but I didn’t really know what to say.

Rain made its way down one of the half windows near the ceiling of the basement.  I watched as a flash of lightening lit up the small square of outdoors that I could see and I listened for thunder.  It was too far away though, or the walls were too thick – I never heard it.

“The home I’m in is different,” he said.

“Yeah?” I asked.

He nodded.  “When I first walked into my room, it looked so small with just enough room for my bed, and a little table with a lamp on it.  But then I saw the window and a big pond outside.  They spread so much corn out there, and there are only a few ducks.  But I thought that might be nice, I could go walk outside and watch the ducks.  I said I’d like that aloud but the lady who was showing me into my room said that I couldn’t do that.”

“No?” I asked.

“Said I would have to make an appointment and see if a nurse could take me.  Come on, I said to her, come on.  I can go out by myself, I won’t try to get away.  But she said no.”

He took his glasses off then and rubbed his eyes.  I couldn’t tell if he was trying to hide that he was crying, or if he was trying not to cry.

“Come on,” he said once more, softly, as if he could just beg me enough and I would change the rules.

I ached inside for him – and I considered finding out where he lived and going there sometime to watch the ducks with him.  I played out the situation in my head, and it gave me momentary happiness.  But then I came to the realization: he wasn’t so much upset that he couldn’t go see the ducks.  It was the fact that his home was a prison and he couldn’t leave just because he felt like it.  It was the fact that the rest of his life would be lived behind the glass, like some museum piece encased before its time - destined only to look out at the rest of the world and watch, rather than live and breathe in it. 

I put my hand in the pocket of my sweater and fingered the change that was lying therein – two nickels and a penny – and tried to find words to say.  I tried to articulate some sort of hope that I could offer him.  But then class began and our attention was taken from one another and directed towards Revelations 13. 

I had a hard time paying attention though, all I could think of was John sitting all alone later that day on his bed, watching the rain run down his window and the ducks nestle one another outside for warmth.  

The Beginner's Guide to Insomnia

Trying to explain insomnia to someone who's never had it is like trying to explain the horrible writing style of your least favorite author to someone who doesn't read. It's practically impossible. Because no matter how strongly you feel about it, no matter how frustrated it makes you, when you're talking to the unafflicted human being, they end up giving you this look that says, "Are you sure you're not just overreacting?"

Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Let me explain. A night of insomnia runs in five stages.

Stage 1
This stage actually starts before you go to bed. While you're brushing your teeth, drinking your tea, eating your second dinner, or whatever it is that you do before going to bed, this feeling creeps into your head. You may not identify it until it's too late, but it's the feeling of impending insomnia! If identified, run for the hills! Nip it in the bud! The symptoms of this feeling are: excessive thinking and/or over-thinking, unreconciled stress, failure to stop doing busy things before 11:30pm, etc..  I repeat, if you feel these symptoms coming on, remedy them sooner rather than later.

Stage 2
And if you don't remedy them, here you find yourself, square in Stage 2. The warm body next to you (if you sleep with another human being or dog) is fast asleep, and possibly snoring (my dog is the worst offender of this), and you're not sleeping. You're tossing and turning. You're thinking. You're mulling. You're stressing. You're planning. Basically, you're not sleeping, but you think to yourself, "hey, it's only been a half hour, I'll get to sleep in no time." Is stage #2 a death sentence? Not necessarily, you still have time to get out of this. How? Stop doing all the things you're doing and go to sleep.

Stage 3
But of course, some days you just can't stop, which leads to Stage 3. Once you're in Stage 3 you're pretty much stuck with it. Face the facts ma'am or sir, you have insomnia. Stage 3 hits when you've been up for approximately 1.5 hrs while trying to fall asleep (these must be 1.5 straight hours of trying to sleep, getting up and distracting yourself is cheating).  It's at this point that you begin considering the meaning of life, your purpose in the universe, whether it's all really worth it, and whether or not that cake in the fridge is a good idea (yes, hunger is a side effect of stage 3). My advice? Just don't get up and get that slice of cake. I mean you're already an almost hopeless case, and eating and/or getting up is a death sentence at this point.

Stage 4
This is definitely the worst stage of all. It's the helpless, hopeless, neurotic, and nasty phase. Your muscles ache from exhaustion, you've counted sheep, counted back from 1,000, you've concentrated on breathing in and out and in and out and nothing works. It's at this point that the world just barely starts waking up, which is basically insult to injury. The last thing you want to hear at this point is a vehicle driving down the road. You just know that whoever's driving is either waking up amazingly rested or they're heading home from the night shift to get an amazing eight hours. You may even start plotting revenge on this poor passer-by, simply out of frustration.

Stage 5
Here we are. It's getting bright out. Good job making it through the night without overdosing on chocolate cake. Good luck making it through your day without fainting or taking a long, long nap!

But let me warn you, if you take a long, long nap, your body may just decide that it likes this schedule better than the old 'sleep-while-it's-dark stuff.'  If you give in to that amazing nap, you might be in for another night of insomnia.

I hope this helps everyone out there who is unable to explain insomnia to their loved ones. For chronic insomnia, or if your insomnia reaches an unmanageable
level, seek medical attention.

Or just shut your brain off and go to bed already.

Have a great night and sleep well!

Snowfall in a rainstorm

Although I’ve made plenty of mistakes, when I married Abel Cunningham, I knew it was the best decision I had ever made, and the farthest thing possible from a mistake. He was tender and kind, smart and funny.  Sure we had our share of disagreements, but doesn’t everyone? Besides, we always made up and usually we were laughing together an hour later. 

