Maya Angelou
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Imagine, if you will, that these pages are a book. Not just any book, but a diary. Its leather binding is now dark from where my hand has held it open to revisit entries, to add details, and to catch tears that didn’t fall when I committed those words to paper. Among its pages you will find doodles and pictures tucked in for safe-keeping, song lyrics and poems that have inspired me, and ideas — those elusive visits from the Muses that strike at the least expected times but demand quick capture lest they be lost forever. The binding is loose and the edges are ragged. When you pick it up and turn it over in your hands, you will feel its warmth, which is very strange at first. If you close your eyes and hold it lightly in your palms, you can feel it pulsing. Breathing and beating to its own sacred, secret rhythm. Do you feel that? Take a deep breath and focus on the diary.
You’re holding my heart.
Now, you might be concerned, and you might want to put this down. I invite you to keep it, to hold it, to get used to the feel of it. I ask that you really don’t worry about dropping it, or stepping on it, or even holding it too tightly; my amazing heart has survived worse. It’s been dropped, broken, mended, stepped on, even stomped on. Once, I even sliced off the piece that belonged to a lover who didn’t deserve it, and I baked it into the most delicious meatloaf, which he quite enjoyed for dinner that night. And that didn’t hurt nearly as much as seeing all the beauty in the world. Or holding my nephew on the day he was born. Or watching my flowers struggle up through the cold ground to feel the sunshine on that first spring afternoon.
I share all of this with you so you have fair warning. You ventured here, and you picked up the book. Before you can put it back down again, it wants something from you. It wants you to stay awhile. Visit. Wander through these pages and meet the ghosts that haunt, the dying that breathe last breaths, and the love that lingers long after it should. Make yourself comfortable. And don’t be afraid if you feel the prick of teeth or claws; nothing really bites around here. At least, not hard enough to draw blood.
She’s due back anytime. I need to leave, but I keep waiting for something to happen. I don’t know what, but something. Something needs to happen. I want things to happen. I need things to happen. Something. Anything.
It’s not what I thought it was going to be, this being in your house. I don’t know what I thought it would be like; I guess I didn’t think. I guess I was so caught up in my own wants and my own needs, I didn’t stop to think about very much else at all.
It smells in here. When I say that, I mean that it stinks in here. Like it stinks of the people that live here — stinking of the food and the clothes and the juice boxes — the stickiness and the funk of the children and the mess of your life with her, with them — the loud, glorious, sloppy, and wonderful life that you live here, with her, with them, every single day. It reeks of the mud and the shit and the busy mornings and exhausted evenings — it’s a cloying odor of love and laughter and life that hangs in every room. It’s not what you described. It isn’t what you told me. It’s cloying and it’s true and it’s making my head hurt so much that I have to sit down on the edge of one of the dining room chairs and bury my forehead in my hands. Although only you and I are in the house, the toys strewn everywhere — the stink — the breakfast plates still on the table, milk souring — it feels so crowded. It’s so noisy. Everything is screaming. I can’t think, and I need to think.
I hate you for having this, for having all of this and needing something more. For betraying all of this — this beautiful chaos, this majestic horror, this appalling, Rockwellian, disgusting assault on my senses — how could you do this? I suddenly find you loathsome. I am glad for you being across the room, on the couch, because if you were nearby, I’m afraid my hatred would dissolve back into passion. As quickly as I am emboldened to hate you, I am drained of energy. Everywhere I look, I see your life outside of us — I see them — and I hate you for needing something else. How could you be so fucking selfish? How could you be so unbelievably single-minded? How could you lie to me the way that you did — how could you pretend that this gigantic life filled with vibrant color and loud noises and so much was somehow so little?
I didn’t expect this. I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect any of this.
I have a hard time breathing. I keep focusing on things like the buckle on my shoe. The frayed seam on my jeans. The dry skin on my thumb. If I focus on things like that, maybe I will remain conscious. When you speak to me, it sounds as if it’s coming from a great distance. That’s what happens right before I faint. But there’s no way in hell I’m fainting on your disgusting carpet — the carpet where you play with your children. The carpet where you fuck your wife. That dirty, filthy carpet that needs to be vacuumed and steamed and cared for but your stinking, gigantic, vibrant and inescapable life of details keeps getting in the way.
I stand. You do the same. I can’t look at you. I glance around my feet, looking for my bag. You tell me you want to hold me. I shake my head and mumble — I know I’m not making sense but I still can’t meet your gaze — and I stare off into the kitchen. I see things there I wish I had not seen, like the assignments your children have brought home from school and proudly tacked onto the refrigerator door. Like the magnetic letters spelling out French words on the side of the fridge, where the little ones can barely reach. I imagine you sitting there, night after night, proudly encouraging them to pronounce those words after you. But you were supposed to teach me French. All I want to do is throw up on the floor and run out of the house, screaming like a madwoman – like the madwoman I fear that I have become tonight. I want to flee. I want to kill you first, though, then I want to flee. Maybe if I kill you, this terrible keening in my heart will stop, and I will be able to go on living afterward, after this betrayal, after the discovery of this web of lies — the lies you told me, and the lies you were telling yourself.
The moment I look at you, though, all thoughts of murder leave my mind. You’re crying. You can’t say goodbye, and you won’t. Two years later, when it’s all still shockingly lingering on, when it still won’t end, you will tell me that the hardest thing in the world you’ve ever had to do is to watch me walk out of your home and not go with me. You will tell me that when you kissed me there, amidst the chaos of your children’s toys, with me clenching my bag in my fist and my body stiff as a board in your arms (because I was already gone already out the door but my heart wouldn’t go just yet was still waiting for that something to happen for anything to happen to change something I don’t know what), that all you wanted to do was run away with me, be with me forever, never let me go.
But that night, in your living room, against all that is right and good, I love you. I love you beyond logic and reason, beyond all sense and beyond the circumstances. I love you so much that it is physically unhealthy for me. Even when you are kissing me, and my mouth and nose flood with your sweet aroma (soap, coconut, mint, and you — the unmistakeable perfume of your neck and your hands on my face), blocking out the stench of your reality — your real world — I am momentarily transported back to the place we had created for just the two of us. For a few blessedly quiet moments, breathing you in and tasting you, I forget where I am — where we are — and I yield to you.
Then it’s over, and we’re back in your living room, and I feel like something bad is happening inside my body, because everything is so wrong — the feelings I feel conflict so much with what I see around me, with where I am and what I know — that my body is ripping apart, like my internal organs are exploding, like my brain is melting and my skin is flaying off in wispy flakes from standing too close to the sun. I don’t know anything anymore. I’ve smelled too much reality, and it has hurt me beyond description. It has ruined me, us, everything.
It will take years for the love to recede like floodwaters, and for all of the truth to surface, for me to sift through what remains and see you for what you are, and me for what I’ve become.
My neighborhood is diverse in many ways — age, race, and religion — and these folks really seem to like dogs. I get a good glimpse of my neighbors mostly while they are walking their dogs up and down the hilly streets of our idyllic little community. It’s great people-watching.
There’s the very tall, willowy woman with the mutt. They walk briskly, and she reads while they patrol the block: she usually holds the newspaper, folded into neat, manageable rectangles.
Oh, and I can’t forget the cute guy with the two huskies. My brother-in-law has one husky, and based on that dog’s personality, I cannot even begin to imagine owning two. Beautiful dogs, but the most bizarrely egoistical animals I have ever encountered. Vain, attention-seeking, moody, petulant — gorgeous and high-maintenance. Like most of us, I guess, except in the form of a snow-loving dog.
I have also noticed the attorney across the street who walks a dachshund. Okay, I’m not exactly sure he’s an attorney. I think, a long time ago, I made an assumption on the occupation of the guy with the dachshund, and the fact that it just rolled off my fingertips onto the keyboard as “the attorney across the street” is a bit frightening.
Most recently, I have noticed the old man with the Yorkshire terrier. That little dog reminds me of the last dog we had as a family. I was in high school, and one rainy Saturday afternoon, my mother came home with a Yorkshire terrier puppy tucked into the pocket of her raincoat. We named her Phoebe, and she was with my parents until they moved to Las Vegas in February 1994. Phoebe lived with me from then until October 2000, and she was the best dog we have ever had. As a result, I have a very soft spot in my heart for Yorkies.