He worked as a fireman and paramedic with the Portland fire department, and I worked at the local daycare; looking out for the kids and looking forward to the someday when I would have my own. 

I remember so clearly the day that everything changed.  It was a Tuesday and he was going on a twenty-four hour shift. I woke up with him at six to pack his lunch, and he kissed me on his way out the door, stroking my long blond hair and telling me that I was beautiful.  I laughed and said that no one was beautiful at six a.m., but he just smiled and looked at me in that earnest, open way that told me he was speaking the absolute truth as he knew it, and he said, “normal people may not be, Maggie, but you sure are.” 

I got the call around noon.  There had been an incident, and Abel was in the hospital.  I learned the details later – he was working on the ambulance and he and his partner had been called to an apartment building for a man that was unresponsive.  Abel’s partner talked with the frantic girlfriend, who said that he had been drinking all morning, but when asked if he had taken any drugs, she reported that he had not.  She lied.  Apparently the guy had overdosed on cocaine and when Abel bent over her to get a pulse, he regained consciousness. 

When people overdose on cocaine, sometimes they wake up and experience violent psychotic outbursts.  They don’t know who, or where they are, but they are often terrified and tend to lash out. 

It was Abel’s partner who saw the knife first, but by the time he shouted and ran towards them, trying to help Abel, it was too late.   The patient plunged his knife into my husband’s stomach.  It entered Abel’s abdomen pointing upwards, and it pierced his stomach, spleen, and left lung.  The partner was able to call for backup and subdue the patient while Abel collapsed began bleeding out on that dirty apartment floor next to them.

When I arrived at the hospital with shaking hands and a sinking feeling, Abel’s partner, Jackson, was in the lobby. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.  I demanded that he tell me what was going on, and he squared his jaw in an attempt at confidence, and said with a trembling voice that Abel was gone. I didn’t believe him, I had seen Abel that morning – I had packed him lasagna for lunch!  I pushed past Jackson and asked the nurse if I could see my husband.  After convincing her that I was indeed immediate family, she brought me to his bed.  Sure enough, the bright blue eyes I loved were closed, and his skin was suddenly, unfamiliarly pale and cold.  I knew Jackson was right, my husband of two years was dead. He would never stand on his sturdy legs again; I would never be swept off my feet by him. He had smiled his last wide, open smile.

I stumbled backwards and ran out to the hall, and kept running until I crashed into Jackson.  He held onto me and I clung to him and sobbed and sobbed. 

A week after the funeral, I cut off my hair, and dyed it such a dark shade of brown it looked black.  He wouldn’t be running his hands through it in the soft morning light ever again, so what was the point?  I began wondering if every choice in life was a mistake, even the things that make you the happiest.  After all, everything ends eventually. 

Staring Down at the Waves and Up at the Stars

     In the early morning hours I sit in the endless, echoing self-silence that is my lot at work, and I find myself with an abundance of time.  Time to sit in my elevated chair of watchfulness, like a gargoyle who's only job is to stay still and watch the lap swimmers until one of them should need saving.  If that day ever comes during morning lap swim (the time for triathletes to come and wake up - their own version of the cup of coffee) I'll admit I'll be surprised.
     So I think.  Some days I relish the abundance of time given to me to untangle my woven mass of thoughts, while other days all I can think of is the slow progress of the clock's minute hand.
     Today, however, my thoughts were interrupted by a laugh that made me look at the swimmers not for their capabilities to stay breathing, but rather for their faces.  I had heard your laugh - one I haven't heard since long ago, since before you decided that we were irrevocably finished and done with.  When I found the owner of that unique laugh, I was a bit relieved to see that it was an impostor and not actually you in the water.  It has been a while since I've harbored hard feelings towards you, but I still have no joy in the thought of meeting you again and being forced into conversation or confrontation.
     I used to lie awake staring at the stars out my bedroom window and wonder why I wasn't enough for you.  But I've found peace since then.  I have found a life of fulfillment and challenge and everything I was looking for.  And I found this without you.  When that thought first occurred to me, I thought to myself that this was the best revenge.  But that thinking quickly dissipated when I thought of all you had meant to me.  Of all the days, and nights, and dreams we had trusted to share with one another.
     Struck by a mix of relief and nostalgia, I settled back into my duty of keeping watch and I said a prayer, wishing that you would find your own life of fulfillment too.  I hope you do.
    

Romance Ablaze

When I thought back to the first moment that I knew I loved her, my mind went to the summer of 2012.  We were canoeing out on the lake, and the sun was just beginning to set, setting the sky ablaze with colors.  She was wearing a red bathing suit and we were both as tanned as could be.  We had stopped paddling just to look at the sky and to drink in the evening air when suddenly she lifted her legs, spun around in her seat to face me, and said,

            “Aaron, this is the life I never want to stop living.  Right here, right now, I have everything I want.”

            When I looked into her lake-green eyes, I knew that she was the life I never wanted to give up – never wanted to stop living for.  She was wholesome and being around her made me feel like there could be good in this life that I could keep. 

            She spun back around then, with a graceful talent that kept the canoe upright and practically undisturbed.  And she began to sing.  Listening to the lilting song that escaped her lips, I whispered, “I love you, Sandy,” and I knew it would always be true. 

            Fast forward three years, and I still had not said it aloud.