I first noticed this little old man and his Yorkie one day before Christmas. Walking slowly up the sidewalk, shuffling more than walking, the leash held gingerly between his fingers as if holding the leash too firmly would somehow hurt the puppy. He was looking down, and I could tell by the slack in the leash that the puppy was tiny and toddling along at its own little puppy pace. Sure enough, as I slowly drove past, I caught a glimpse of the sweetest little black and tan puppy sniffing along at the grass — a brand new Yorkie.
Again this morning, I saw this man and his dog — shuffling down the sidewalk, leash pinched gently between his fingers, watching that round, soft, little dark slipper of a dog meander along blithely, not a care in the world. Something about the pair is so endearing. The way he watches that puppy is so attentive and sweet. He looks at the dog as if having something to watch over, protect, and care about was long overdue.
This brings to mind thoughts about aging and the more difficult aspects of growing old. Losing those things we, young now, take for granted. Losing people we love. Losing the dreams to which we’ve held fast for years, as life twisted and turned, plotting its own course despite our best efforts and, often, hopes. Gaining wisdom and finding serenity even as we grow more disconnected from the hustle and bustle of the world around us. It begs the question: is it really “loss,” or is it more a letting go? Do we simply learn to let things fall away, opening our hands to allow them to slip through our fingers, freeing us from worry, from judgment, and from the dreams we didn’t attain?
Why do we not honor the passage of time, welcoming the grey hair and the lines life etches across our features? Why do we not sit at the knees of our grandparents, listening to them speak of the history through which they lived?
But, back to the little old man and his Yorkie. Maybe what makes them such a happy pair is that the dog doesn’t care about the old man’s brittle bones, or his failing hearing, or the line of prescription bottles standing at attention on the kitchen counter. Maybe the dog only cares that several times a day, regardless of the weather, the old man pulls on his coat and hat and reaches for the leash — that glorious sound that means once again, together, they will brave the elements and wander, slowly up and down the sidewalk, taking in all the sights and scents. Maybe that’s it. Maybe that dog is patient with him when others are not. Maybe the dog waits for him outside bathroom doors and when food dishes need to be filled and, most importantly, when people no longer make the time to wait for him. Maybe, it’s just as simple as the dog loves him and is something for him to love in return.
I once built a whole love affair on letters.
Well, that’s not fair. I once built much of a love affair on letters. Words, books, poetry, songs, prose: you name it, we seduced one another with any and all of it.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I met someone and together, we journeyed a great and terrible distance. Through it all, we wrote to one another. Religiously, feverishly pouring out heart, mind, and soul onto the page. Together, we were rocked out into a separate universe of our own creation, the ink becoming blood and the page our living flesh.
It was a heady time; it was a delicious time. It was a dangerous time. I remember feeling that as I walked through the world, my feet hardly touched the ground. I felt oddly detached and disconnected from this terrestrial plane and eventually became completely disconnected from myself. I was far away and lost with him in this beguiling and intoxicating place of a communion so pure, I didn’t think it was possible. Lofty. Beautiful. And not real.
At one point in the relationship, I felt compelled to take all the letters and put them in a binder, chronologically. I did so without really realizing the power of those Words. As much was done electronically, I had my letters and his responses, and I had his letters and my responses. They chronicled the rise and fall of the relationship: the excitement and newness of it all, the first trustings, the initial revelations, the deepening vulnerability, the opening of our lives to accept the other, the flirtation, the desire, the wanting, the need, the consummation, and the suffering and devastation that accompanied all of its impossible complexities and complications.
I have since buried the binder in a box under old diaries and keepsakes. I sometimes forget where it is, and when I come across it, I handle it as if the box is filled with poisonous snakes. I never want to sit and read them again. Only twice in the years since the affair ended have I unearthed the notebook and read the letters. To do so rips my heart from my chest and tears apart my soul – even now, all these years later. I simply can’t do it, and so I don’t do it.
But I keep the letters.
I hear from him now and again. His new life. His new wife. His world: so quiet, so calm. The turbulence of those years is behind us; the emotional maelstrom now nothing but memory. But, I remember. I wonder how something so powerful (and misguided), how something so real (and not real at the same time), how something so important (it was important, yes, it was very important to both of us) could simply disappear – evaporate into thin air as if it was never there in the first place.
How do these things happen? How do you promise to love someone in this life and beyond this life and then when things get complicated, you let those promises be swallowed up by fear and insecurity? How does that love simply vanish?
I submit that it doesn’t simply vanish. I submit that once discovered, love endures. I submit that nothing dies; it simply changes form. I submit that somewhere, deep down inside of him, he has his own box of letters he cannot revisit, lest it decimate him and tear at the fabric of everything he’s so carefully constructed for himself.
I submit that because I know him, because I know his heart, someday, when he least expects it, he will wake in the dark, cool hours of the morning and sit straight up in bed, his heart pounding in his throat, awash in the distinct sense that he’s made a terrible mistake, that something is horribly wrong, and that somewhere along the way, he gave up something incredibly rare and precious. He will wonder, panicked, where he is and worse, who he is; what his life is and why. He will fear these sensations and sleep will flee him, and he will not know what to do. He will swing his legs over the edge of the bed, and he will sit quietly, trying to moderate his breathing, and he will struggle. And as the light changes to blue, as morning breaks, he will feel a strong longing for something he can’t name, and he will pray that these sensations leave him as quickly as they arrive.
But, they won’t. They will haunt him.
I’ve spent a lot of time lately sitting around with ghosts. Generally, I find that ghosts make the best conversationalists when it comes to discussing death, because the living don’t really care to have that dialogue. I, however, don’t have that problem. I have absolutely no concern or fear of my death, because of what I believe happens when we die and because of the way that I attempt (often poorly, by my own standards) to live my life. So lately, I’ve been sitting around with the ghosts of some old friends and important family members chatting about the possibilities.
From the time life started, I read, and once I could read words, I wanted to write. I remember writing and drawing my own illustrations. In elementary school, for “career day,” I created a diorama out of a shoebox that depicted me, at a typewriter, in a room surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I was alone at the typewriter (oh, my God – did I just remember that I had added a pet? A cat? Did my mother ask me why I had a cat in there with me?) and the room was my library. I was, of course, writing.
A few years after that, in another school, in another town, at another “career day,” the writer of Friendly Fire (a book that was big in the 70s/80s but appears to be out-of-print; I’m officially old) came to talk to us about how difficult it was to be a writer. I was painfully shy at twelve, and I sat in rapt adoration at having a real, live, published author sitting in our classroom talking to us about writing. I was too scared to ask questions during the Q/A session, so I waited and approached him as everyone filed from the room. I asked him how one becomes a writer. He looked at me and told me to find another profession. I remember slowly leaving that room and walking down the middle school hallway feeling like my life had ended. How could a writer tell another writer that?
Although I didn’t pursue a career in writing, I continued to write all through high school into college. My college applications contained articles I wrote for the local papers and my fiction and poetry. I worked in a bookstore in college. In both high school and college, I participated in workshops, lectures, roundtables, and forums. I submitted work and suffered rejection. When I left college, I got a job that had nothing to do with journalism or writing. I stopped writing with discipline. I moved away from the image in the diorama. It receded from my mind, fading from memory as lots of things tend to do.
But back to death. I don’t imagine death as the Grim Reaper, tall, dark, and sinister. I think of him as an efficiency expert. Death is clean and neat and very organized. Everything is simple. Human beings make it complicated and messy. Death has hospital corners and precision. It knows things we don’t. I always imagine us all in this large, pristinely white airport, carrying nothing and standing perfectly still on those eerie yet serene moving walkways, in the quiet, as we slowly migrate toward the same destination. It may appear we are moving in different directions, but in the end, it’s actually all the same. We just take different routes to get there, and depending, some arrive earlier than others.
Dawna Markova wrote:
I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.
God, I love that poem. It’s more than a poem. It’s a song, a heartbeat, a throbbing life inside my skin. The words start and they don’t stop til the end, tumbling one after the next, like cool water bubbling and flowing down from the mountain. It’s effortless. It makes sense. It’s simply and eloquently what it is.
So, maybe in the end, it’s not so much about who we are but about what we do. What we give, what we become. With what and with whom we connect. Where we travel and what imprints we leave when we follow a path or blaze a trail. In whom we trust and confide, and the lives that we enrich with ours, expecting nothing in return. The generosity with which we meet needs. The forgiveness we give, when we are capable.
Maybe it’s about whether or not we grace the world with love and compassion or fill it with fear and hatred. Whether or not we reach out or close our hands to those around us.
Maybe it’s about the light we shine.
Amanda Tate Writes 